Literacy And Livelihoods For 445 Women In Nepal

I'm coming out of hiatus to blog about something that involves the Language Development Centre in Kathmandu. As some of you know, I visited the centre last year to find out more about their work and to also get ideas about developing minority language education / literacy programmes in Nepal and NE India. Lauren and I are also hoping to work with them in the near future to assist in running workshops to develop literacy materials for a minority language spoken in Nepal.

They have had great success with the adult literacy programmes and multilingual education in schools. (For those of you who think that children should just learn in the majority language of the country / English, imagine if you only spoke English at home and had to go a school where Mandarin was the language of instruction for everything, and you didn't have much exposure to Mandarin outside school.) Through such education programmes, they've also helped to liberate girls who would've otherwise been sold into slavery, taught mothers what to do when their babies get sick and have diarrhoea and given people the necessary literacy skills to do tasks that most of us take for granted.

The following is an email from a friend who's doing work for the centre:

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Dear Aussie linguist friends,


I want to let you know about a fundraising initiative that Language Development Center Nepal is doing. I hope you'll take a look, since this can make a big difference for helping LDC become self-sufficient without SIL or other religious support. And let your friends who are interested in supporting language diversity know - often it's hard to know what to do to support endangered languages, other than doing linguistic work yourself, but this is one such way.


Language Development Center Nepal, is working to get a permanent spot on Global Giving, a website where people (like you!) can donate to support LDC's work in literacy and improved livelihoods: http://www.globalgiving.org/projects/literacy-and-livelihoods-for-445-women-in-nepal/


We have been selected by the GlobalGiving Foundation to participate in its Open Challenge, a fundraising opportunity for nonprofit organizations working around the world. In order to succeed in GlobalGiving’s Open Challenge, LDC must raise $4,000 from 50 donors by April 30th. If we meet this threshold, we will be given a permanent spot on GlobalGiving’s website, where we have the potential to benefit from corporate relationships, exposure to a new donor network, and access to dozens of online fundraising tools. In addition, we could earn as much as $3,000 in financial prizes for raising the most money.


Not only will I personally be thrilled if we raise money and get a permanent spot on GlobalGiving, it will make a big difference in the lives of people who really could use some help - but in a way that respects their dignity and allows them to create lasting change in their own lives. I know money is tight, but since we need to get donations from at least 50 individuals to get a permanent spot on the website, just $10 makes a big difference. Please take a moment to check it out at: http://www.globalgiving.org/projects/literacy-and-livelihoods-for-445-women-in-nepal/.


Also, we need your help spreading the word. Please share this with your friends and family, including through facebook - there's a prize from Global Giving for the project that gets the most facebook shares.


Thanks for thinking about this! I know everyone wants your money, but I will personally vouch for this being an awesome organization doing great work!


Best,


Miranda

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So please visit the site.
Share it on Facebook.
Tweet about it.
And donate what you can.

Closing this chapter

I've made it back to Melbourne, in more or less one piece. Got back on Tuesday and have spent the past few days catching up with friends and sorting out the apartment. To be honest, I'm already looking forward to going back to India. But there's a lot of stuff that needs to be done in the meantime.

Friends have been asking me what I've been doing over in Nepal and India. Though I'd love to condense it all into a 30 second speech that I can repeat over and over again, it's just not going to happen. I tell them I'm looking at minority language education (MLE), especially teaching kids to read and write in their home language, not a foreign language. I also look at language documentation projects for minority / endangered languages, including recording traditional songs and stories, as well as dictionary making.

The push for MLE is particularly strong now, given that more and more parents are sending their kids to schools where a dominant language like English (or Nepali in Nepal) is the main / only medium of instruction. Most people think it would be better to do this, so that the kids will have better English and thus be able to get a better job, and it does sound good in theory. The reality is that children who go to such schools with very little exposure to the dominant language like English at home find school frustrating and quite traumatic. Imagine being dumped in a foreign environment for a few hours a day (this is not an immersion programme) and forced to learn everything from how to read and write to how to count in a foreign language. Children either slog it out and memorise things without understanding them (so there's little cognitive development) or worse, just drop out of school altogether.

Research has shown in places like the Philippines that students who go to schools which implement MLE for the first few years of a child's education and slowly transition to English as the medium of instruction (after introducing it as a subject) actually end up doing better in both their home language and in English. Of course the success of such programmes depends on other factors, including the teachers and the actual curriculum, but it's not hard to imagine the opposite, where kids get frustrated at school when they can't understand much of what's happening.

This brings me back to a point that my friend Linda brought up while we were in Tezpur for the NEILS conference. It was about how sometimes linguists appear to be telling people to preserve their own language, even if the speakers don't see any economic advantage. And I agree, I don't see why linguists should have a say in it. I know people who regret the loss / decline of their language a generation or two later - I belong to one such group, but I'm actually not that sentimental about language loss. Sure, we're losing 'windows' into different worlds, but you can't tell someone to keep speaking a language they don't see value in just so they can keep the language alive for the sake of keeping it alive. I suspect, the fear is the loss of linguistic data which is the driving force behind many a linguist (including one I met up with in Singapore earlier this week who completely disgusted me with the way he treated his language consultant).

While I am not for telling speakers what to speak, I do believe that if there is evidence to show that teaching kids in their home language actually helps significantly with their schooling, I am all for presenting the evidence and advocating to schools and parents that this is what they should be doing.

Now this sounds a lot less impressive than it really is, considering that I'm not trained in producing educational materials for primary school children. But I do know people who work with communities to develop minority language materials for schools in NE India and will be looking at the opportunities to collaborate with them and run workshops in Nagaland to produce said materials.

There's a lot more that needs to be said about this, but I'll be revisiting this stuff later this year. For the time being I'd like to thank everyone who's been keeping up with my updates. The blog will return from hiatus sometime in late 2011.

As a final note, a linguistics professor once said that she had been asked whether she spoke to the language she worked on. She didn't, so the next question was how she could study something she didn't speak. Her response was that a physicist can study the motion of a ball - its speed and trajectory, but it doesn't mean the physicist can play basketball.

That was her metaphor. I'd like to extend that by saying that yes, physicists don't necessarily play basketball. But physicists would never tell basketball players how to play ball, so why do linguists tell speakers what to do with their language? In basketball we have coaches who understand the physics (they don't dedicate their whole lives to observe how particles move) and also have experience with the game. Similarly, we need people like that to bridge the gap between theoretical linguistics and actual language development programmes.

'Push' or 'press'?

The other night I went to the Crystal Jade restaurant at Holland Village (Singapore). As I got to the top of the stairs I saw a sign on the glass door saying 'PUSH' with a mini handprint next to it. I was just about to push the door, when it started to slide to the side. This confused me greatly and I mentioned it to my friends once I walked in and found their table. One response was, "Aiyah, it means 'push the button to open the door.'"

The glass door at the entrance was one of those semi-automatic sliding doors that only open when you touch the sensor (I can't remember there really was a button) on them, so that they don't keep opening and closing every time someone walks by. It just so happened that someone had touched the sensor for me from inside when they saw me walking towards the door.

Now it's perfectly alright to say 'push the button', but the problem with seeing a sign that says 'PUSH' on a door, is that one would immediately assume from the context that it means pushing the entire door. I suppose what I was expecting to see was 'PRESS' or 'PRESS TO OPEN' or 'TOUCH TO OPEN'.

For me it was another one of those examples that I want to offer to linguists who largely ignore the contexts in which language is used. But my first thought was that the restaurant ought to change the sign before someone breaks the door trying to get in by pushing on it.

Language learning: Dialogues (II)

Talking about dialogues which are less than useful, I should mention that the main reason I was doing Assamese classes was to help me to learn Nagamese, an Assamese-based creole and the lingua franca of Nagaland.

One book (see picture below) I purchased on my last trip conveniently provided translations of Nagamese words in both English and Sumi. It's probably one of the only resources I have found on Nagamese, but - and no offence to the writer for his work - I've found most of the 'mini-dialogues' in the book rather bizarre.

Given the format of the book, it's difficult to tell when one dialogue ends and another begins, although one can often group together a few lines by context. Often, lines appear to have been inserted in a rather haphazard manner.

Some make sense:
(page 96)
- Gari chalabi.
- Aste chalabi.
- Besi joldi na chalabi.
- Rukhibi.

- Drive the car.
- Drive slowly.
- Don't drive it too fast.
- Stop.

Others don't:
(page 98)
- Aluchhi hua to bhal nohoi.
- Amake nalage.
- Etiya, etiya.
- Mukh bond Koribi.
- Nijor kam sabi.

- To be idle is bad.
- I don't want.
- Presenly (sic), just now.
- Shut your mouth, please.
- Mind your business, please.

Some seem quite rude (like the example right above):
(page 99)
- Apuni heitu rasta laga lamba Kiman ase jane?
- Nai ami pahorise.
- Nodi kiman chowra ase?
- Kele apuni moike jawab nadie?
- Kelemane ami apuni laga samanete bohibole mon nai.

- Do you know the length of that road?
- No, I forgot it.
- How broad is the river?
- Why don't you answer me?
- Because I don't like to sit near you.

But one just screams 'church abuse scandal' (even that wasn't the original intention):
(page 94)
- Itu mej uporte rakhibi.
- Mor laga pichete khara hobi.
- Mej laga niche sabi.
- Dangor lorakhan khela pichete horu lorakhan khelibo pare.

- Put it on the table.
- Stand behind me.
- Look under the table.
- Small boys can play after big boys have played.

Seriously.

Language learning: Dialogues (I)

Most language learning textbooks these days include a dialogue (or two) in each chapter, along with a vocabulary list, followed by some discussion of grammar. The dialogues are usually based on some assumed needs analysis of the learner, and focus on common scenarios language learners are likely to encounter, in the order in which learners are presumed to encounter them. For this reason, many books I've seen start with a 'Meeting at the airport' scene.

There's the typical greeting, followed by a brief introduction (simply one's name), and sometimes talk about luggage. Now while this all seems a reasonable way to start the book, I really don't like this kind of dialogue. In my experience, if someone's coming to pick me up at the airport, they're either family, friends or a business associate, all of whom would probably speak the same language as you. (Sometimes it's just the driver who may not speak the same language, but none of the dialogues I've seen cover things like 'Are you the driver?' or 'Did [insert name] send you?') One might argue that such lessons still incorporate elements of 'real world' interaction like greetings and introductions, but my point is, why the need for such a contrived environment?

During my first Assamese lesson, my first tutor had prepared a whole dialogue based on her own needs analysis for me - we had met the previous day to discuss the tutoring over tea. She said, we would go through the dialogue, memorise it and then look at some grammar points.

I have nothing against memorisation. I spend a lot of time memorising new vocabulary and set phrases. But I'm dead set against memorising dialogue, unless of course I'm in a play. For certain topics, like when I'm introducing where I'm from and talking about my family, the act of repetition naturally makes me memorise my little spiel. Anyway, the dialogue my tutor had prepared went exactly like this (in English):

(The situation assumes I'm walking into the office for research students in the linguistics department for the first time and meet someone sitting at her desk, who incidentally is my tutor.)

Me: Hello.
Tutor: I'm [tutor's name]. What is your name?
Me: My name is Amos [my tutor actually wrote my full name, but I argued that people there wouldn't be able to tell which was my first and last name]. Do you work here?
Tutor: No, I don't work in this department. I work in the ELT department.
Me: Ok.
Tutor: I teach in the ELT department and at present am doing my PhD. What do you do?
Me: I'm a research scholar. [...]

What followed was then a long description (not all of it correct) of what she thought I did, like saying 'I'm doing a PhD.' I had to stop the dialogue at that point and tell her that this wasn't what I wanted out of my language class.

For one thing, the scenario was just not something I was ever going to encounter. I'd already met the people in the office and our meeting was nothing like what she had written for me. Then there was the issue of having her write out what she assumed was my introduction, without getting the facts right first. I told her that I would actually like to compose my own introduction, and she could judge it to see if it was culturally and linguistically appropriate. Finally, the dialogue just didn't sound natural to me. I know there are are cross-cultural differences, but I've tried writing dialogue for plays in English, and it never sounds natural to me when I go back over what I've written.

Anyway, whatever it was, I explained to my tutor that I already had a long list of things I wanted to be able to express in Assamese, and a number of scenarios like catching an autorickshaw and paying for stuff at a shop that I really wanted to cover. It wasn't as if I was sitting in a class with 10 other people and had to follow a set syllabus - the advantage of having a private tutor is being able to dictate, within reasonable boundaries, what you want to learn and when you want to learn it. IF you know what it is you want to know. For me, having been in Nepal and having learnt a little bit of Nepali, I already had a good idea of the situations I wanted to be comfortable in in Assamese.

Surviving fieldwork: Coming home

I think the last time I came back from India I was feeling much more traumatised, and I'd developed some weird allergies that I hadn't before (like to the feathers in the doona which I had been using for a whole year in Melbourne). I just constantly felt itchy and dirty. Watching Slumdog Millionaire didn't help either, especially that scene when the male protagonist as a boy gets to meet Abitabh Bachchan.

I suppose after any long trip to a place that's different from home (doing fieldwork or not), coming back can be a little of a shock. Reverse culture shock, they say.

I don't think I've ever experienced (severe) reverse culture shock. Returning home - whatever 'home' means - has often been a relief for me. I suppose it also helps that I'm 'homeless' in that I often refer to both Melbourne and Singapore as 'home' but don't feel like I quite belong in either place. But coming back, there are things I often need to adapt to again. Some are 'nice' things to be reacquainted with, like potable tap water and meals not based on rice - things I pointed out in my previous post. Some are somewhat harder to readjust to.

The main thing I suppose is the price of stuff in general. Everything's started to feel expensive, and I'm only in Singapore now. Wait till I get back to Melbourne and have to pay A$3+ for crappy public transport or A$10 for a 'cheap' meal...

Also, yesterday as I was coming out of the pool, I had this sudden urge to cough and spit out some phlegm. I caught myself just in time and even choked a bit when I remembered I was in Singapore. Now, as disgusting as people find it (myself included after a period of time being home), I find being able to spit in public quite a liberating experience. I did it all the time in China when I lived in Urumqi, and I did it often in India - of course given the amount of pollution I was inhaling, I would rather have it go out than stay in!

But the hardest thing I think is the constant explanations to people about what I've been doing and where I was. There are some people I've been chatting with online who seem to ask the same questions over and over again. 'Are you still in Nepal?', 'Where's Nagaland?', 'What are you doing there?'. The questions certainly don't stop when I get back, and while I don't expect people to keep up with everything I do, it does get a little tiring having to explain myself over and over again. Some days I'm glad I'm not actually from Nagaland, if only because I'd get so tired of explaining where Nagaland was every time I met someone from abroad - it was bad enough having to explain to people in Europe where Singapore was all the time!

Oh well, at least I've got my little speech about what I'm doing and where I am / have been all prepared. And frankly, it's only when the small minority of people I find myself repeating basic stuff to that annoys me (like the person who thought I was doing 'logistics'). I'm usually more then happy to talk about what I've been doing and what I will be doing.

It ain't a meal if it ain't rice

Back in Singapore, there are two things I need to remind myself of. One, I'm once again in a place where tap water is potable! The whole idea seems so alien to me now. Two, rice does not have to be part of every single meal.

I'm aware that this is a sentiment shared by many people in Asia (a tour package Mum and I took to Paris offered rice at every meal except the last dinner, which was the only 'French' meal for the tour) and there are still people in Singapore who need rice in every meal. But I'd say they belong to the older generation, and it's certainly not the case in my family that we need rice at every meal.

Now despite being mostly on my own during my last few weeks in Assam, I was still subjected to rice at most meals. Take for instance the first night I stayed at the hotel in Guwahati. I ordered room service: fish and chips plus a serving of masala peanuts. I knew full well that the fish and chips would be crap, but I just wasn't in the mood for roti and rice (even the extremely oily Chinese fried rice). After the waiter had delivered the food and was about to leave, he asked me politely, "Sir will you be taking dinner?"

A little perplexed, I simply pointed at the tray he'd just deposited on the table and said "This is dinner." The waiter shook his head in the typical Indian fashion to connote agreement. He then appeared again later to pick up the tray asked me the exact same question.

Granted that by this point in the trip I just wanted to eat what I want, when I wanted and how much I wanted, I was more than a little miffed at having his concept of dinner imposed on me!