Upon arriving in Kantolomba this morning, we all went to attend to various projects: Phil to the pre-school English classroom, Anna to prepare for a workshop later that morning on training English pronunciation skills, and Jen to a quick check in on pantolombas before joining preschool English.
Phil reads with the pre-school English class. In this book, the children get to press on the colored dots, and then turn the page to find that pressing them has made the dots change size and color! A reminder that the book is a wonderful, magical technology, too!
Susan and the magic dots book - from the smiles, it looks like a hit!
As we were preparing for the morning ahead in the small library/office room, there was a soft knock at the door. It was Docus, one of the young women we were practicing reading with the day before. She brought three of her friends with her. They had with them the storybook we had been reading and asked if they could come in and read some more together. Of course! We sat down, and they began to read the book aloud. It was clear that they had been practicing together and helping one another. All four of them were participating. All four of them could now read the book. And there it was in action, ubuntu, the “one heart” that we had talked about with Theresa the day before. Such a joy and a privilege to witness. After their success with the first book, we gave them some more books to take away and agreed that they would practice overnight, and we would meet again tomorrow to read more together.
At 11:00, we gathered together with the English program leaders—Theresa, Charles, Veronica, Beatrice, and Georgina, along with some of the young women—for our workshop on pronunciation. We began by explaining that the goal was not to sound like native speakers, not to “get rid of” accents, but to add simple tools to help the team be understood when they speak English and to understand when they listen to English. The key is to bring awareness to the musical signaling system of English: the pauses, the rhythms, the stress, the intonation, the melodic moving up and down.
Something we learned in our preparations for bringing English oral fluency lessons with us is that before we learn the words of our native language, we learn its musical system. Thereafter, we unconsciously carry that musical system over to any new language we learn. It’s the water we swim in. Because the signals in the musical system of the new language are different, we have difficulty understanding and being understood. And so there are tools and practices we can do to build awareness of both the musical system of our native language and the new language we are learning. It is our intention to share some of these tools with the team and to get the team practicing with them!
We gave everyone the chance to experience for themselves just how vital the clues and signals in the English musical system are. Here is our example to hear how crucial it is to get word stress in the right place:
Someone comes along and says “I’m having problems with my comedy.”.“Really? Your sense of humor is great! I’ve heard your jokes, they’re good! Nothing to worry about.” “No, my COMEDY! I’m having problems with my COMEDY!” “No, really, you’re great - really funny!” “No! The people on my COMEDY are just not getting along! We can’t get anything done!” “OH! You mean commIttee!”
For this practice, we got out our magic tools: rubber bands! Hold the rubber band between your hands, and move the hands out when you say the stressed syllable. The physical resistance of the band, the extra force you have to put in to make the band longer, is like the extra force you put into the stressed syllable to make it longer. It’s a way of getting a feel for the musical system in the body. We repeated over and over again together with our rubber bands: “COmedy”, “comMITTee”
“What’s your favorite English word, Beatrice?”
“Procedure.”
“And where’s the stress? Can you move the rubber band to match the stress?”
“ProCEdure!”
Beatrice was eager to continue practicing with the rubber band after our workshop was over.
We might assume that training people to master the pronunciation of individual sounds, and then to enunciate each part of each word clearly, is the way to help people be understood. But making tensed-up efforts to speak “clearly” in this way, producing a monotonous string of clearly-made sounds, actually makes us less likely to be understood because it breaks up and stifles the PROCESS of the musical system’s unfolding. The music unfolds through pauses, rises, falls. It would be like practicing individual notes on a piano without practicing the process of the melody.
Over in the pre-school English classroom, Phil was joined by Veronica and Beatrice. They are beginning the process of training to teach using the method and materials Joy has been using with the young students. It is an outrageously fun, interactive English program with lots of songs, games, and speaking.
Sadly, it looks like Joy will not be with us for the remainder of the trip. Her pains have led to the need for surgery, which is not life-threatening but will require a period of recovery.
The children waving, ready to introduce themselves to you in English!
Meanwhile, Jen, Veronica and Theresa gathered with some of the older girls in the program (13-16 years old) to talk about English, assess the interest level, get a feel for the level of English the girls currently have, etc. The level of spoken English is very minimal, but it would seem interest is quite high, at least among these girls who self-selected to talk with us.
At the end of the meeting, Jen asked who wanted to do some more reading practice. Nora, Charles’ daughter, and Sandra courageously spoke up to express their willingness and joined us for a reading session. We could hear that Nora and Sandra have much stronger reading skills than Docus and Naomi, the girls who had difficulty reading simple sentences when we read together yesterday. They are all around the same age. The difference? Sandra has been educated by Charles at Living Compassion and Nora has Charles at home! (We are starting to think that Charles is our secret weapon!) Docus and Naomi have been attending local schools. It is heartbreaking to think of all of these young people attending school every day and not receiving the support they need to learn even basic reading skills.
Veronica speaks of her experience of the importance of English.
Reading with Nora and Sandra
Over in the sewing room, work continues on the Pantolombas...
As you can see, lots of committed, careful work is going into them, and they are coming along beautifully!
The women begin preparing the peanuts on Tuesday for the peanut sauce they will serve with nshima on Friday. On Tuesday, they sort and roast the nuts. On Wednesday, they pound the nuts to make a paste. On Thursday, they let the paste rest, ready to be made into a sauce for rice on Friday.
We enjoy that the team here is much like our team at home—we each have primary roles—e.g. Theresa is the coordinator—but we all chip in to do what needs to be done: sort nuts, do dishes, clean the bathrooms.
When we look, there is art everywhere!
Foster always looks so regal.
We gathered after lunch with Veronica, Theresa, Charles, and Susan. We looked at some of the English course materials together, including a fun, interactive dvd that plays a recording of how to pronounce words. Because of the awareness-building tools we had learned that morning, we were all able to tune in more closely to the differences in the musical systems of English and Bemba. The team saw places where they were bringing the musical signals of Bemba into the music of English, and heard how that makes what they were saying more difficult to understand. We are all excited to keep practicing tomorrow!
As we practice the musical system of English, Jen enthusiastically moves the whole body to express word stress!
Here are some of the other sights, colors, and textures from around the property we wanted to share with you:
Foster crocheting a blanket.
Another day of service at Living Compassion. Another day of LIVING compassion. So much to be grateful for!