We are back in Moscow, Idaho and very grateful to God for a successful trip. We were able to accomplish just about everything important that we had planned.
Following the Ji ‘Mi -Gba micro-finance seminar, we were able to finish off training the Bakwé team. It was intense up until the last day. First there was wave after wave of music groups coming in to give the Bakwé team recording practice. Word had gotten out that we had some professional recording gear. In between the waves we helped the team set up a local network with access to the internet. Here, we were able to set up things adequately but not in the way we had originally planned –giving direct access to a friend in the States who could repair and trouble shoot their computers from a distance.
During this time Perez’s laptop gave up the ghost. We set aside a day to recover his old hard drive and put in a new one, but it turned out that the HDD was OK and the computer itself was bad. It had already served us about 8 years, so it is time to find a replacement. He can work using the spare desktop computer for the time being.
The last day, on our way out of the village we made a stop in the village of Petit-Gabo, the last Bakwé village to the south on the road to San-Pédro. Here we met the chief and observed our newest Bakwé reading and writing class in session. You can see pictures of this class in the “photos” section. We then made a stop in San-Pédro and relaxed a bit on the beach! The weather was overcast and rainy so we didn’t do any swimming, but the down-time was much needed before the 5 hour road trip back to Abidjan.
Benjamin flew out on Wednesday. During the next two days before my departure on Friday, I trained Alexis on how to use Accronis backup software, Google Agenda, Google documents, and FileZilla. Alexis and I also worked on a Bakwé text that I had transcribed from a recording. This text will be useful in my continued analysis of Bakwé discourse grammar.
Join us in thanking the Lord for keeping us healthy and safe, and for all that we were able to accomplish in such a short period of time! Thanks for your prayers.
