Categories
Africa

Congo

This time next week I’ll be on a flight to Brazzaville in the Republic of Congo where I’ll be running a planning workshop. If you’d like to get a feel for the place before I go, Linguistica has just posted an interesting piece on literacy work in a Congolese language. The picture is from her […]

Categories
Do Not Use

Lingamish: Pudding and Chocolate Cake

Lingamish has just posted two interesting posts which are worth a read (not just because he calls Kouya Chronicle an excellent blog in one of them). These two posts get my award for the best titles of the week! Pudding Worship Sky Like Chocolate Cake

Categories
Africa Bible Translation Church: World

Kouya Literacy

On the day when the BBC have announced another peace deal for Ivory Coast, it was good to receive some photographs of literacy classes going on in the village of Dema. It all looks so peaceful and perhaps it’s a sign of things getting back to normal. We lived in Dema for almost a year […]

Categories
Languages in Africa

A New Language for Divided Cameroon:

From the BBC: Teachers in Cameroon are concerned that the new language frananglais – a mixture of French, English and Creole – is affecting the way students speak and write the country’s two official languages. With more than 250 indigenous languages and both French and English as official languages, choosing the right vocabulary to convey […]

Categories
Africa Bible Translation

A Crowded Room

This is me, with too many other people in a small room in a hot climate planning for Bible translation work!

Categories
Language and Society

More on Language

From the Independant. Many animals and plants threatened with extinction could be saved if scientists spent more time talking with the native people whose knowledge of local species is dying out as fast as their languages are being lost. Potentially vital information about many endangered species is locked in the vocabulary and expressions of local […]

Categories
Africa Bible Translation

Twins: Who is the Oldest?

Which twin is the oldest; the one who is born first or second? To the Western mindset the answer is straightforward, but in Northern Ivory Coast things are seen a little differently – there, the second born twin is actually the older: The reasoning behind this is that the older is more important, so the […]

Categories
Africa

Birdwatching in Togo

I went birdwatching with some friends yesterday morning. I’m not quite sure why birds need to get out of bed quite so early, but they do seem to feel that it is needed and so birdwatchers are condemned to standing around with binoculars to their eyes at times of day when normal people are fast […]

Categories
Africa

Video of Togo

I’ve been trying out a camcorder here in Lomé, but I can’t get it to talk to my computer to load the stuff on to You Tube. In the meantime, here are some scenes from around the country shot by a US Peace Corps volunteer. I don’t know what they look like because the link […]

Categories
Africa

You know you are still in Africa when…

You have to flame your bread before eating it to ensure that there are no nasties lurking on the surface. No, I’m not making toast!