back from Andoas Viejo (early)

So… I don’t have much time but I want to keep you all posted… I’ll make a list of important points that summarize the last 1.5 weeks :

Boat trip San Lorenzo-Andoas Viejo:

- Duration of the trip upriver: 2 days. Downriver: 1.5 days.

- Pastaza river gets quite wide and shallow half way to Andoas Viejo, which makes it extremely difficult to navigate (we had to backtract several times because our boat would touch the bottom and we had to look for a slightly deeper spot). It also rained on us for several hours, but we got to see an amazing rainbow!!!

Andoas Viejo:

- Mid-sized “aldea”, has 1 primary school, 1 secondary school, 1 health center, a church (+a newly formed sect that believes that God will come down to get and take those who are readily waiting for him to go to heaven–the raptist story?), a little shop, a water pump with potable water (or that what we assumed, because we drank it straight and didn’t have upset stomachs), alcoholism (even among the authorities), and political power abuse.

Andoa language, or Shimigay, or Katsakati:

- No actual speakers left… a few elders remembered some words but they never really spoke the language–they’d just leaned it passively when they were kids. We mainly worked with J., an old man whose mom was supposedly a monolingual speaker of the language, and M., an old woman whose grandma spoke the language (but none of her parents did). Two yonger women also pretended to know the language but they hardly remembered a few words, and pronounced them differently than the J. and M., which, along with the fact that they are mother and aunt of the current chief of the town, lead one to think that they just wanted money from us and thus pretended they spoke the Katsakati.

Highlights: pretty sunsets, starry sky (2-3 nights)

We’d better not have seen… so many “manta blanca” bugs and fleas!!! (the place we stayed at was full of them) (this was a roof and thin “walls”, not floor (other than dirt) and huge openings between the so-called walls and the roof.)

We were lucky because… the roof under which we stayed the first night (no walls) fell down along with the structure that was keeping it up with the strong winds of the one-to-last night we were in town.

Now what?

- We are now working on the Abecedario that we have promised the community we’d do. We are in San Lorenzo finishing it up and are hoping to makes copies and staple it (manually!) tomorrow Saturday, at which point we’ll leave it with a priest, who’ll be able to send it or take it personally to Andoas Viejo in the near future. The Abecedario is a little book that contains an introduction, including a description of the sounds of the language for non-linguists, a few notes on the language family and how to read the Kataskati words in the book, a list of words in alphabetical order, and an exposition of all the words distributed by alphabet letters, accompanied with pictures (drawings) and the local Quechua, Spanish and English equivalents.

And then?

- On Sunday we’ll head to Iquitos and from there to new projects.