alphabet booklet finished; now off to the south

So, after much suffering, we’ve taken the Abecedario to a copy place. It should be ready tomorrow night. Then, after I take it to someone else in town, it will eventually be sent to Andoas Viejo, where the last speakers of the language live.

As for us, we are heading down to the south. The plane from Iquitos will drop me off in Pucallpa and from there Lev, Chris and I will fly in a 9-seat plane to Atalaya. From Atalaya, little boat to Sepahua (shown on GoogleMaps) and from there to Nuevo Luz, where I might stay until the project is over in August.

My main task will be to record (audio and writting) matsigenga and kakinte words for comparative research (other languages in the language family are better documented than these). Nuevo Luz is partially a Matsigenga community but we are not sure how many Kakinte speakers we’ll find, so I might haveto go somewhere else for a week or so to collect Kakinte data –and maybe establish contact and good relations with people in the community who show interest in having more work done on and/or in their language (most of what has been done right now is by SIL…)

The site I mentioned yesterday by the Kakinte/ Caquinte community reads:

“La meta de nuestra página es informar quiénes somos, cómo vivimos y qué son nuestras expectativas y temores respecto a nuestro futuro. No somos animales salvajes, somos seres humanos y deseamos ser tratados como tales, con la dignidad que tenemos y merecemos.” (from here)

OR

“The goal of our page is to give information about who we are, how we live and our hopes and our fears in regards to our future. We are NOT wild animals. We are human beings and we desire to be treated as such with the dignity that we possess and deserve.” (from here)

and

“Our language is a Arawak language (like that of our neighbors, the Ashaninca and the Machiguenga), but it’s different. We are neither Ashaninca nor Machiguenga. We are the ethnic group Caquinte (Kakinte) and we want to be recognized as such. We want to maintain our language and our culture. We have the desire to develop but we don’t want to lose our ethnic identity” (from here)

So hopefully this project will be well received and we can plan on going back next year :)

More on the Kakinte people in Spanish: Cómo vivimos

(disclaimer: I’m not sure who put that website together; the site claims it’s by the community but there are no names or contact email, and there are lots of religious references…… hard to tell. But anyway, it’s good to know that someone supposedly among the Kakinte wants to preserve their language and culture)