New Lead
Beginning Monday, we increased our level of work with our Iquitos Omagua consultant Amelia to three hours a day. This may not sound like much, but three hours of work per day requires a good deal of follow-up analysis and data entry/editing for our dictionary. Her level of comfort in our work is also increasing. She is able to put together very fluent sentences when prompted from Spanish, but is nervous and hesitant about putting together strings of connected speech in longer conversations or stories. To facilitate this, we're attempting to have small conversations with her in Omagua, so as not to put her on the spot to produce a "long" story. This is a great way to get naturally occurring language a little at a time, and complements the data on the language that we have from the translation of specific sentences and the elicitation of specific lexemes. In addition, we discovered this morning that there may be another, very elderly Omagua speaker who may still be alive in Iquitos -- the maternal aunt of our current consultant Amelia. If she is alive, she is at least in her mid-90's, but Amelia indicated to us that she ran into her a few years ago. Working with her would greatly improve our data, as our most elderly speaker, Lazarina (91), remains quite ill.
Lev & his wife Chris arrived in Iquitos Tuesday, and two other Berkeley grad students John Sylak and Stefanie Farmer arrived this morning. They will all be setting off for a village farther downriver along the Amazon called Nueva Vida, where they will continue work on Maihɨki. It has been nice to have additional company, and I have spent time with Lev & Chris planning the details of my September excursions in southern Peru, visiting Caquinte communities several days downriver from Cuzco.
Tuesday afternoon Clare & I had to deal with the hectic experience of buying numerous supplies (foodstuffs, buckets, soaps, towels, a propane tank, etc.) to augment the supplies that we left in San Joaquín last year. The Belén market area is an extremely dense area filled with street vendors with stalls in front of stores and wandering alleyways. Most of Peru market areas still follow a pattern of specialized shops that sell particular kinds of goods, so shopping for supplies is easiest done in a crammed area like Belén -- it's also far cheaper. In order to get these supplies to the village, Wednesday morning we met the dueño of our lodgings in Iquitos, Jorge, at a shop named Comercial Santa Cruz. He was in town on his own supply acquisition run, and we arranged to have him take our goods to San Joaquín in the same load. We went with him in a moto to Puerto Masusa (one of Iquitos' three ports), where some of his goods were already waiting to take off. Masusa is an extremely poor, muddy, trash- and fly-ridden slum with many areas low enough to river level to allow canoes to come in closely to load up supplies. These are in turn taken to large lanchas that actually take the goods upriver. We saw our purchases as far as the canoes, and paid Jorge to take them to the farther distance and then on to San Joaquín. In general, big port areas are not the most enjoyable places to hang around.
Finally, the weather here has been much more reasonable the past few days. It has been raining more often, which clears the humidity, and yesterday we had our first lluvión -- a very large rainstorm that even impresses locals. Shops in lower-lying streets were fighting off incoming flood waters with brooms!
Lev & his wife Chris arrived in Iquitos Tuesday, and two other Berkeley grad students John Sylak and Stefanie Farmer arrived this morning. They will all be setting off for a village farther downriver along the Amazon called Nueva Vida, where they will continue work on Maihɨki. It has been nice to have additional company, and I have spent time with Lev & Chris planning the details of my September excursions in southern Peru, visiting Caquinte communities several days downriver from Cuzco.
Tuesday afternoon Clare & I had to deal with the hectic experience of buying numerous supplies (foodstuffs, buckets, soaps, towels, a propane tank, etc.) to augment the supplies that we left in San Joaquín last year. The Belén market area is an extremely dense area filled with street vendors with stalls in front of stores and wandering alleyways. Most of Peru market areas still follow a pattern of specialized shops that sell particular kinds of goods, so shopping for supplies is easiest done in a crammed area like Belén -- it's also far cheaper. In order to get these supplies to the village, Wednesday morning we met the dueño of our lodgings in Iquitos, Jorge, at a shop named Comercial Santa Cruz. He was in town on his own supply acquisition run, and we arranged to have him take our goods to San Joaquín in the same load. We went with him in a moto to Puerto Masusa (one of Iquitos' three ports), where some of his goods were already waiting to take off. Masusa is an extremely poor, muddy, trash- and fly-ridden slum with many areas low enough to river level to allow canoes to come in closely to load up supplies. These are in turn taken to large lanchas that actually take the goods upriver. We saw our purchases as far as the canoes, and paid Jorge to take them to the farther distance and then on to San Joaquín. In general, big port areas are not the most enjoyable places to hang around.
Finally, the weather here has been much more reasonable the past few days. It has been raining more often, which clears the humidity, and yesterday we had our first lluvión -- a very large rainstorm that even impresses locals. Shops in lower-lying streets were fighting off incoming flood waters with brooms!
In Spain, we called a really intense rainstorm 'chaparrón'.
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