Philippines Trip January 2011 #10

Yesterday was a full day of working with the Lubuagan Kalinga translation team. All are native speakers of Kalinga. One of my big goals on this trip is to get them setup and working well with our latest computer tools for Bible translators. Normally when I work with translators in Canada one of my young staff, like Jeff Klassen, who are much better at using and teaching the computer tools than I am would be doing this. However, since I am the only support person here for this team, this falls to me. If things can go wrong with a computer, they usually do go wrong with me and I certainly have had my share of frustration getting everything to work properly. One of the translators has an old and VERY slow computer. This didn’t make things any easier. I also discovered that our internet access is not quite as solid as I had thought. Apparently the connection drops from time to time, especially when a lot of people are using it at once. One of the functions of our new tools requires good connectivity on the internet. Right off the mark yesterday morning I ran into a snag that I just could not resolve. I had followed some careful directions that Jeff had sent me. Finally in desperation I decided to try to get in touch with Jeff. It was about 9 PM in Canada (13 hours back from our time) and Jeff of course was at home and not on his computer. However, Syrine, our Kalinga daughter in Canada was on, so I asked her to call Jeff and let him know I needed help. Jeff graciously came on and spent a couple of hours working me through a solution to the our problem here. By the time we were done it was well past midnight and past noon here and I had a headache, but we did get all 3 translators set up. We did run into another snag I couldn’t solve later in the day. So I went to bed early and then got up at 1 AM (noon in Canada) and contacted Jeff at the office. He walked me through the solution to this problem in a short time. I sure hope we don’t hit any more snags today because it is Saturday here and I doubt if I will be able to connect with Jeff again until next week. It sure is great to have better communications these days. When we lived in Kalinga the only communications we had with the world beyond was through our SIL supplied single sideband radio by which we could talk with our SIL support centres in Bagabag and Manila. Now almost everyone here seems to have cell phones. Today we expect our colleagues Fred and Bel. Bel is the Philippine translator who completed the translation we started in Limos Kalinga. They have been battling the flu and getting their son settled for his schooling in Manila. When they arrive today we will finalize plans for the library dedication next week.