Stories, Stories and More Stories

Currently I'm in my second week of what we are calling a discourse workshop. Basically for each of the nine languages, we had people who speak those languages tell stories, record them, write them down and then we charted them. So for the language I'm working with, which is called Ngoreme, I studied these stories and then divided up them up into sections such as subject, object, verb etc. These stories also are translated into Swahili, word for word so that I can understand them as I don't speak Ngoreme.

Now because I have put specific parts of speech in specific columns in the chart, I can look at one column and see all the verbs or all the objects and this is helpful in many ways. For example, we wanted to see what type of verbs come before the climax of the story. We looked at the verb column and found that sometimes the same verb is repeated leading up to the climax of the story. Later we will take these things that we've learned and apply them to our translations.

It has been interesting to learn how Ngoreme stories work and what makes an Ngoreme story good. However beyond that, it has been really fun just to read these stories and see all the differences between them and some of the folk tales that I know.

One difference that really confused me was the relationship between girls and gourds. Gourds are the dried shell of a vegetable, similar to a squash that can be used for many different purposes, a common one being to hold water or another liquid (see the picture above for an example). In Ngoreme folk tales and some folk tales from other languages, girls often go in and out of gourds and hide in gourds when they are running away from someone. I just didn't understand this at all so one day I asked one of the translators to explain this to me. His answer was very enlightening. He said that the narrow spout of the gourd allowed the girl to get in and then she could sit in the fat part of the gourd. But her pursuers could not get her out, much the same way you can drop a stick in the gourd but then if the stick turned sideways, you could not retrieve it again. He also said she would be stuck in the gourd. Explained that way, the whole gourd phenomena made sense to me, especially since gourds are very common around here.