Saturdays in Abidjan are, just like in the US, a popular day for weddings. I was wondering about the loud music I was hearing from my window early in the day, and when I ventured out for my late afternoon before-dinner walk, discovered massive tents set up nearby and a wedding reception in progress. Feeling rather conspicuous, I didn't stick around, but did manage to glimpse the happy couple.
As I have mentioned before, the SIL Center is located in a nice neighborhood near the Grande Mosquée, surrounded by embassies and not far from the Abidjan Golf Course. The high rise apartments nearby are occupied largely by an aspiring middle class population, although the buildings are not aging particularly well, and having an elaborate wedding like this is not unusual.
JeDene left on Monday for Sassandra, a place west of Abidjan, for a few days as she is doing a workshop on working with tonal languages. The speakers of those languages are not always conscious of these tones and how they function. One of the things needed is developing an orthography, or spelling system that accurately reflects the language. This is particularly helpful to speakers in areas of low-level literacy. The language in question here is the Neyo language, an Eastern Kru language spoken in the southern Ivory Coast, with about 10,000 speakers. However, I see from the photo of the 3 men eating at the beach that Stéphane Abou from the Center here went with her! Had I seen the photos of the place before she left I might have asked to tag along!
Below you can see the location of Sassandra on the image taken from some fabric SIL-Côte d'Ivoire had made for their 50th anniversary a couple of years ago. It is a very African thing to have fabric made to commemorate a special day or event, and it is not unusual to see people walking around wearing the same commemorative fabric. When I was in Burkina Faso a couple of weeks ago I wore both a blouse, and a dress, made with special fabric commemorating March 8, International Women's Day. They each had fabric representing the holiday for two different years, one made with fabric from 2015 and the other from 2016, and I met people recognizing the fabric and commenting on it...
Below is me in the dress with the 2016 fabric taken a couple of weeks ago at Fina's which I posted earlier.
As for library news, Wednesday I found an article in the Annales de l'université d'Abidjan, "Précis de Grammaire Wobé" by Inge Enger, for someone in British Columbia, who emailed that he needed a scan of a a page in the article as his photocopy of it was blurry! Our somewhat battered copy is below :
I discovered to my dismay that some of the data I entered into the library's database got corrupted somehow and I lost some of the bibliographic data on three consecutive days. The titles were there, but the corresponding data was missing important elements like the place and date of publication, pagination information, etc. Very strange. Laurel Miller is a whiz with the ResourceMate software as she was the one who originally bought an earlier version of it for SIL-Abidjan and Bamako libraries many years ago. The problems occurred before we transferred the software and data from the old ailing computer to the new one, when I was frequently getting booted out of the database. At any rate, I am slowing correcting that data as I go, although Laurel thinks she will be able to do it another way as she is able to sort the data and figure out exactly which items are missing the publication data... At least the problem does not seem to be occurring with the items I have done since the switchover...
Laurel is also working on a website for SIL-Abidjan so that whenever she finally gets it finished we can put up the library's holdings on the WebOPAC like I recently did for Ouagadougou. The Director here, Pierrette Ayité-Beurgre, is really eager to have this information available. I was hoping to have that done before I left, but it looks like it will have to wait a little longer...
Meanwhile, as I said earlier, we have been doing a massive cleanup of the [physical] library here in Abidjan. There is a shortage of storage space in this building, and many copies of the SIL local language publications seem to be warehoused here before they are distributed to their respective language communities. This is in addition to the aforementioned boxes of donated items that seem to have accumulated over the years. I have finally managed to get Laurel to work with me to box up some of these donations to give to other worthy institutions...😁 Since this library also serves as an archives, there are a couple of footlockers of materials that need to be sorted through and the unnecessary items disposed of... That I will leave for Laurel as she has worked here for 25 years and has the institutional memory. Unfortunately she is a packrat loath to part with unnessary stuff...
Behind me are the vernacular language materials I have just entered into the ResourceMate database)
Sharyn Thomson has arrived here on Abidjan, but I have barely seen her. She's probably too jet-lagged to make much of an appearance right now... Early this morning I was off to the Treichville Sports Park for another Covid test in preparation for my upcoming trip to Paris. I have converted some of my Côte d'Ivoire SIM-card telephone time to Internet data usage for fear I would not use it up before I left. This was a good move as the wait at the testing site seemed long, and I didn't have a book with me. I was #52 in the wait queue and was there at least 40 minutes before it opened. It seems a good amount of time on this trip has been devoted to Covid-19 protocols... It went smoothly, though, and the whole process today, including the taxi ride to and from the site, took around 3 hours.
And I finally did get my salted caramel ice cream from the ice cream place, Roots, which also serves pizza and sandwich-type fare as well. When JeDene returned from her Sassandra excursion, she was interested in eating something non-African, so we stopped there for dinner. I was pleasantly surprised !
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