Trivia

Well, here I was giving my dear friend Grace a hard time about never updating her blog... and she came back and told me to take the plank out of my own eye, since I haven't updated mine since Monday! Sorry, Grace, and here's your update for the day.

I've been working all day. Yup, all day long. Imagine. Started out by organizing some lunch for those of us who eat in the guesthouse. Problem is, there's no gas. The warehouse is empty. Maybe two weeks and the barge with the gas for cooking will arrive in town. So we're using the charcoal "jiko" stove, and I taught the girls who work in the house how to boil water for tea in the microwave today! Jackie and I still have some gas at our house, but once that's gone... that's it. And we have a big workshop (which means a full guesthouse!) starting on Saturday. Oh well. I think everyone should just fast. After all, they're all Bible translators and it's a very Biblical thing to fast, isn't it?

Once I figured out lunch (ended up being quite a feast - lentils cooked over charcoal, chapatis made at the little stand on the corner, pinapple and papaya), I had to figure out a problem on one of the team's computer. They had a corrupted file, which is WAY beyond my ability to recover. So I came back to my office and started reading and researching and figuring out my session plans for the workshop that's coming up. In my reading today, I found some particularily interesting tidbits:

• the average middle class child in the United States reads approximately 1 million words a year, or about 80,000 to 100,000 words per month.

This really makes me wonder just how many words the typical child here reads every year. I'm guesstimating maybe... oh, somewhere between 75 and 100. Per year. We are certainly not living in what you would call a "print rich" environment! A pretty grim situation in terms of trying to help raise up a literate generation! I wonder how many of the languages here even have 1 million words in printed form yet?!

Another tidbit I read today:

• Estimates of the number of repetitions needed to learn a word vary anywhere from eight to fifteen times.
  

I'm going to bring this little tidbit to my Arabic teacher tomorrow and prove to him that I'm really not all that stupid - I just need some more repetition as I try to learn more vocabulary :)