So, the big day that I didn’t blog about last Tuesday.

I went down to Wioi with the aim of getting some video of some of the local cottage industries in order to elicit explanations and narratives from the films later.

Hula watu (Indonesian: gula batu) is palm sugar (pictured), and sopi (Indonesian: cap tikus) is a spirit distilled from the fermented palm sap or saguer.

I also went with Bert and Anes (two of the old Toratán guys) to Tatengesan, a village nearer the coast, where they used to speak Toratán but not any more. But we did find one old guy who still spoke it and he was very happy to sit down with the Wioi gang and use the language for the first time in ages. They talked for 2 hours straight and I recorded some good natural conversation.

Since then I’ve been working transcribing and annotating. Now that’s what I call exciting! I’ve got a little crew of people who come to my house to help with typing and translating. But next week I’ll need to spend the whole time in Wioi trying to get consensus on orthographic conventions, and working on the lexical database. As well as making more recordings.

I’m painfully aware that I only really have a few weeks left here and I want to make the most of them.