Silisili Survey - Day One

Well folks, the survey team has returned! The Silisili Survey was a success, despite some challenging circumstances. Namely, vertical terrain. Here’s an introduction and day one; stay tuned for the whole story.

Preparation and Day One

Once upon a time there were four surveyors. Sitting comfortably in their office in the Highlands, they heard of the Watut River Valley and of their lack of the Word in their own language. Several languages bordering this area have translations or are in the process of completing them, but the Watut Valley had no language development projects.

Other development projects were in plenty. The lure of gold had brought several mining companies to the region, so that despite the extreme remoteness of parts of the valley, helicopters could be heard overhead several times a day. What a strange juxtaposition! The most modern of technologies used for the extraction of gold while PNG’ans living within hearing of the helicopter’s blades still live as they did hundreds of years ago.

The regional director asked the survey team, “Will you please go to the Watut? If you find a thriving language there, it will be first on our priority list for a translation project.” That’s the kind of thing we like to hear! Because, in fact, two surveys had been completed in the area, one in 1965, one in 1990. Both had recommended a project, but either no translation teams were available or no one considered it high priority.

The survey team spent several weeks considering the questions the regional director wanted answered and developing questionnaires and other research tools for the job. Then, the morning of February 10th, we four – John G, Brian, Janell, and myself – boarded the Long Ranger helicopter and took off.



A 45-minute flight found us over our first village. Remarkably, the coordinates I’d given the pilot for its position were actually correct! We grinned to ourselves as we noticed a man acting as traffic director; he was waving his arms vigorously to show us where to ‘park.’

Hopping out, we ducked under the spinning blades and yelled, “Is this Dangal?” It was, so we thanked our pilot, and he was up and away. That quickly we left behind the comforts of our modern age: motorized transport, electricity, western food. We were in the remote jungles of Papua New Guinea.

When we first arrive in a village we try to never be in a hurry. Often people are out in their gardens, or perhaps a village leader is not present. Because we are looking for community consensus and the attitudes and intentions of its leaders, it would be pointless to pick a random fellow and ask him what he knows.

So we sat around, talked a bit, got stared at, answered some questions… finally we decided to start some work that wouldn’t require everyone, since we didn’t have much of a crowd yet. I began the word list. Our current word list consists of 170 lexical items and 20 short sentences designed to get at grammar, sentence order, etc. I quickly found there weren’t many strange phonemes (sounds) to record, but that [l] and [r] were in free variation, meaning that the people don’t distinguish between these sounds! One time my informant would say [bola], the next he’d say [bora], and he wouldn’t know the difference. This caused a bit of confusion when speaking Tok Pisin with them. For example, ‘road’ frequently became ‘load,’ which naturally made getting trail information a bit tricky.

Anyhow, the word list went fine. Meanwhile John G had gone on the Walkabout Questionnaire, a tool he’d helped design to get at immigrants and their influence on language use. He was gone about four hours, and returned absolutely wasted, saying he’d just done one of the hardest hikes of his life and that we couldn’t possibly do some of what he’d done with packs on our backs.

We were to prove otherwise, but in the meantime we took his cautions quite seriously. We’d heard of a village – Sanang – that was straight up and over the mountain. We’d not heard of this village before, so suddenly our travel plans were brought into question. Do we try to get to Sanang or not? Watching John as he collapsed to rest, we were convinced that Sanang – even supposing we could reach it – would not be worth the struggle of getting there. What’s more, the Dangal folks said, “They speak just like us,” so theoretically our research in Dangal applied also to them.

Our Main Questionnaire had to wait till late that night, and we never really got a great crowd together. But as we were to discover, the population of this area is extremely low, so there just may not have been many more folks around.

Some other memories from day one include seeing the young guys go off to pan for gold (apparently they can make a very good wage this way) in the Watut River; getting soaked to the skin because I decided to go take some pictures just before the clouds let loose; seeing the church building with one bench in it; and washing under a short pipe they’d stuck into a clear stream.

We crawled into our mosquito nets and hoped the pigs would keep it down so we could get a good night’s rest, wondering what the morrow would bring.