[sw-l] News from the Philippines

Wed Jul 14 16:35:29 UTC 2004

SignWriting List
July 14, 2004

Dear SW List and Nana!
Thanks for re-posting your message, Nana. Here is the complete message, 
including the attachment of Filipino Fingerspelling at the end...I will 
answer your message on the List later today...I hope you and Stefan can 
meet in Germany! That would be great...;-)

Val ;-)

---------------------------

Complete Message from Nana in the Philippines:

Dear Val,

I feel bad for not answering your kind e-mail sooner, but then I know 
that
you of all people understand the pressures of time and that you will not
really mind :). Our kids are still being treated, but it is nothing life
threatening and so we continued to work in the Philippines. Over the 
past
months our work has changed though: we moved from the school and are no
longer involved there, since the work of our organisation here has 
grown a
lot. We are now just in charge of the "Church Ministry Department". 
Right
now there are 4 Deaf Churches in the area. My husband is training the
leaders and for that using both gloss and SW translations of Bible 
passages.
Gloss is just because we cannot put out SW fast enough at the moment :) 
and
so this is better than nothing.

Over the summer (in the Philippines April and May) we had 2 deaf college
students working for us to add a lot to our SW dictionary. They wrote 
about
800 signs by hand (after learning the basics of SW) and started to enter
them in the computer. Since they have returned to college we have been
slowly working at entering the rest of them in the computer (still a 
long
way to go, but slow and steady wins the race, isnt it?)

We were able to get a lot of ideas for our work from Steve and Dianne
Parkhurst and other SIL/Wycliffe workers and at the moment the 
Philippine
branch of SIL is working to help us get more training for our 
translation
work. Probably the first week of August we will have our first course. 
Until
then we need to translate Genesis 2, 12 and Acts 8. The gloss 
translation is
almost finished now we need to do SW, which takes longer, because many 
of
the Bible words are not in our dictionary yet. Unfortunately we cannot
really use the ASL Bible Translation - we thought that FSL was very 
similar
to ASL, we can still see the common roots, but the differences are big
enough to make it easier for us to work directly on translating from a
"hearing" text to gloss and/ or SW. So, you can see that we are busy 
using
SW and both we and the Deaf (who learnd it already) love it (those who 
havnt
learnd it yet are sometimes quite against it, asking why we would want 
them
to learn "a new language" when they are doing fine with what they have 
- we
just tell them: we dont want them to learn anything unless they want to 
do
so - that usually does it :)!!

A few weeks ago you mentioned something about "columnmaker" for the SW 
DOS
program. Can you try to explain to me again where to find that and how 
it
works, because at that time our e-mail connections were so bad that I 
could
not enter the website and since then I lost the link. We feel that even
without the "grammatical correctness" it might really help to have SW 
texts
in columns from the beginning. Really makes much more sense.

I have not used SW much for homeschooling our kids recently, because 
since
the beginning of their TB treatment we had to reduce school hours so I 
spent
most of our time on the 3 Rs and a little bit of story reading, but 
even the
bit that we did has helped them to learn a lot more signs.

BTW, my husband had to start 2 sign language classes for hearing 
people. He
uses SW there and everyone told him they were so helped by it, because
finally they dont need to write a half page every time they want to 
remember
a sign!! That was also my experience when starting out with SW about a 
year
ago - the deaf here are amazed how much my sign has improved even 
though I
don't spend too much time with them (as my husband does!).

I need to close now, but I just wanted to take the time to put you
up-to-date with what is happening with SW in the Philippines (at least 
in
our small area, I am not aware that it is being used anywhere else :().

Greetings,
Nana Dumitra
PS: I try to attach the FSL fingerspelling alphabet as it emerged this 
past
summer. It follows the "English" order of the letters, because that is 
what
the deaf are taught here. When we do our dictionary in three languages 
we
will need to do the English part in this order, but the Tagalog part 
will
need to sort according to the Tagalog alphabet (I think I sent you that
before).

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Valerie Sutton [mailto:sutton at signwriting.org]
Gesendet: Samstag, 24. Jänner 2004 23:09
An: Nana Dumitra
Betreff: Re: AW: Homeschooling and Filipino Sign in SW

Dearest Nana!
It is great to hear from you...

Happy New year to you! Sorry, it took me so long to answer - our
family is
going through some major health issues (my husband had Dengue Fever,
all of
us has pneunmonia and just recently all our kids have been diagnose
with
TB). You can see our life is not exactly boring. But neither is yours
from
what I have been reading on the SW List!

I am so horrified at your situation! If I were you, I would get my
family on an airplane and move to a western country, and get everyone
into hospitals....Life is sooo precious and why risk the life of your
family? Do you have the funds to leave? Life is just so much easier in
the west...I feel so sad for people that they have to suffer so....TB
is no joke...The life of your children is at stake...

My problems are nothing in comparison to yours, believe me! Even in
western countries, people get pneumonia, which I have had several
times, but TB is very very rare...and Dengue Fever is literally
non-existant...

Well, today I finally succeeded to download the three documents you
mentioned for the Literacy Project. I will work with the Deaf to put
it into
Filipino Sign Language (if the story works for them) or maybe this is
a good
starting point to find out about some "true" Filipino children's
stories
that we could adapt to something similar... I will have to see and
"play it
by ear" (or better "play it by eye"???:)).

You are an amazing person, Nana....I can't believe you can even think
of SignWriting right now...but you are correct about Goldilocks...it is
a northern European story that is also told in the American countries,
but it really doesn't fit in the Phillipines is my guess. I would be
happy to send you some printed copies, but at least you have the
documents right now on your computer....Can you print them out? If you
can, then your Deaf students will get inspired and start writing their
own stories - that is perfect!

We are still trying to get our computers to co-operate with SW Java and
FileMaker so I have not really been able to use the SignBank files
much.
Hopefully next month or at the latest in March we have someone coming
who
knows a bit more about computers than we do, maybe he can make them
work.

Sweetheart...you do not need FileMaker because on that CD I sent you,
there is something called RUNTIME. Put the CD in your computer and find
the RUNTIME folder and install the Runtime and then open the Runtime
folder. Inside the folder you will find a long list of files. Open the
one that is named "OPEN ME". That will start SignBank. I sent you a
flyer about RUNTIME inside the CD holder...read that...it makes it
possible for you to use SignBank without FileMaker....

But even without these programs we are busy adding to our Filipino Sign
Language Dictionary. We have about 250 entries in English and 320
entries in
Tagalog (that is about 220 different signs).

That is absolutely fabulous and I am so impressed with you!! This
sounds like the best for you right now...and that is the most
important...Did you know you can print your dictionaries? In the
dictionary manager program, you can print dictionaries and it really is
wonderful...I can teach you if you don't know how...

Answer when you have time, if it is not soon - don't worry.
Thanks for all you do for us,
Nana from the Philippines

If I had my way, I would find money to fly you to a western
hospital...But it may be that you wouldn't leave even if you could!
Years ago I used to travel, and I became seriously ill while traveling.
Being in foreign hospitals is not easy, so I stay home now!

Many blessings to you, your students, and your family -

Val ;-)

---------------------------

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Valerie Sutton [mailto:sutton at signwriting.org]
Gesendet: Dienstag, 09. Dezember 2003 06:40
An: Nana Dumitra
Betreff: Re: Homeschooling and Filipino Sign in SW

Dear Nana -
Please forgive my tardiness in answering this email message...I hope
you are doing well in the Philippines!

Two questions: while you were off the list, I looked through the SW
site a bit more and I saw that there were also two homeschooling
families taking part in the Literacy Project. I am homeschooling our
children (7, 6 and 4 - the 2year old will follow laterJ) and since we
are working with the Deaf and also working with SW, I was wondering if
there would be a chance for us to also take part in the Literacy
Project. What do you think? We would want to teach our children FSL
not ASL, but I thought the materials might be a good starting point to
get an idea what and how to do it. - I read the stuff about giving
reports etc. that would be no problem, the only thing we should not
disclose our exact location here on a website (for security reasons).

Of course you are welcome to join the SW Literacy Project...Normally I
would mail stuff to you, but I am very tired and each one of the items
that you need are available for free on the web for download...but some
of the downloads are really small...so we might be able to survive with
the CD I sent you plus a little downloading...and you will have
everything for the Literacy project...

The three books that we begin with are on this web page:

Documents 76, 77 and 78
http://www.SignWriting.org/library/pdf/pdf012.html

Try to download those...they are small documents, and then write again
to tell me if you succeeded...Once I know that, I can give you
instructions on what to do next...

I will answer your other questions later...Thanks for writing, Nana!

Val ;-)

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