Matrilineal systems

This week has been all about picky little formatting tasks to get the dictionary documents looking the way they are supposed to. We are working with MS Word, and it is so frustrating! But, it looks like we will be able to print the Chiyaawo dictionaries tomorrow (finally) and then get the last few things ready for our workshop next week. That will be a very busy week as well!!

One exciting thing for us today - someone filled in the huge dips in the road by the center! We were all surprised as we left for lunch that we didn't have to go up and down and up and down! The rainy season had really washed the sand away and the vehicles helped to create these huge mounds and dips. We are so grateful that it is fixed!

We have been focusing a lot on how families are organized here. Most of the people groups in central and northern Mozambique are matrilineal, which means that descendence and inheritance are traced through the mother's line. This means that a child's mother's brother will have more say over how he is raised than his father does. As you can imagine, this causes a lot of trouble in marriages here as husbands are seen as just add-ons to a family and they are there simply to provide children. If he is found to be less than suitable by the wife's family, he is simply dropped and another is found. This is not to say that women have more power than men (which is what matriarchy means), but that a women has a lot of security within her clan and is guaranteed to inherit any wealth or property from her family.

It was interesting to talk with a missionary who has been here for some 12 years about his view of the matrilineal system. He was saying that in his mind, matriliniage and Christianity cannot exist together. He gave countless examples of Africans he has known who have accepted Christ, and each one naturally turned away from the family structure he/she grew up with. Matriliniage values the relationship between a woman and her brother, where Christianity encourages married couples to love each other and place a high value on one another. This particular missionary was commenting that it would be interesting to go all around Africa and interview people who have turned to Christ and ask them how their family works. He hypothesized that one would see a change from matrilineage to a system more focused on the marriage bond where the parents have more influence on their children than any other relative.

This is all very interesting to us linguists as well, since each new cultural system comes with a whole new set of terms. We were able to hear from a man from a northern Makhuwa group today as he explained the different terms that referred to different people in his family tree. He took us through 8 different generations, and the terminology was quite different from the kind of thing we see in an English North American family tree. There were different names for an older brother versus a younger brother, the name for mother and mother's sister were the same (due to the matrilineal system), certain cousins were considered different from other cousins (you can marry your mother's brother's children but not your mother's sister's children) and so on. All this may seem confusing and a little pointless, but the terms give you an idea of how the people understand family relationships and who has authority and responsibility over who. It is also very crucial for translation, as you need to make sure that the right person is being referred to.

For example, this same missionary I mentioned earlier reminded us of when Abraham and Sarah went into a city and told everyone that she was his sister. In our society we think of him as a liar because Sarah was clearly his wife! However, people in these cultures here understand that story perfectly because to them, they were brother and sister because they came from the same father different mothers (or vice versa, I can't remember). And with Jacob and how he worked for his future father-in-law for his first wife, then was tricked into marrying her sister, then worked a while longer for the wife he originally wanted - that is understood quite well here because it is a common practice here. The woman's family can manipulate quite a bit because the man doesn't have much to fall back on!

Anyway, that is a little of what I have learned in the last while. One of the interns here is doing a bunch of interviews with people from different language groups here to find out all we can about the structure of their families and the terms they use for different relations.

Prayer items:
-If you could remember the workshop in your prayers, we would greatly appreciate it! There are 4 language groups and a LOT of information will be gathered. Pray that the computers would work well, that the informants will be cooperative and helpful, that we will know how to help them and facilitate their work, and that we would be able to do any editing and formatting with ease and in a short amount of time.
-Also, the first intern to arrive here will be leaving on Tuesday, only to have two nights at home before setting out for a summer semester at CanIL. Pray that he would be able to debrief from all his experiences here and that his summer school would be a good time of learning for him.
-The day after he leaves, we are receiving another intern who will be teaching at some English schools around Mozambique. Pray for her easy arrival and quick adjustment to the culture and language.
-There is a Bible dedication coming up on June 21. Pray for a good program to be set up, for safe travel to Balama (near Montepuez, west of Pemba), and for many people to be blessed by the publication of the Word into their language. (I will give more details on this when it comes closer, but I know that I will be going!)
-There have been a few extra costs involved on this trip that have been sort-of unexpected (ie. the flight from Johannesburg to Nampula was more than I had figured). I have seen God provide in small ways, for example: housesitting rather than paying full rent at the dorms on the center, being able to put our meals during the workshop next week under the dictionary fund, and an unexpected gift from a friend back home (thanks guys!). Praise God for that! So, just pray for a continuation of the grace and provision I've already seen God give.

Thanks for your prayers, and for reading this very long post!!