This workshop was held in Lendem at a regional center of Instituto de Tradução e Alfabetização (ITA), the local Wycliffe/SIL organization. The center is about 90 minutes from the capital city of Bissau. The participants represented eight different language projects plus one Bible institute building an organizational website.
From a logistical perspective, the workshop went fairly smoothly. There was no regular internet, so we lowered our expectations there and merely worked through the Matchbook server. We were completely reliant on a generator which provided us scheduled electricity for about 15 hours a day. The days were long and hot, but the breaks were adequate and the food was plentiful and delicious.
Workshop venue (dining area in back)
The participants fell in the normal range in terms of technical proficiency, general aptitude, and motivation. Some struggled with the most basic functions while others were already changing their theme and color scheme before we had finished introducing the Wildfire menu. Some participants were highly motivated.
There seemed to be some ambiguity as to the participants' actual expectations of the workshop, despite John's clear communications in the weeks leading up to it. A couple last-minute substitutions were also a factor. It seemed that some thought this was an introduction to website building in general, and as such they did not bring the media John had instructed them to bring.
We then had a Matchbook failure on Friday morning of the first week. The SysAdmin team (mostly Eldwin) was able to rebuild what was broken over the weekend, so we started the second week like everything was normal. Amazing.
Because of some of these challenges, we lowered our initial ambitious goals. We encouraged the participants to prepare three solid pages of content for publication, and we avoided training more involved topics like "Image with Text", teaching those lessons individually to the teams who were ready for it.
Listing and organizing their content
Hard at work
The participants responded best to clear and simply-stated tasks but often needed to be personally guided through to completion. Regular reminders of what remained seemed to help.
With the exception of the Bible institute, all of the websites will be subdomains of itagb.org. The website for ITA itself will be built at some point in the near future, mostly as a hub with links to the individual language sites.
In the end, all of the teams finished the workshop with a launch-ready website. Granted, some of the websites had to be practically carried by John to the finish. But the sites have pages and quality content and have the potential to reach many with the Good News. And that's why we went.
One very special part of the closing ceremony was when most of the teams took turns leading a worship song in their language. It was surprising how many of the others knew the songs in the other languages!
Thanks to all of you who supported the workshop and who prayed for us, especially when the Matchbook failed us at the end of the first week. We are still in the process of moving all the sites from the Matchbook to production, but before too long we will update this page with the URLs of all the newly-launched websites.
To God be the glory!
~ Eric and John
Please enjoy various photos from the workshop below, followed by excerpts of the worship songs at the closing celebration.
Closing celebration
The Kriol team demonstrating their site
Celebration dinner with the coordinators
Newly launched:
Photo Gallery
