This workshop was held in Ukarumpa, the home of SIL-PNG  one and a half hours (by small aircraft) northwest of Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea. The flight in was the roughest the pilot had experienced in five years of flying that run! (One of us had a flight delayed and had to fly to another city and drive two hours to Ukarumpa – also a rough ride!)

Ukarumpa is uniquely positioned as a large mission base, home to 800-1,000 (mostly SIL) staff and families.  

Stable internet access and power outages were challenges we faced, but eventually we got a cable to the downstairs server rack to provide internet and UPSes to see us through the two minute power outages without losing projector or the Matchbook server (whose battery was unfortunately inadequate.)

Aside from the power issues, the venue was great – a training center with a large classroom, a dining hall nearby for the fifteen minute tea-breaks.
 

Daniel had a run-in with a stomach bug, but thankfully it was over the weekend, so he didn’t miss out on the classes!
 

Six language teams had signed up, and there were other teams interested but did not have enough time to prepare.  In the end, there were five language teams present, two represented by an expat, three by local translators alongside a translation or literacy consultant.

One language consultant also built a website for his translation aid, an text-critical Greek New Testament.

Another language project that had initially registered was unable to attend because of another workshop happening at the same time as ours, but since one of them was already proficient in other website building software, we set him up with a site and let him teach himself using our helpsite.

The teams took to the website building very quickly, worked well with intermittent, small help needed, and they all produced fine websites.

One literacy team was very ambitious, and is creating a resource for the community to learn the details of their orthography, so until she is finished that, with a page of images, audio and text for every letter of the alphabet, the site remains unpublished.

The local translation teams were justifiably proud of their new websites, most of them the first in their language.

There were concerns about the trial status of the orthography for some projects, but shortly after the workshop finished we got permission to publish all the remaining websites