No grant.
No lab.
Just stronghead linguists.
28 students from the Department of Linguistics and African Languages at Obafemi Awolowo University decided they weren’t going to wait for funding that might never come.
Only 4 of us could make it to the field — it was simply impossible to fund everyone. The rest worked on field remotely, but mainly post-field. We slept in the home of someone we found through a good word and a hopeful ask. We packed our own food and kitchen utensils. They treated us so well that we were mostly fed. Without that kindness, the project would have collapsed before it started.
Almost everything went wrong. We forgot our printed wordlists, stimuli, and paradigms and had to depend entirely on soft copies. We got lost more than once within the community. We had a road accident in Uro where two of us were injured and rushed to the community health centre, where they were promptly attended to. We kept going.
The Departmental Phonetics Laboratory lent us recording equipment, eliminating what would have been one of the heaviest costs. Language assistants gave their time and knowledge — not for payment, but on the hope that something good would be done with their language. Every material produced from this project was made by students who were not paid, made possible also by the Uro community who embraced this work wholeheartedly and in genuine goodwill. We are especially grateful to Oluro, the King of Uro, whose support and openness made everything possible.
What we learned is that documentation is expensive — genuinely, brutally expensive and no documentation attempt, including ours can downplay that. We survived on improvisation, on the generosity of strangers and the community, and on the belief that a language worth speaking is a language worth saving.
There is still more to do. The educational materials exist only in soft copy — the community cannot yet hold them in their hands but only acces through devices. A digital dictionary is still out of reach. Annotation continues, but slowly, because everyone doing it is volunteering and self-funding at the same time. A proper domain name for this project is something we hope for. We are not done. We are just being honest about where we are.