Morning Compost

`1RantWoman is parking this item about a Quaker space and a Quaker way in its own right.

http://sheffieldquakers.blogspot.com/2009/10/quakers-in-transition-part-2.html

RantWoman will at some point ramble about convincement, the non-presence of birthright membership, the number of people who become Quakers through going to Quaker colleges, and other threads of how people learn the patterns and practices of Friends. It's not that RantWoman cannot quickly make that an interesting topic this morning; it's just that RantWoman already has a must-do list and is trying to corral all the items already on it.

For instance at RantWoman's Meeting's recent Year of Discernment retreat some of the most ardent students, observers and practitioners of the tensions between worship and social action had a sort of related conversation about why it matters to do different kinds of activism specifically with Quakers. Quakers is shorthand here for people who share some kind of unifying spirit-centered set of assumptions. This concept of unifying assumptions is automatically problematic as soon as we try to talk about what we all actually believe, but in RantWoman's experience we do still manage some kinds of uinifying practices and at least the minimum logic necessary for some level of coherence.

RantWoman promises to try to catalog this in a general case some other time. At the moment RantWoman is fixated on her conflict with Dear Friend, her shared work habits in the realm of policing the frontiers between different pairs of languages, corraling the worst abuses of people who think bilingual communication is just great and therefore easy, and assorted related questions.

RantWoman notes as one form of background, RantWoman grew up around a lot of different musicians, teachers and performers. This lot included rather a number of different poets, prima donnas, and artistes. RantWoman says that not as judgment one way or another, just comment on her experience. Such personalities can be quite high maintenance; beautiful things also result. Any insinuation that any of these categories might apply to Dear Friend (or RantWoman?) are left to readers to judge.

Meanwhile, RantWoman here is linking with essentially a review of a Quaker event.

http://rantwomanrsof.blogspot.com/2009/05/bilingual-business-meeting.html

Dear Friend has been one of the key movers over several years in forcing FWCC Section of the Americas events to be bilingual. This means provision for consecutive interpretation of all plenaries, translation of key documents, and other measures intended to ensure that people participate on at least somewhat equalized footing.

One big aspect of this is disciplining speakers to turn their documents over to the interpreters ahead of time to give the interpreters time to fully and accurately render intended messages. This requirement also disciplines speakers to get their work done ahead of time. RantWoman remembers eating lunch with the keynote speaker. (Not seeing well creates interesting blessings as far as who one stumbles into when one sits down to dine.) The keynote speaker had just turned her speech over to the interpreters, to Dear Friend in fact. She let go of it quite pointedly, saying it was in God's hands.

One side effect of the FWCC commitment to bilingual participation is bilingual wordsmithing of Business Meeting minutes, a process the very Friend who figured God and Dear Friend were now in charge of her message, who was new to the practice called a "human rights violation." RantWoman tends to agree on tedium grounds. However, participation means participation in all of it; in the case of that conversation RantWoman is an agnostic about whether more technology might help but that is another conversation entirely.

RantWoman would also point out that many kinds of international exchanges involve this level of wordsmithing or worse. The only difference is that more money or bigger chunks of people's time and other resources are at stake. In some cases the tedium is even more torturous, the people one must endure the tedium with more tiresome, and the tortures even more protracted. Thoughts of this make RantWoman tremble sometimes when she reads about them, when she thinks of doing more of that kind of interpreting herself, or when her own fixations on a question falter after only a few minutes.

But back to matters with Dear Friend. Dear Friend was one of the platform interpreters, the interpreter with the microphone doing sequential interpretation during much of the torture mentioned above. This means Dear Friend and another of the interpreter team were up a good part of the night translating the minutes being wordsmithed at the Business Meeting in question.

Eventually the minutes got resolved and matters turned to other communications. Part of the task of interpreters is to discipline one's clients to get material in time to be worked with meaningfully. One of the letters being read had not been copied in advance to the interpreters until a moment before it was read. Dear Friend was the interpreter at the mike and the speaker hit one of those constructions that has been flummonxing beginning Spanish students for centuries.

Those in attendance probably included about 20 native Spanish speakers and about 40 people who had at least second year high school Spanish. By second year Spanish, students will typically exude extreme smugness to have mastered the construction above. Dear Friend made the common mistake and said exactly the opposite of what was meant. At least half the second year Spanish survivors audibly said "No." Dear Friend had to stop and ask ONE person to explain the problem. Then he got to trundle bravely on interpreting the letter he assuredly did not want to be dealing with at the last minute in the first place.

Somewhere out of this excursion, MAYBE RantWoman will be able to extract some thoughts about what of her conflict is personal, or reflective of common characteristics and concerns, what needs to be surrendered to the community. RantWoman is not going to try very hard for now except to note again some of Dear Friend's gifts, some reasons one can be thoroughly aggravated, and that sometimes just goes forward figuring the Light will land eventually.