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9 min read
Everything He Knows Is Sound
Mbapa Lupu has been blind for years. His language has no alphabet. On a remote island in eastern Indonesia, every story his people have ever told now lives in voices like his, and fewer of his grandchildren are listening.
Mbapa Lupu, the eldest of Waikaroko, in his doorway. He knows his village now by its voices.
Mbapa Lupu hears us before he knows who we are.
Footsteps on dry earth. Unfamiliar voices. He calls out: who is it?
Indya: It’s me again. This time I’ve brought guests from Europe.
Mbapa Lupu: What do they want here?
Indya: They want to speak with you.
Mbapa Lupu: With me?
Indya: Yes. They want to get to know you.
His eyes, clouded white, do not move toward us. His expression stays still and pensive. It takes a moment to understand what he is doing. He is listening.
He is the eldest man in Waikaroko, a village that, Indya told us, is home to fewer than a hundred people in the Kodi region at the far western tip of Sumba, an island in eastern Indonesia. He has been blind for many years. The thatched roofs, the stone graves of his ancestors, the faces of his grandchildren: he holds them all now only in memory.
What reaches him is sound. A child calling across the plaza. Bare feet running between the houses. A relative’s voice saying his name. And the language all of it arrives in: Kodi, named like the land itself, the tongue of his parents and of theirs.
Kodi has never had a writing tradition. There is no book of his people’s history, no written list of the ancestors, no manual for the ceremonies he has spent a lifetime performing. All of it is held the way he now holds the world: by ear. When the elders stop speaking, it is not filed away somewhere. It is simply gone.
A village built for the dead
We were a small team from Silencio, and we had come to record his language. We arrived in October, at the end of the dry season, when Sumba is parched and the heat does not let up. The road to Waikaroko stopped being a road long before the village appeared. Then the roofs appeared above the trees: steep thatched peaks rising high over the homes beneath them, aimed at the sky.
Left: the road to Waikaroko in October, at the end of the dry season. Right: a traditional village along the way.
They are aimed there on purpose. In Marapu, the ancestral faith that still runs beneath Sumba’s churches, the dead do not leave. They stay close, they watch, and they must be fed, honoured and spoken to. The top of a Kodi house, inside that soaring peak, belongs to them. The family lives below. The animals live below the family.
Left: houses in Waikaroko, with family graves among them. The peak of a Kodi house belongs to the ancestors; the family lives beneath it. Right: Inya Lupu in Waikaroko.
The dead are kept close on the ground, too. Waikaroko’s graves stand at the centre of the village and at the doorsteps of the living, some of old stone, some of newer concrete. They are not fenced off or set apart. These are not monuments. They are grandparents. In Waikaroko, the past is not behind you. It is beside you.
Left: goats graze among family graves in Waikaroko. Centre and right: the kitchen and a sleeping space, in the half-light under the thatch.
Mbapa Lupu has spent his life tending this bond: the rituals, the sacrifices, the precise words owed to each ancestor. He cannot see the roof that shelters his ancestors anymore. He still knows exactly what he owes them.
Pig jaws kept under the roof, from the offering made when the house was built.
“They don’t want to learn”
We sat with him and talked through Indya, our words passing into Kodi and his passing back. We asked about his life, about Waikaroko as it used to be, about what has changed.
The answer kept returning to the same place. His children and grandchildren, he told us, no longer want to learn the old ways. The ceremonies, the obligations, the words: they are moving toward school, toward the towns, toward Indonesian, the national language that opens doors his own language cannot.
He is not bitter about it. He is happy for them, for the schools and the chances he never had. And he is sad, because he hopes they will remember. Many of them do: when there is a ceremony and the whole family comes home, the old words come back with them. Those are the days the house fills with voices again. Those are the days he can hear all of them at once.
Mbapa Lupu inside the house. Through Indya, he spoke about a lifetime of customs his grandchildren are letting go.
The recording: what’s for dinner
The recording we share here is not a sacred chant or a ritual prayer. It is three people talking at home: Mbapa Lupu, Inya Lupu and our guide Indya, recorded mid-conversation. That is the point.
They begin with the day before, when a little girl from the village danced for the foreign visitors, and how happy that made them. Then the talk turns to dinner. Is there meat tonight? From the ceremony? Yes, he says: there was a ceremony in the neighbouring village, and the meat comes from the sacrifice.
“Yes, we are having meat tonight. But it is expensive, so we have less rice.”
Mbapa Lupu, in translation
Indya records on the Silencio platform as Mbapa Lupu and Inya Lupu talk.
Listen: Kodi · Waikaroko, Sumba, October 2026 · 1:42
Inya Lupu | Is there meat tonight? From the ceremony? |
Mbapa Lupu | Yes. There was a ceremony in the neighbouring village. The meat is from the sacrifice. |
Mbapa Lupu | Yes, we are having meat tonight. But it is expensive, so we have less rice. |
Excerpts from a longer conversation, translated by Indya.
That translation could only come from a person. No widely available AI translation tool supports Kodi: there is not enough recorded and transcribed speech for machines to learn from. For now, the only bridge between Mbapa Lupu’s language and ours is someone like Indya, who grew up speaking it.
What you are hearing is simple on the surface. The meat on their table came from a ceremony in the neighbouring village: animals offered to the ancestors, then divided among relatives and neighbours, because in Kodi a sacrifice is never eaten alone. Receiving that meat is also an obligation, one that will one day be returned. The debt owed between villages. The animals owed to the ancestors. A faith that families here still keep even when keeping it means a thinner plate. Across Sumba, ceremonial sacrifices are so costly that families can spend years in debt to honour them.
So one sentence about supper holds the whole system: the ancestors, the bonds between villages, and the price a family pays to keep both.
What this recording does not contain matters just as much. When the Kodi address their ancestors, they do not speak as they do at dinner. They use a ceremonial language of paired verses, each line answered by a second that echoes it, passed down by elders like Mbapa Lupu and spoken only at the right moment, by the right person. It is the most valuable and most fragile part of the language, and it is not in this recording.
That gap is the reason for what comes next. Everyday speech like this dinner conversation is where a language lives, and it is the first thing to vanish when the young stop speaking it. The ceremonial words are where its memory lives. Capturing both, with the community’s permission, is the work ahead.
Why the words are vanishing
Indonesia is home to more than 700 languages spread across some 17,000 islands, more than any country on Earth except Papua New Guinea. Sumba, about the size of Jamaica, holds eight or more of them on its own. In the west, villages a few kilometres apart may not understand each other at all. Waikaroko lies in the Kodi region, and speaks its language, also called Kodi. Linguists class it as vulnerable to threatened, and it remains almost entirely undocumented: no full grammar, almost no recordings.
700+ languages spoken across Indonesia
8+ distinct languages on Sumba alone
~20,000 Kodi speakers, with no writing tradition
<100 people living in Waikaroko
For centuries those language borders were also battle lines. Clans raided and feuded, and between neighbours who could not understand one another, quarrels were hard to settle with words. Pasola gave that conflict a ritual form: a mounted spear battle, still fought each year in Kodi, where rival clans meet on a sacred field so that they do not meet anywhere else. Once it ends, no clan may take revenge.
When the riders and their families gather, Indya told us, they speak to each other in Bahasa Indonesia, the one language they all share. Here, the national language is quite literally how peace is spoken.
That is the cruelty at the centre of this story. The language that ended the wars is the one now silencing the tongues it connected. Indonesian is the language of school, of government, of church. It arrives in every home through television and smartphones. Children learn it because it is their future, and nobody can blame them.
What we promised him
Before we left, we told Mbapa Lupu why we had come. We wanted to record his voice, his knowledge and his language, and to keep them for children who have not been born yet.
He had one question for us.
“Will you come back?”
Mbapa Lupu
Left: Alexander Messerer with Mbapa Lupu and Inya Lupu. Right: Alexander outside the house.
We told him yes. Everything that follows is how we intend to keep that word.
Here is what that promise means in practice. With Indya and our local guides, Silencio is funding a first phase of 50 hours of transcribed Kodi speech over the next 12 months, working hand in hand with local communities: everyday conversation, stories, knowledge of the land and, only where the community chooses to share them, the ritual words. Every speaker is paid. In a village where a ceremony can mean less rice on the table, that is real income, earned by doing what the elders have always done: speaking. The community decides what is shared and what stays theirs.
What | 50 hours of transcribed, translated Kodi speech: everyday conversation, stories, knowledge of the land |
Who | Speakers from Waikaroko and surrounding Kodi communities, recorded with consent and paid |
When | Over the next 12 months |
Where | Published on Hugging Face within the next year |
Licence | CC BY-NC 4.0: free for research and education, not for commercial use, never sold |
Sacred speech | Shared only where the community chooses |
We cannot save a language. Only the people who speak it can do that. What we can do is make sure that if a child in Waikaroko ever wants to hear how her great-grandfather spoke, his voice is still there.
The last sound
When we pressed stop, the recording ended. The language did not. It went on around us, in the children, in the elders, in a village that has never written down a word of it.
In Waikaroko, nobody has to go looking for the ancestors. They lie at the front door. They live in the peak of the roof. Every meal, every ceremony, every conversation about meat and rice happens within arm’s reach of the people who came before. The dead are not only remembered here. They are lived with.
That is what Mbapa Lupu wants for his language, and what he hopes his children and grandchildren will carry: not a museum, but the same nearness. Words spoken every day, beside the people who taught them. A grave can be kept by stone. A language can only be kept by voices. When the family comes home for a ceremony and the old words return, the ancestors are close in both ways at once.
A recording cannot replace that. But it can be set down beside the living, like a stone at the door, so that one day a child in Waikaroko finds her great-grandfather’s voice as close as his grave.
Graves along the road to Waikaroko.
To support the Kodi archive, or to work with Silencio on low-resource languages: info@silencio.network
Reported and recorded in Waikaroko. Translation by Indya. AI tools were used to help research and draft the text, which was reviewed and edited by the author.