"Words are the voice of the heart."
Confusius
We are back a little more than 2 months. Much has
happened and most of the much was finding one’s feet and integrating into a new
country. However, with a big difference compared to the US, Latvia, France or
Germany: the country is new, but not foreign, rather familiar in regards to
language, culture, customs, habits, traditions, even
quirks.
I discovered that command of a language can
empower or debilitate after moving from Africa to the States. I could speak
English – well enough to do almost everything, but not well enough to feel
comfortable. I had to think how I want to say things; I had to write my patient
reports out before I could dictate them; I said wa’t’er,
tom’aa’to’ and l’aa’f (like the
British), are you be’tt’er mrs
Be’tt’y, instead of wadu,
to-may-to, laugh, are you be’dd’a
mrs Be’ddy’. I called traffic lights -robots, the trunk of a car – a boot;
glove-box – cubby. I took a lift to
the second storey of a flat…meaning…I
took an elevator to the second floor of an apartment.
The unfortunate, often embarrassing mistakes: I
could call a stupid driver an aghs-hole without a blink of an eye whilst it
caused my friend to almost overturn the car,“Caren, you can never say that! It
is extremely bad.” My innocence was shattered, “Oh, sorry, I did not know..”
Another reverse one: fanny pack…now that is bad for a South African since fanny
refers to the female private parts!
I could not understand for the longest time why
you would call plastic knives, forks and spoons silverware? It is everything
but… How could you eat on the run? It’s take-out, not take-away; ‘tomayto’ sauce
is ketchup and tea is cold with ice, not warm with milk; you don’t hoot, but
honk; you go to the bathroom, not the toilet; when your child is naughty you
kneel down and say, “we don’t do
that”? Who was naughty here? You spank or paddle, not give a hiding and you DO
NOT spank in public, because then HRS will take your children away and they will
disappear in the system and you will NEVER see them again. That scared the
daylights out of me! I learned to use the very foreign to my vocabulary word scoot very appropriately, “Scoot your
booty!” That is but a few I can think of quickly.
I could not pray in English for the longest time.
It was a victorious moment when my friends could understand what only God could
to this point. The day they understood my ‘take-out’order at a McDonalds
drive-through was the day I felt I finally arrived in America…it took my tongue,
vocal chords and vocab 2 ½ years
to finally make it to America!
A year later the language trepidation struck
again – in a major way. We moved to Latvia…where complete foreignness met us:
not only the language, but the way it looked – funny curlicues hanging on to
letters, tiny roofs protecting words’ heads and little stripes and dots causing
such confusion when you plunge into the turbulent river of the Latvian language.
With the help of Gundega, my blonde, hip language
teacher I managed to acquire enough words and phrases to blow up my arm rings
and keep me afloat. I trained hard under the watching eyes and listening ears of
Gundi until I could finally paddle to shallower water and feel ground under my
feet. A year later I could crawl out onto the beach and start to waddle around
in markets and stores being able to communicate enough to be understood. By the
end of the 2nd year I
could even deliver a Christmas party speech. I forgot about that until recently
when I discovered a video and I was quite impressed with myself, because right
now I can say, ‘’anna esmu caren” and that is about it! A shame after all that
hard work.
Back to the US and by this time we’ve slipped
into the American tongue like a hand into a glove: the boys sounded born
Americans, the parents not, but we could do life smooth-and slickly in English –
pray, preach, write, fight, laugh, learn – no problem. I even learned to 100%
appropriately use offish colloquial
phrases like: “Hel-lo-ho…?” widening my eyes, stick out the chin – just
slightly while the word swings off the tongue; or the sarcastic, “Sorreee”; or
“du-u” for stupidity or when you tell a story about someone in his/her absence,
“bless her heart”. And one of my favorites is, “let’s blow this joint!”
From the US to France and oh my, was that ‘très
difficule’? French is decidedly one of the most challenging languages to hear,
to get with your ear. You learn to read, write, but when French emits from the
mouth of a Frenchman you have problems: no idea where the sentence starts or
ends, no idea how many words in the sentence, because everything is strung
together and together and together forever. I love what Mark Twain had to say
about French in his biography,
‘It has always been a marvel to me --
that French language; it has always been a puzzle to me. How beautiful that
language is! How expressive it seems to be! How full of grace it is! And when it
comes from lips like those [of Sarah Bernhardt], how eloquent and how limpid it
is! And, oh, I am always deceived--I always think I am going to understand
it.
- Mark Twain, a
Biography
With French-in-Action, listening to cassettes
repeatedly as well as Radio Info my ears could finally grasp and hold on to a
few words and then the chipping away slowly followed, like trying to open a
coconut with a blunt object…chisel and chip and chisel and chip…gradually French
started to make more and more sense and I even started to enjoy it, except…when
we had to perform serious business in French like going to the regional ‘mairie’
for our registrations or long stay visas; trying to order firewood or fuel over
the telephone (actually any business conducted over the phone was quite a
nightmare) or going to a doctor that could barely speak a word of English. He
decided after my first visit to him that I could not have a depression anymore.
One only uses anti-depressants for 6 months! Hello-ho…? Trying to explain in
French my medical history of 16 years of depression was a perfectly horrid
experience. He nodded his head every now and I still left without a
prescription. Well, I guess when in France do as the French doctors decide…I
convinced myself I have no more depression until 3 months later when I hit, not
an all-time low, but something very close to it. Thank you docteur ? …I cannot
even remember the man’s last name
anymore.
After floundering around for hours in a giant
supermarket trying to find basic food supplies I decided I do not need that kind
of anxiety, so I asked Willie to drop me off at the store one Saturday morning,
armed with an outsize English-French dictionary, pen and notebook. I started in
the first aisle and slowly worked my way through every shelf. It was quite an
eye-opening experience, “Aa, gingembre means ginger, poivre – pepper, viande –
meat, fish – poisson, savon – soap, chausette - socks etc” Four hours later,
“Voila!” saved me much future shopping
distress.
My mom taught us, “There are small 2 keys that
unlock the hearts of most people: please and thank you.” 10 words in the French
language, most of the time, can unlock the aloof façade of a Frenchman, “Excuse
moi, monsieur/madame j’ai un problem. Est’que vous me aidez s’il vous plait?”
Excuse me ma’am/sir, I have a problem. Can you please help me? Admitting your
need for help softens the heart and breaks through defenses. The French are
fiercely proud of their language and it is a high value to speak it properly –
for them, not necessarily an expectation for foreigners, although they do
appreciate it if you address them in French and at least show that you are
trying.
They, on the other hand will seldom admit that
they can speak or understand English, for fear that they might have to speak it
and reveal their poor command. It is a language pride thing and I do understand
it after living in the culture for 5 years, so admitting and submitting when you
need help give them confidence and oftentimes propel them to speak or help in
their not-so-good-English.
The French language became a serious bone of
contention for Willie and me. My French improved snail-slow and I could butcher
my way through most of what needed to be done. Willie on the other hand, !bless
his heart!, really jumped into the French ocean with commitment and dedication:
language school, intense Alliance Francaise classes in Paris for 3 weeks during
summer vacation and finally twice a week one on one sessions for months with one
of the best tutors in Fontainebleau. It was during this mammoth attempt that
Willie realized and decided he has no more language chips left: no more
gray-matter space left for another language, but for ‘bonjour’, merci, s’il vous
plait, and a few more. That meant I had to help buy car parts, figure out phone
and internet bills, register a British car in France, explain, inquire and
translate: mega-stress! On our way to Feu Vert (auto-parts store) with my
killer-size dictionary on my lap, I would look up, write down and practice
trying to say, “we need a spark plug for a Honda diesel whatever”. The worst
was: we would get there and Willie will ask the assistant, “Est-que vous parlez
un peu Francaise?” They usually will put up their hand with a millimeter opening
between index finger and thumb, “Oui, un petite peu.” That’s all you needed to
hear – that petite peu meant business may be conducted in English!
No need for me to whip out my spark-plug crash course vocabularly…awful,
not just for me, but also for Willie who felt chained by a foreign
language.
Great was the relief when we moved to Germany for
Willie and me, because both of us had German as a foreign language at school, we
lived in Namibia where German was one of the 3 ’official’ languages and last,
but not least – German is a far kinder language on the ear, since Afrikaans, as
a Germanic language, share the same phonetics with German. Pronunciation
therefore is easier and listening makes far more sense.
Willie could organize our car and home insurance,
negotiate with our very Allemanisch car mechanic and order his food in German!
Awesome!
After 17 years of juggling language balls we have
returned to Namibia. As we crossed the Otto Beit bridge from Botswana into
Namibia the balls and foreign-language-stress plonked into the river. Most
people can speak Afrikaans, English and often German and the black people can
add to that repertoire more than one tribal language as well: Ovambo, Damara,
Herero, Nama…
It is quite unusual to hear Afrikaans,
specifically, spoken so widely – and not just by ‘whites’.I feel sad that I have
to mention it in this way – single out specific people groups, because in South
Africa, Afrikaans unfortunately, but I guess, for valid reasons, is often
referred to as the language of the
oppressor.
We are experiencing the very same red tape and
schlepp of entering a ‘new’ country, but it is still infinitely easier than any
of our previous country/culture moves. The reason…?The language! With that I
will allow Antoine de Saint-Exupery, French poet and writer to have the last
word:
‘Language
is the source of misunderstandings.’
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