A crucifix can tell a lot about a place. In terms of religious symbols, it allows a certain measure of interpretation which is rare in such objects of devotion. In my highly subjective experience, I have found the pattern to generally go as follows; the more realistic the crucifix the more rational the institution’s perspective on religion tends to be. The ones at my old school were a solemn affair, that whilst not plagued by hyperbolic suffering that I have seen in some (never a good sign), it is still clear that Jesus isn’t having a great day. He’s slung low, looking down despondently in a rather touching expression of his humanity. This, I feel, corresponds to my old school’s somber and meditative take on the whole thing.
Compare this to the one in the Holy Family church, one of the largest on the island. First of all, it is gigantic, taking up the entire wall of the church. Secondly, Jesus looks like he’s having a grand old time up there. He’s fully clothed, has excellent posture and generally looks pretty pleased with himself. There is no evidence that he is suffering one of the most excruciating forms of execution ever devised. I can think of no better introduction to the manner of faith on the island than this.
The community I am surrounded by is overwhelmingly Catholic. I have no problem with this. Catholics have always deserved my respect, and ones such as these who travel halfway across the world to help people even more so. This is, however, an abrupt change from my home life where I was exposed to about one religious person for every two non-religious people, and none of them were particularly over-zealous about it. Between the Jesuit Volunteers, Jesuits in training and people from countries with high rates of practicing Catholicism such as the Phillipines, we non-Catholics are firmly in the minority. As comfortable as I am with that, there also an unspoken desire for us not to openly practice or lack-of-faith and to particularly avoid teaching anything that openly criticizes Church doctrine. Having gone to a high school where even the priests discussed their issues with Christianity and atheist teachers were out and proud, this seemed strange.
However, when placed in the context of the society the school operates in this comes as no surprise. It’s not that being non-religious is frowned upon, it is simply that it is not comprehensible. Walking across the oval with a Xavier student (a group that represents some of the most intelligent and Westernized people on island) I was asked in a scandalous tone, “Is it true that some teachers are… atheists?” One might have been mistaken for him asking me whether we hid dead bodies in the teacher’s lounge. I looked at the kid, remembering that I was a card-carrying atheist at his age, and told him that we had weekly Wiccan sacrifices and that he was more than welcome to join.
My most intimate view of Chuukese society, my students, have revealed some of the truly bizarre manifestations of this. For example, the ability for religion to turn up in topics for which it has no relevance amazes me. One of my favourite examples was in a comprehension test about an extract describing the Californian Gold Rush. The question was, ‘Why do you think this article compares the lucky and unlucky stories of miners?’
“Because the good thing they were lucky to find gold. Unlucky some don’t find gold and they think too much about money but they don’t think of going to church and if they die they will go to hell. They are happy in earth but when they die they are sad in hell.”
And this student is by no means the least intelligent or most conspicuously religious I teach. Another time was when I took remedial reading for the seventh grade. The students were, on the whole, not great in their behavior. That was until my second week of it when I discovered that they paid much more attention when I made them read books about Jesus. After that, I came to school every day armed with children’s bibles and religious education texts. Their favourite, which couldn’t really be described as a page-turner, was a book of saints subtitled ‘Superheroes of God’. After going through every saint in the book whose adventures simply weren’t nearly as captivating as the stories of my childhood, I asked what sort of books they wanted to read next. I suggested the categories that had fascinated me as a kid: space, adventure, history, science. These were met with a decidedly dull reception. My Jesuit co-teacher, Brother Patrick, who had supplied all of my religious books and was quite enamoured of ‘Superheroes of God’, suggested, “What about books about Jesus?” The response was rapturous. More books about Jesus was exactly what the doctor had ordered it seemed. It should be noted that these are probably the same kids who draw swastikas on the teacher’s desk in permanent marker.
This irony is telling. It is arguable that they view the crosses that they draw elaborately in my class in the same manner they view the desk swastikas. They are both powerful symbols and are hence worthy of expression, but they are clueless as to what their meanings are. This complete lack of critical thought can easily be dismissed as some self-important non-Christian’s intensely biased view on the whole matter, but it was a strongly Catholic teacher who suggested it to me. And when one of your 8th Grade students at a Catholic school asks you what the definition of a Christian is, there is generally something seriously wrong.
This inability to view faith in a critical sense explains some of the eccentricities of the local brand of Catholicism. It explains the ‘Jesus-having-a-dandy-ol’-time’ crucifix. It explains the fact that my students cannot get their head around the idea of a non-Christian perspective on a passage about Easter. It explains the many devotional pictures of Caucasian Jesus. A Peace Corp I talked with even suggested that the state’s political apathy is a side effect. Yet again this can easily be dismissed as one of those ‘religion-is-responsible-for-everything-evil’ arguments that Dawkins and his crowd are rather fond of, but the patterns in behavior are pretty stark. I really do believe it is one of the fundamental problems about this place.
I struggled with all of this for quite a while. However, it was the awkward words of a young Mormon that lead me to come to an acceptance of the way things are and my place within it.
This chance occurrence happened at the airport. This is apt because it always draws an eclectic crowd of people on the island and is about the only time you see locals and tourists in the same room. This particular day we were bidding farewell to Sam, an American volunteer. It was an emotional time; I told him to do his best jagger, he said we’ll catch up some time and drink red wine out of the bottle. At the same time, the Mormons were saying goodbye to one of their own. As everyone knows, you can spot a Mormon at a thousand paces, particularly a group of them (I wonder if there’s a collective noun for Mormons?) and they did not disappoint. All of them were dressed identically: white shirts, black ties, black pants and personalized nametags. My favourite part is a local addition to this uniform, where the faithful can choose between black leather shoes or black crocs. Now Chuuk being the ecumenical place it is we had virtually nothing to do with the Mormons. Readers of my earlier posts may remember my obliviousness to their existence for my early months, and my awareness of them has increased only marginally. They always travel in at least pairs, and they always drive very shiny cars. They never give lifts. Beyond this, however, I was blind to their presence on island.
It came as a surprise then to find that they were closer to home than I had thought. As both Sam and his Mormon travelling companion went through check-in, a young Maori in the party came and sat by the ragtag mob of Xavier volunteers that had come to say goodbye. He began striking up a conversation with Tom, my fellow Australian. Turns out they had met at the Sapuk Elementary graduation. Turns out he was twenty years old. Turns out he was from New Zealand. This is a pretty big deal. I can name Peace Corp volunteers I have never met on islands that take days to reach on a boat. But here was someone from the country next door, who was the closest non-student in age to me apart from the two other gappies and who was living in the same village as me.
And he was nice. The conversation was pleasant indeed. He compared Tom’s looks to the lead singer of Evermore. We discussed the strange relationship between New Zealand and Australia. We talked about the island itself. I decided to ask him what he was doing on the island. His response was that he was here preaching the gospel, which I really should have seen coming but figured that if he had travelled this far to do that at least he’s devoted to the task. He asked me the same question and I told him I was teaching. He asked if I had anyone with me to translate, I said no. He asked where ,and I told him St Cecilias.
He gave a slight look away and in an absurdly casual tone, asked me, “So do you get to church much?”
Half in shock, I gave Tom and Lydia (neither of whom are of the religious bent) and he seemed to pick up on that.
“So you’re not a Christian.”
“Well that’s a complex question.” I said in an attempt to be diplomatic.
“You’re not a Christian but you teach at a Christian school?”
It was at about this point where the conversation, which I had been rather enjoying, went into a steep decline. I acknowledged that this was ironic but that I was comfortable with the arrangement. Had I been in a slightly less forgiving mood, I might have rushed into a bout of self-righteousness, comparing my attempts to genuinely help the Chuukese to his bible-bashing. But it wasn’t the right time or place, and it wouldn’t have achieved anything in the long run. He quickly peeled off and rejoined his throng of Mormons. They all looked incredibly happy, even as one of their own walked past the security guards and into the purgatorial waiting area next to the tarmac. As we left I said goodbye. I invited him up for a meal sometime, though it’s probably unlikely he’ll take me up on that.
The odd thing is, walking away from the airport, I felt more comfortable not being a Christian here than I have since I arrived. So if you’re out there, my Mormon friend, thank you.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Monday, June 7, 2010
The Finer Pont of the Language Barrier
Every day, no matter what amount of activity or inactivity that day involves, I am confronted with the fact that English is not the principle language of this island. I can talk to as many Americans and as many fluent Chuukese people as I like, but ultimately the language barrier pervades my lifestyle here. This was something I prepared for upon arrival, I had been to foreign countries before and even stayed in the houses of people who barely spoke English; it wasn’t until being here that I began to notice more curious sides of the language barrier.
One such element is the way that scraps of another language, almost entirely remote from their original tongue, can be as effective, if not more effective, than fluent language. This is highlighted every day on two levels for me on my walk home from St Cecilia’s. The first is a group of kids around the village of Peddia (as mentioned in my last post). Everyday these kids play on the road and everyday they greet me as I walk home from school with a hearty ‘good morning’. When I was still in high school, I often used good morning at odd times of the day for comical effect. These kids, however, do not. They genuinely are wishing me a good morning at four o’clock in the afternoon. I often give them back a carefully pronounced ‘necurier annim’ which in English means ‘good time-around-three-or-four-o’clock’. Then the next day, they will greet me with a hearty ‘good morning’. I figured it is an act of courtesy. It doesn’t matter that the white guy knows enough Chuukese to greet us. We hear Chuukese greetings all the time. We’ll give the white guy a greeting in his own language; maybe he’ll respect us for it. I like to think I do.
This, as all things to do with the language barrier, goes both ways. Whenever I am on the walk home, people will always ask me questions in Chuukese. A Xavier staff member once explained it to me like this. “You are a white guy who is not in a car. You are therefore an object of curiousity.” Unfortunately, my Chuukese is so limited that I generally have no idea what they are talking about. People invariably have told me on many occasions various terms such as ‘where are you going’ or ‘I don’t understand’ that I could recognise or use. However, my mind never retains them. Instead, my response to all questions from the local people is to point up the road and say ‘Xavier’. At this point they always respond with an ‘aaaah’ and a nodding of the head. I figured that this answered the majority of the questions they could of asked; where I am going, where I live, why I am dressed so funny. And even if it does not answer their question it explains why I can barely speak Chuukese. The consistency with which this answer has satisfied countless questions in another tongue is a mathematical marvel.
***
Another thing that I have discovered is that the English language is so complex that even for fluent speakers there are still aspects of it that are only truly accessible to native speakers. Teaching a class where the majority of kids are fluent English speakers has allowed me to view this element first hand. Sometimes this appears in the way kids frame a particular phrase. But the most curious is when it shows up during the handling of areas of our language considered taboo. This was highlighted during one particular lunchtime spent in the company of Caroline, an American teacher, and Mary Helen, one of my students. Mary Helen speaks English as well as I do. She can impersonate my accent better than any of the Americans on island. However, this particular lunch she casually turned to another classmate and with the lightest possible intonation called him a particularly derogative term for a homosexual man beginning with the letter f. The only people in the room who seemed to register the gravity of the word were Caroline and I. The eight graders seemed surprised at our response. We tried to explain that it is an extremely offensive term and that it should be abstained from on all occasions. Her reply was simple and blunt:
“In Chuuk, it’s not a bad word at all.”
Another of these incidences occurred in an essay by one of my students on the topic of whether foreigners were good for Chuuk. During my study skills lessons we had drawn up a basic map of the topic, a couple of possible points and a crash course in essay structure. Whilst in order to pass only a paragraph with three arguments and an opinion was needed, the higher end of these essays had well constructed essays with a strong structure and an attempt at explaining their points, not simply listing them. The majority of these essays ran along simple lines, saying either that they were good or bad and following a similar line of argument that either involved Christianity for the good and drugs for the bad. A couple attempted to merge these arguments into a ‘both equally good and bad’ line of reason and was done quite well. But nothing compares to the bizarre and compelling viewpoint presented by an unusually bright student named Jonvan.
Jonvan is one of those students who knows that he is too smart for the school he’s in. He’ll come to Xavier next year and be challenged academically for the first time in his life, but during his time at Cecilia’s his extraordinary intellect manifested itself in bizarre ways, from the self destructive to the overly affectionate (interrupting my class by shouting ‘I love you Mr Joe). So when he handed his essay in and explained that he had used arguments he learnt in study skills class, I should have braced myself for something interesting. What resulted was an opinion that was so left field, yet so incredibly clever that it took my breath away. Jonvan’s argument was essentially that the foreigners that came to Chuuk ultimately were driven by a need to dominate in all aspects of their occupation. In five small paragraphs and two handwritten, A4 pages, my eighth grader had produced an interpretation of Micronesian history better than any I had heard.
However controversy abounded in a particular paragraph about the early colonists treatment of Chuukese women. It showed this theme of dominance in a sexual light. That’s pretty delicate material for an eighth grader and on all accounts it’s quite a valid point. It impressed me that he had chosen to grapple such a topic.
Unfortunately, in order to portray it, he used the ‘F’ word. Twice. My mind was immediately struck by the implications of using obscenities in essays (my Hamlet essay in year 12 sure would have been more interesting) and, more importantly, how I should mark it. If it was put in there gratuitously to stir a reaction, the kid deserved to be failed. But if he used it to describe the act and could not find a suitable euphemism, perhaps the term might even earn some merit. I consulted a few of the other Xavier faculty on the matter and their response was pretty consistent. Fail him. It was Sam who took the dissenting view. He put it better than anyone.
“It’s kind of rough, sure, but when you consider the way that Chuukese women were treated when the first Westerners came, there’s not really anything else you can use to describe it.”
So I ended up giving him an A. A low one at least, I wasn’t going to give him full marks even though his essay deserved it. I took him aside the next day at school. I asked him why he thought I wanted to talk to him. He looked completely bemused. I told him it was about his essay. He replied “Oh, did I fail or something?” I explained that no, he hadn’t.
“Then why am I here?”
“Jonvan, you used the F-word in your essay.”
“Oh yeah.”
“Jonvan, you can’t do that.”
“Yeah I know, but I was right wasn’t I?”
“Yes, Jonvan, you were right.”
***
The third way in which the language barrier appears in life here is in the moment where the language barrier is entirely transcended. These moments are rare but memorable. The best of these was the evening I was stranded downtown with Randy. It’s a fairly regular thing for us faculty folk to get a lift with the girls on the busses down to the rest of the island to pick up supplies. The bus then returns from its drop offs, picks up the staff and returns to Xavier. This has worked extremely well, except once. This exception occurred when Randy and I were told that pirated copies of a British TV show ‘Skins’ were at a particular shop next to the airport. We then told the driver to pick us up from the shop, and went about in search of our British TV show.
It was at around six-thirty while waiting out the front of the shop that alarm bells began to ring. With the realisation that at least the first bus to return had forgotten we began to wait by the road for the later busses. By the time it was dark, we realised that we had missed the bus. Readers of my last post may have picked up on the idea that Chuuk isn’t very safe after dark. It really isn’t. Cheap alcohol and high unemployment mean that we aren’t advised to be off the Xavier campus after dark. So, more than being stranded on the other side of the island, we also were in a pretty dangerous situation. Randy decided he would go back to the store and ask to use their phone. I was to wait to see if any late coming busses passed us. The distance between my vantage point and the store was no more than a hundred metres or so, and nobody was around. So, I was left on my own.
It was about two minutes into my solitude that I saw a shadow across the road. I convinced myself that it was imagination. However, as it began to move and eventually start crossing the road, my mind went from denial to worst-case-scenario. The annoying thing was that I was going to beaten up and Randy wasn’t going to be there. I think in a life threatening situation, the least you can ask for is a witness. There’s something strangely reassuring in a witness. I took a few deep breaths, closed my eyes for a second, and opened them to see a middle aged Chuukese man, who was now standing next to me.
“Nepong (good evening).”
“Nepong.”
(something in Chuukese)
“(with finger pointing up road) Xavier.”
“Ahhh.”
Randy returned, and after realising that the middle aged man wasn’t going to beat me pulp, used his more extensive knowledge of Chuukese to gather more information. His name was Iyam, a name I remembered because it sounded like Liam without an L. Randy somehow conveyed the idea of a bus, lateness and impressively, the idea of being forgotten. Iyam replied by inviting us over to his house for rice and fish. But the conversation soon ran dry, the extent of our cross-lingual knowledge could only last us ten minutes. But Iyam stayed and waited with us. Eventually, his son joined us. So did his best friend. By the time a car from Xavier arrived, the three of them had waited with two complete strangers who didn’t speak their language for two whole hours. Though they barely spoke to us for the whole two hours, it was the kindest gesture I have been showed in my time here.
Leaving the place we had waited for so long, I thought about the way that Iyam and his companions had picked up on such a basic human thing; two anxious white guys on the side of the road. And in their actions, the language barrier is forgotten. Nothing needs to be said. Just stand next to them. Moments like these make all the small, trivial aspects of the language barrier that I am exposed to every day look rather inconsequential.
One such element is the way that scraps of another language, almost entirely remote from their original tongue, can be as effective, if not more effective, than fluent language. This is highlighted every day on two levels for me on my walk home from St Cecilia’s. The first is a group of kids around the village of Peddia (as mentioned in my last post). Everyday these kids play on the road and everyday they greet me as I walk home from school with a hearty ‘good morning’. When I was still in high school, I often used good morning at odd times of the day for comical effect. These kids, however, do not. They genuinely are wishing me a good morning at four o’clock in the afternoon. I often give them back a carefully pronounced ‘necurier annim’ which in English means ‘good time-around-three-or-four-o’clock’. Then the next day, they will greet me with a hearty ‘good morning’. I figured it is an act of courtesy. It doesn’t matter that the white guy knows enough Chuukese to greet us. We hear Chuukese greetings all the time. We’ll give the white guy a greeting in his own language; maybe he’ll respect us for it. I like to think I do.
This, as all things to do with the language barrier, goes both ways. Whenever I am on the walk home, people will always ask me questions in Chuukese. A Xavier staff member once explained it to me like this. “You are a white guy who is not in a car. You are therefore an object of curiousity.” Unfortunately, my Chuukese is so limited that I generally have no idea what they are talking about. People invariably have told me on many occasions various terms such as ‘where are you going’ or ‘I don’t understand’ that I could recognise or use. However, my mind never retains them. Instead, my response to all questions from the local people is to point up the road and say ‘Xavier’. At this point they always respond with an ‘aaaah’ and a nodding of the head. I figured that this answered the majority of the questions they could of asked; where I am going, where I live, why I am dressed so funny. And even if it does not answer their question it explains why I can barely speak Chuukese. The consistency with which this answer has satisfied countless questions in another tongue is a mathematical marvel.
***
Another thing that I have discovered is that the English language is so complex that even for fluent speakers there are still aspects of it that are only truly accessible to native speakers. Teaching a class where the majority of kids are fluent English speakers has allowed me to view this element first hand. Sometimes this appears in the way kids frame a particular phrase. But the most curious is when it shows up during the handling of areas of our language considered taboo. This was highlighted during one particular lunchtime spent in the company of Caroline, an American teacher, and Mary Helen, one of my students. Mary Helen speaks English as well as I do. She can impersonate my accent better than any of the Americans on island. However, this particular lunch she casually turned to another classmate and with the lightest possible intonation called him a particularly derogative term for a homosexual man beginning with the letter f. The only people in the room who seemed to register the gravity of the word were Caroline and I. The eight graders seemed surprised at our response. We tried to explain that it is an extremely offensive term and that it should be abstained from on all occasions. Her reply was simple and blunt:
“In Chuuk, it’s not a bad word at all.”
Another of these incidences occurred in an essay by one of my students on the topic of whether foreigners were good for Chuuk. During my study skills lessons we had drawn up a basic map of the topic, a couple of possible points and a crash course in essay structure. Whilst in order to pass only a paragraph with three arguments and an opinion was needed, the higher end of these essays had well constructed essays with a strong structure and an attempt at explaining their points, not simply listing them. The majority of these essays ran along simple lines, saying either that they were good or bad and following a similar line of argument that either involved Christianity for the good and drugs for the bad. A couple attempted to merge these arguments into a ‘both equally good and bad’ line of reason and was done quite well. But nothing compares to the bizarre and compelling viewpoint presented by an unusually bright student named Jonvan.
Jonvan is one of those students who knows that he is too smart for the school he’s in. He’ll come to Xavier next year and be challenged academically for the first time in his life, but during his time at Cecilia’s his extraordinary intellect manifested itself in bizarre ways, from the self destructive to the overly affectionate (interrupting my class by shouting ‘I love you Mr Joe). So when he handed his essay in and explained that he had used arguments he learnt in study skills class, I should have braced myself for something interesting. What resulted was an opinion that was so left field, yet so incredibly clever that it took my breath away. Jonvan’s argument was essentially that the foreigners that came to Chuuk ultimately were driven by a need to dominate in all aspects of their occupation. In five small paragraphs and two handwritten, A4 pages, my eighth grader had produced an interpretation of Micronesian history better than any I had heard.
However controversy abounded in a particular paragraph about the early colonists treatment of Chuukese women. It showed this theme of dominance in a sexual light. That’s pretty delicate material for an eighth grader and on all accounts it’s quite a valid point. It impressed me that he had chosen to grapple such a topic.
Unfortunately, in order to portray it, he used the ‘F’ word. Twice. My mind was immediately struck by the implications of using obscenities in essays (my Hamlet essay in year 12 sure would have been more interesting) and, more importantly, how I should mark it. If it was put in there gratuitously to stir a reaction, the kid deserved to be failed. But if he used it to describe the act and could not find a suitable euphemism, perhaps the term might even earn some merit. I consulted a few of the other Xavier faculty on the matter and their response was pretty consistent. Fail him. It was Sam who took the dissenting view. He put it better than anyone.
“It’s kind of rough, sure, but when you consider the way that Chuukese women were treated when the first Westerners came, there’s not really anything else you can use to describe it.”
So I ended up giving him an A. A low one at least, I wasn’t going to give him full marks even though his essay deserved it. I took him aside the next day at school. I asked him why he thought I wanted to talk to him. He looked completely bemused. I told him it was about his essay. He replied “Oh, did I fail or something?” I explained that no, he hadn’t.
“Then why am I here?”
“Jonvan, you used the F-word in your essay.”
“Oh yeah.”
“Jonvan, you can’t do that.”
“Yeah I know, but I was right wasn’t I?”
“Yes, Jonvan, you were right.”
***
The third way in which the language barrier appears in life here is in the moment where the language barrier is entirely transcended. These moments are rare but memorable. The best of these was the evening I was stranded downtown with Randy. It’s a fairly regular thing for us faculty folk to get a lift with the girls on the busses down to the rest of the island to pick up supplies. The bus then returns from its drop offs, picks up the staff and returns to Xavier. This has worked extremely well, except once. This exception occurred when Randy and I were told that pirated copies of a British TV show ‘Skins’ were at a particular shop next to the airport. We then told the driver to pick us up from the shop, and went about in search of our British TV show.
It was at around six-thirty while waiting out the front of the shop that alarm bells began to ring. With the realisation that at least the first bus to return had forgotten we began to wait by the road for the later busses. By the time it was dark, we realised that we had missed the bus. Readers of my last post may have picked up on the idea that Chuuk isn’t very safe after dark. It really isn’t. Cheap alcohol and high unemployment mean that we aren’t advised to be off the Xavier campus after dark. So, more than being stranded on the other side of the island, we also were in a pretty dangerous situation. Randy decided he would go back to the store and ask to use their phone. I was to wait to see if any late coming busses passed us. The distance between my vantage point and the store was no more than a hundred metres or so, and nobody was around. So, I was left on my own.
It was about two minutes into my solitude that I saw a shadow across the road. I convinced myself that it was imagination. However, as it began to move and eventually start crossing the road, my mind went from denial to worst-case-scenario. The annoying thing was that I was going to beaten up and Randy wasn’t going to be there. I think in a life threatening situation, the least you can ask for is a witness. There’s something strangely reassuring in a witness. I took a few deep breaths, closed my eyes for a second, and opened them to see a middle aged Chuukese man, who was now standing next to me.
“Nepong (good evening).”
“Nepong.”
(something in Chuukese)
“(with finger pointing up road) Xavier.”
“Ahhh.”
Randy returned, and after realising that the middle aged man wasn’t going to beat me pulp, used his more extensive knowledge of Chuukese to gather more information. His name was Iyam, a name I remembered because it sounded like Liam without an L. Randy somehow conveyed the idea of a bus, lateness and impressively, the idea of being forgotten. Iyam replied by inviting us over to his house for rice and fish. But the conversation soon ran dry, the extent of our cross-lingual knowledge could only last us ten minutes. But Iyam stayed and waited with us. Eventually, his son joined us. So did his best friend. By the time a car from Xavier arrived, the three of them had waited with two complete strangers who didn’t speak their language for two whole hours. Though they barely spoke to us for the whole two hours, it was the kindest gesture I have been showed in my time here.
Leaving the place we had waited for so long, I thought about the way that Iyam and his companions had picked up on such a basic human thing; two anxious white guys on the side of the road. And in their actions, the language barrier is forgotten. Nothing needs to be said. Just stand next to them. Moments like these make all the small, trivial aspects of the language barrier that I am exposed to every day look rather inconsequential.
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