Communication, communication

“One problem that recurs more and more frequently these days 

in books and plays and movies is the

 inability of people to communicate with the people they love…

and the characters in these books and plays and so on, 

and in real life I might add, 

spend hours bemoaning the fact that they can’t communicate. 

I feel that if a person can’t communicate the very least he can do is to SHUT UP!” 

 ~Tom Lehrer

This advice comes from Tom Lehrer, musical comedian probably most well known for his “Elements Song.”  There was a point in my life where I completely agreed with him, after all if you can’t communicate why keep talking?  That all changed when I moved to another country and had to start trying to learn another language.  

As a YAGM group we took a weeks worth of Arabic when we arrived here, but we moved at a pretty fast pace and I was pretty overwhelmed.  For a while, I used the Arabic I knew ONLY when I was certain of the words I was going to use.  I could say hello, introduce myself, ask how much something cost and tell somebody I spoke a little Arabic.    I spent a lot of time being certain that I didn’t know what was going on or that I couldn’t speak any Arabic.  I was frustrated that I wasn’t learning Arabic and that it wasn’t getting easier. In short, I felt I couldn’t communicate, and spent hours bemoaning this fact and saying to myself “I need to learn Arabic.”  So, in following Mr. Lehrer’s advice, I SHUT UP!

Then two things happened.  The first was I started taking Arabic lessons from a Kindergarten teacher at my school.  This was helpful on a practical level as I was now in a formal learning situation so I was actually learning Arabic again.

The second was having several people decide that they were going to speak to me in Arabic and expected me to respond in kind, including a wonderful older gentleman from my church named Abdullah.  Abdullah greets me every time he sees me in Arabic requires that I do the same, then he will continue our conversation in a mixture of Arabic and English, gently correcting my mistakes, filling in words I don’t know and congratulating me when I figure out how to communicate what I need. 

He keeps telling me that “where there is a will there is a way” and I generally respond with “where there are Kindergarteners who need to be understood there is a will” and he will tell me that I will speak Arabic by the end of the year. 

Slowly, I am beginning to believe him because the more I try to communicate in Arabic the more I discover I actually can.   By no means am I even remotely conversational but this is a moment where shutting up actually does more harm than good.  When I am willing to try to communicate, I discover that I can actually communicate to a cab driver that I need him to wait while I get my friend from a hotel and then need him to take us to the Lutheran Church.  I can communicate with one of the students that I need them to sit down and no, they cannot go to the bathroom again.  I can communicate to the shawerma man that I am vegetarian so I don’t want meat, I just want salads on my sandwich.

While these communications aren’t always pretty, never lengthy and are nowhere near grammatically correct, as I struggle through these conversations, people are incredibly gracious and forgiving.   Which makes these conversations more than attempts to communicate needs and wants, they are a way to keep building relationships here and of to continuing to make new friends.