Words

Words are important - the words we use, the words we say, the words we write, and the words we choose to keep to ourselves.  It has been interesting over the past 2+ weeks how many people have had the reaction of "Wow - you're actually trying to learn the language before you dive headlong into working on water systems in the Ulpan Valley?!?!?"  It seems strange to me that this is strange.  I've been told that this approach is pretty unusual for projects that are of a somewhat "technical" nature.  Evidently, most of the time the well-intentioned geeks like me come to a place and enlist the services of a translator and drop a project on some people.  Whether we ultimately succeed, or to what degree we succeed with Project Ulpan, will probably not be quantifiable for perhaps a decade or two, but I have to admit that learning at least some Spanish and at least some Qeqchi is turning out to be more rewarding than I thought it would be.

We received lots of good advice before moving here, and much of that advice had to do with words.  One of the best illustrations of "language barriers" was given as "you will know exactly how a 2-year-old feels because you understand only a little and can communicate even a little less than that, but you know exactly what you WANT to communicate" and I have to admit that there have been some times in our brief stint here that all I want to do is point at something and loudly pout, just like a toddler (granted, that tactic has proven to be quite successful for me, if not a little embarrassing to the rest of the family, but I got my lemonade, dagummit).  But learning how to communicate, I have decided, is fundamental to Project Ulpan.

It is fundamental in the sense that it shows we are wanting to be involved long-term, not just for a project.  It is fundamental in the sense that we can better know what these communities need and what they want (and what they don't want).  Thinking back to my "professional life" over the past 15-ish years, I'm sure I made some "technical mistakes" along the way (what's a decimal place among friends anyway?) but the ones that stand out are all mistakes of communication - where I didn't "speak the language" of a client or a customer or a boss or a regulator or whomever.  Language barriers are a real thing, even if you speak the same language.  But the good thing is that these, like all barriers, can be broken down.

Scott Owings, a man whom I respect immensely and who always seems to be able to speak the language of the person he is talking to, said that it is comforting to remember that there are three words that are the same in all languages: hallelujah, hosannah, and amen.  That's comforting to me.  It's also comforting to me that Bernoulli's equation and Newton's laws of motion are constant everywhere too.  I hope to be mixing in a little Bernoulli with a little sprinkling of hallelujah and a dash of amen in the coming months.