With my new occupation I must say that the art of communication has been key in success.
I found myself immersed in a world of sudden new languages even though some could still be referred to as the English language. There have been times when I have wanted to stop a child in full speech and question if in fact the figurative language he is using might be inappropriate, and then I think again. And yet still I remain fascinated by the way communication is key in the lives of those around us and how it builds our self-esteem.
There is a place I have gone for years to get my nails done, and now I love it more than ever because the lady and her husband running it have a sweet little Vietnamese baby that I get to hold and take care of while I wait for my turn. Skylan has become a piece of my heart. She is so beautiful. And I am beginning to think that it is taking them longer to get to me because my amazing babysitter techniques are so cool that this mom and dad are enjoying every minute of it as well.
But on this one day this little angel was fighting her sleep in the back room as I rocked her and sang to her. She refused her pacifier, and I kept pulling out all of my tricks from the past when my now-grown sons were little. And then magic happened. This elderly lady had a chance to step in. I guess she is the grandmother. As I held this infant in my arms she began to sing a song to her in Vietnamese and the five month old began making sounds back at her, mimicking the song. I was blown away to see such beauty. This infant was not responding to my English even though she loved my attention. She was hearing sounds that were familiar to her which brought her great comfort.
This created a question in my mind. How much is lost in translation when people reach out to love speaking from their own perspectives and syntax. How many times do people misread others simply because the communication gap hit a level that stopped the communication of love? From the mouths of babes, right?
It was the toughest thing in my new job to get used to a language unfamiliar to me to read through their idioms and for them to get mine. To figure out the way to get the most out of them through competition when I cannot give a grade. To reward them with graphing their own fluency growth before their eyes and high fiving me when they saw it.
And then it hit so funny. They challenged me on a fluency timing and told me I said “troposphere” wrong. I brought them right down to ask the science teacher and sure enough we were both saying it wrong. I was giving it the long o sound. And I said, "To err is human." And they said, "NO, we’re made of 75% water." And I'm like, "What?" "Yeah, we're not made of air or if you put a pin in us we'd be flying away like a balloon."
And I looked at another student and said, "To err is human." And he said, "No, we’re made of 75% water and that's why when we drink a whole lot we swish when we walk." And as my laughter filled our closet of a classroom they informed me that they love me because I laugh at common sense stuff.
Wow, to err is human. To not embrace all cultures and love all forms of communication is indeed an error of mankind. God brought us one language and it was called the language of love. And with that there need be no translation.
