Stockholm Thursday morning.
I am fourteen years old and in England to teach me a new language. We are sitting at the dining table and I try to say no, the sausage is not that good. But what I’m actually saying is: I do not eat intestines. They laugh at me.
The pocket dictionary has let me down.
It feels hard. The host couple is super cute, but it still feels lonely.
A few days later, I manage to smear the disgusting kid pie, the kidney pie, in the napkin and sneak out after the meal and put everything in the trash, which of course the mother in the house discovers. She kindly says that it’s better for me to say what I do not like. But it’s not that easy. And I’m even more ashamed.
Even today I can evoke the memory and above all the feeling of the situation and of missing a language.
I came to think of this yesterday, when a cavalcade of pictures suddenly popped up on my mobile phone – The year in overview 2020 was written.
On the very first one sits that young Syrian couple with their eyes fixed straight into the camera lens and into me.
I took the picture in February this year on the Greek island of Lesbos. 34-year-old Ibrahim Anas and his ten-year-old wife Ayatte El Hussein had just fled the fighting in the northwestern province of Idlib in Syria. The UN had long warned that up to one million people, civilians, were stuck in the area towards the closed border with Turkey.
Ibrahim barely spoke any English, but the body movements showed how much they froze. Then as now it was rainy and windy and my feet were already numb like two freezer blocks.
It’s never happened before that I’m offered coffee there, but now it’s happened. There was something in the meeting, even though they barely knew any English and I unfortunately no Arabic. A man came and translated. It turned out that the couple advised others in the family, who were still in Syria, to try to get here.
Ibrahim said they were missing water, electricity and light and above all security, which they hoped for.
IKEA crosses between linguistic mines, when furniture and other things are to be named, according to an article yesterday in Dagens Nyheter. Swedish words can in other languages be shit, pimps, poop and snot and other things. During my years at the UN in Geneva in the late 80’s, I also became aware of not only language clashes but what swamp you can fall into with the wrong gesture, tone of voice, mine play and even silence.
I myself was one day told by an American that if I wanted to stay in the organization, I would probably be a little less straightforward. Which he said yes, just that, very straightforward.
I look again at the picture of Ibrahim and Ayatte and wish I could call them because with the corona pandemic it is difficult to try to meet them again. I would like to ask How are you? How is it going? But we have no common language for talking on the phone. And with them, it’s not about a kidnay pie, language clashes in the UN corridors or brand names that are repulsive, but precisely that we can not talk to each other.
The picture of the young Syrian couple first appeared, when the year 2020 is summed up by my mobile.
Source: ICELAND NEWS