Communication Lines
Brenna Taylor
For three months I traveled with a group of nineteen students through seven countries, each varying in development, geography, and cultural norms. With this kind of travel, one tends to see a huge variety of behavior and personalities, as well as some peculiar universal trends. My appearance as a tourist always segregated me automatically from the local people, an almost inevitable happening. In many countries—Tanzania, India, Thailand, and Turkey—my travel pants, pale skin, disoriented expression, and the filtered water bottle I constantly toted were open invitations for solicitation. I approached the trip with a desire to connect with people everywhere, believing meetings with strangers and spontaneous conversations with locals would deepen my understanding of their culture. Naturally I was curious about people.
There were always barriers to such encounters, mostly language and my social status as a tourist, as well as our fast-paced travel. Sometimes I isolated myself from strangers because I was tired, I was avoiding being solicited, or I was too shy to start a conversation that held the possibility of going stale or awry. I learned it was very hard to breach superficiality, and that there were a lot of cultural differences and barriers to breach as well. Often I wonder at opportunities I may have missed by being monolingual and how much more I could have learned about people and countries were I not, but I also appreciate the chances I had to talk with people I met and how much could often be communicated without words. I can reflect on many times I was struck by conversation with strangers but a few specific instances characterize the nature of these encounters.
In India, tuk-tuks--small three-wheeled, open-sided boxy vehicles--acting as taxis, shuffled us from place to place. I met some interesting men this way. Sometimes our drivers spoke English well, luckily for us, so often at least one of us students would strike up conversation, about family, or about India, even briefly at times about religion and politics. One man in Agra told us he was saving up for his daughter to go to university. Another explained the driver’s strikes that were occurring in some parts of the country. I valued these conversations because it opened up a personal side of the nation to me, and I could relate to and understand the men as if they were my own neighbors.
Some conversations, however, would fall into awkward dynamics. It wasn’t unusual, being a young woman, to receive some kind of flirtatious offering, sometimes not much short of marriage. One young driver in Jaipur mistook me for younger than I am. He joked that I was a “little baby” but a very “sweet baby,” and although we had jovial conversation on the way to the train station, he eventually was attempting to kiss my hand as I was leaving his tuk-tuk. “In your next life you will be reincarnated as Indian, and I will wait for you,” he remarked, eyes gleaming behind imitation Ray ban aviator sunglasses. I found that being a female was often frustrating for me, as it was difficult to be taken seriously by men we met, whereas some of the boys in our group could often approach and carry on conversations with random people with less apprehension.
Other times conversation was thwarted by language barriers. Last week I had to take a bus from Rome to Florence, and I asked the driver if I could sit in the front seat in order to allow the woman next to me, who had a baby, to have more room. The bus driver, who spoke a handful of English, simply nodded his head as if he understood and replied, “For me, it is no problem.” He was an older man with bright blue eyes surrounded by wrinkled skin. As he talked, his hands swooped, his fingers pinched, and his jaw jutted out. I sat in the front seat, where tour guides usually preach to a busload of indifferent tourists. The driver began speaking to me in Italian but soon figured out I spoke none. We attempted an ongoing dialogue of simple words, spoken and repeated in Italian, then repeated in English, then gestured with English and Italian, back and forth between us. Often the man sitting behind the bus driver would interpret for me, small-talk remarks like “tell me your life story” or “I can drive with no hands.” At first I did my best to maintain my finest confused-easy-going expressions, raising my eyebrows, shrugging, laughing in response to his eyes popping and belly-laughing gestures. After a time it grew frustrating, and our interpreter found us boring; the driver was irked at my waning efforts to carry on an incoherent conversation with him. I fell asleep dwelling on my own frustration at never having learned a second language.
Still I was surprised by Indian teenagers in Dehli who would approach us only to have a conversation. In the hectic square of Delhi, there are hundreds of people trying to make a buck, selling trinkets or services of every kind. But among them are some who seemed to me, at least after talking to them, to be only curious, and not just interested in our money. At first I approached them wary of being led into a shop or coerced into a shoeshine. They were university guys, and since I was a noticeable out-of-towner, they would approach and ask, unabashedly, where are you from, why are you here, what do you think of Delhi? Although their intentions were quite likely ambiguous at best, I couldn’t help but be a bit charmed by their lack of hesitation to talk to a complete stranger. Time limited these conversations, but I was happy to be able relate to people my age, however diametrically different our backgrounds.
The most touching encounter I experienced took place in the Maldives. Our leaders arranged for the group to meet with mid-teenage students at a school on one of the atolls. The atolls are small and quite isolated compared to the built-up mainland, Male, so many of these students had never met anyone from outside, especially from the United States. We broke off into small groups in the small bare-bones rooms that were their classrooms.
We had a group of about seven girls, clustered around a table, shyly smiling, all in their simple, turquoise, long-sleeved uniforms, and many with their heads covered with a simple black scarf. I was with four other Biomes peers, and we had nothing formal planned, other than simply to talk about their experiences living in the coral reef. I wanted to make them feel comfortable, and as I opened my mouth to ask a question, an eager, round-faced, bright-eyed girl enthusiastically told us how happy she was we were there. She went on to say she was a member of Blue Peace, the environmental advocacy organization in the Maldives, and she had noticed how the coral reefs had changed since she was younger. I was touched by her intelligence and enthusiasm.
From then on she and the other girls were asking us questions, putting us on the spot when at times we couldn’t provide answers. They had learned about the coral reefs from their childhood and were well versed in its biology and ecological processes. When talking about climate change, I was inspired because they knew how it was so closely affecting their home.
Most of the talking was done by the enthusiastic girl, Mahlda, but the others opened up like chirping birds to me as soon as we were out of the classroom, giggling, playing and teaching us little vocabulary words in the local dialect. When it was time to leave we exchanged names and addresses, Facebook names, and took pictures together. In the short time we were together I was amazed at how smart, friendly, and kind these girls were, in contrast to my own introverted personality. While we were walking, one tall, smart-alecky girl looped her arm and mine, and responding to my periodic awkward silences, asked me, “Why are you acting like a stranger? Tell me about you! I want to know about you, we are so happy to meet you.”