Language barriers can sure create misunderstandings.
Peter in his family shamba
Recently Chuck and I went for a walk with a neighbor kid, Peter. As he was showing us his family’s shamba (garden) a girl came up to us, shook Chuck’s hand and said we cheated her. We didn’t remember ever meeting this girl so how could we have cheated her? She tried to explain in her broken English that we were supposed to visit her at her school. Chuck asked several questions about her school and finally found out her school was a primary (elementary) school. He explained that we don’t visit primary schools (Nice View is a primary school so we visit Nice View) only secondary (high) school students who have graduated from Nice View. Come to find out, after we returned home and talked to Gideon, she was a neighbors daughter who we had met several weeks earlier for about 2 minutes. Her mother had asked us to visit her daughter in school to which we replied we don’t visit primary schools due to time constraints. So between not having the correct language and assuming she didn’t understand us fully (but we are finding that many people understand a lot more then they let on) I guess the mother thought we would be visiting and told her daughter as much. So we cheated her by not visiting her school which we told her we wouldn’t be visiting in the first place.
Then on the same walk, Peter took us through someone’s yard as a shortcut home. He walked us right up to the woman’s home (we found out later it was his aunt) and she came out to greet us. She invited us in, with her broken English, we went inside and sat down.
Immediately she told us she had waited all day the day before for us to visit and we never showed up. We’ve never met this woman, had never been to her home and had no idea who told her we’d be visiting. Because of the language barrier we didn’t even attempt to ask who told her we would visit because when I asked the boys, who were also there, where their home was she (I thought) was translating the question to them but then told us “they love soccer”. “a lot of boys in the US do too, but where do you live?” was my response. That question never got answered! We never found out why she was expecting us either.
So in the course of one walk we cheated a girl and disappointed a woman…both of whom we either met briefly or didn’t even know. Guess the language wasn’t as clear as we thought!