Miscommunication.

I’m sure you all can imagine the difficulty in communicating with non-native English speakers. Regardless of how well a person can speak English, there will always be forms of miscommunication. In my current living situation I am the only native English speaker. I live with a group of people who collectively speak over 6 languages, and while this is impressive, it can also get quite confusing.

In addition to my living situation, I also work with a Nepali Man, Mahendra Paswan, aka another non-navite English speaker..  While we have a great time working together, and while is english is quite impressive, we have had our moments  when communicating has proven to be very difficult. This week for example, we had a very funny situation happen with one of our youth groups.

One of the things we have been assigned to do this year is to initiate our youth groups to put on a social theater performance. This will involved our youth groups to come together, pick a topic that is important to them, write a script, and perform in front of the community. The youth in our villages have zero experience in performing arts, so, like everything else in the village, it is a slow process.

This month we began introducing the idea of theater and constructed some activities around getting the youth comfortable with drama and performance. The first activity we chose to do was a simple activity we had taken from our youth-group guidebook. In a previous activity we had asked them to create a list of the issues within their community that they feel affect them. We divided them into small groups and had them pick from a handful of papers that had these issues written on them. They were then asked to create a skit on the topic they had chosen. I told Mahendra that I thought it would be a good idea to tell the groups that they could not speak to each other, i.e. share their topic, and then at the end of each skit we would ask the audience to tell us what they had perceived the issue to be from the performance.

I sat to the side as Mahendra explained the activity, had the children chose their topic, and disperse to create their skits. We told them they had 25 minutes and then the rest of the time would be dedicated to performing. Mahendra and I walked around, stopping at each group to see how they were doing. However lets remember that while I can observe the situation, without language it is really hard to know what is going on,. From this angle everything looked great! However, after 15 minutes Mahendra came over to me,

Mahendra: “Cara all the kids are finding this activity really hard.”

Cara: “I can imagine. This is the first time they have been asked to do something like this before.”

Mahendra: “Yes, but also they don’t understand how they can do this without speaking?”

Cara: “what do you mean, without speaking?”

Mahendra: “You said to have them not speak…”

Cara (Confused as usual): “What do you mean by ‘not speak’? I told you that they couldn’t speak to each other about their topics. Meaning to keep their topic a secret from the other groups so that at the end the audience will guess what issue the performance was referring too.”

Mahendra: “Oh shit.”

All of a sudden Mahendra ran off to each group to tell them that they could in fact speak in their performance.  He then ran back over to me.

            Cara: “Mahendra?”

            Mahdenra: “Ok, ok, ok. Miscommunication. All is fixed.”