Some thoughts.... (and sadly, no pictures)

As the program is winding down and the summer is setting in, I am feeling nostalgic for home yet super reluctant to leave India. As the temperatures exceed 100 degrees everyday now and the general weather condition is haze (from the burning of the garbage and leaves that fall in the spring, not the winter), I sometimes question my sanity in not wanting to leave. Yet, I really do enjoy being here, I love the friends that I've made and enjoy speaking, listening to, and writing Urdu.

Regarding the language learning, I am feeling super self-conscious right now about my ability to communicate. I wish that I was better at the language. But I need to remind myself that I have made improvements over the past year and developed a real love for the language (and for language learning in general) that will sustain my Urdu learning when I am not here....

I think that language learning has also been good for me as I grow as a person. One way is that I've become much more comfortable with ambiguity. For example, I was speaking on the telephone with a friend about our day's plans and my visit to his home. For me, phone's are much harder than in-person conversations to understand - maybe its the lack of visual clues or maybe its because people don't have an immediate reminder of my "foreign-ness" and forget to speak slower. As we made the plans, I knew that I was definitely either eating or not eating with his family, but I was unsure of which. Instead of going over the plan for a 5th time, I decided to grab a granola bar and head out the door. If food came, then that would be ideal (his wife is a great cook), if no food, then I would not starve. Luckily, this time food came!

The other thing it has helped with is coming to terms with not being able to speak my thoughts clearly and, therefore, sounding like a dunce often. Its hard to discuss ideologies and vague concepts when your vocabulary is not so developed and strange to have big ideas in my head that I can't communicate. The thing I find most frustrating about this is that your ability to communicate is often used by others as the main indicator intelligence. So, one day I was in class and my teacher was telling a story about Indian politics and stopped to ask me, in particular, if I knew who Indira Gandhi was. Now, I understand that many of you probably don't know who she is (but she was India's 5th and 8th prime minister and a huge force in Indian politics), but I don't imagine that any one working on a ph.d. in Indian history and anthropology doesn't now a lot about her - it would kinda be like an American historian not knowing who Nixon was. At the time I was concerned that he would think that I would not know who she was, irritated, and embarrassed by the fact that he had singled me out. For me, learning to positively use these situations, to feel less enraged or ashamed, and trying to use them as another gateway to learning the language, has helped me think about a lot of things - and is a project I am still working on.

Ok, I do have more reflections, but I imagine that the may not be the most interesting and, also, I am completely drenched in sweat - its 9 am and already hot. This is made worse by the fact that to type, I can't sit directly under the fan (the computer has a short power cord) and I have to have the computer on my lap and the computer generates a ton of heat. So I am going to move the computer from my lap, sit directly under the fan, and do some Urdu paper writing!