What I Learned from Peace Corps:
How to Communicate
For the past five years, I’ve been living in a constant state of miscommunication.
I never realized how much my own self was defined by language until it was gone. For the past two years, only a tiny percentage of my daily communication has been with native English speakers. And of those, the majority are Australian or British, while I myself am American. Bit by bit, over these past two years, I’ve watched as pieces of myself have floated away: My vocabulary. My grammar. My sarcasm. My pop culture references.
I have always loved language: Structure. Order. Persuasion. Beauty. Language makes us as much as we make it. When you look to the roots of language, you can find how inextricably tied it is to the culture surrounding it. Both constantly evolve as either takes on newness.
Coming from the Midwest, I stereotypically had had minimal exposure to other languages, so when I joined Peace Corps Cambodia in 2011, I was in for quite a shock. At my going-away toast at the end of my service (more like a roast…thanks, guys), one of the Program Managers remarked that when he first met me, I spoke so quickly that he doubted I’d ever be understood by a Cambodian English-learner.
Two years into my service, I had this to say about language and communication:
The way you communicate will completely transform. Learning a language from scratch through immersion is a powerful experience. You will learn to have complex communications though expressions, gestures, and basic vocabulary. You will learn to bond with another human being through silence. You will answer the same basic questions over and over and over again. You may never achieve the ability to discuss ideas and concepts. You will develop a new English language which consists of pared down vocabulary and grammatical structures. You will actively think of each word before you speak. Your speech patterns will slow. You will have to define words whose meanings you had always taken for granted. You will learn to listen.
Now, approaching my 5th anniversary in Cambodia, having moved from Peace Corps Volunteer to senior management at an education NGO and having progressed from a Cambodian boyfriend to a Cambodian fiancé, I have a few things to add.
I miss being eloquent. I miss seeming intelligent (or simply not stupid). I miss being understood.
I’m actually quite functional in Khmer by this point. I can speak, read, write and type (a fact that actually saddens me as many Cambodians are themselves not given the opportunity to achieve that). But the intricacies still elude me, and even the way I speak Khmer is still impacted by my American-ness. In Khmer, I still use the word ‘sorry’ with the frequency that only an American could, and I struggle to adapt to the lengthy language of appropriateness and politeness in formal Khmer situations.
When I was still a Peace Corps Volunteer, these miscommunications and lack of understanding were bearable and, most of the time, amusing. I still chuckle at the time I told an elderly woman that her son had ‘f@*ked’ me a lot as opposed to ‘helped’ (two such opposing words should never be allowed to have such similar sounds….). And, before, when I was the only English speaker at an event and got lost in the conversation, I could just tune out and play Snake on my little Nokia.
In my current position, though, a lot rides on my understanding and being understood. This level of responsibility highlights my language failures every day. When a little kid mocks my accent, it’s no longer obnoxious. It’s painful. When I walk out of a meeting thinking we’d reached consenus only to find the opposite playing out, I ache at my failure. Just learning more vocabulary is not enough because communication is much more than mere words. It’s also patterns and culture. To be eloquent in Khmer is a level which I fear I can never achieve.
To try to counter this, I’ve worked to adapt to find the bare-bottom necessities of communication. In both English and Khmer, I pare down words as well as abandon elegance and subtlety in order to be understood. Those parts of myself, though, I miss every day. I miss the power I used to feel from my command of a language.
In the midst of self-pitying, I must remember that this is a two-way street. I respect that everyone who communicates with me - either in Khmer or English - is also sacrificing a part of their selves to try to find common ground with me. I look to my amazing host mother who told me of her family’s experience under the Khmer Rouge via charades; she sacrificed the pain and emotion and importance of her language so that I could understand. I look to my fiancé who lives our relationship in a language that is not his own so that we can grow together.
Beyond mere miscommunication, I’m increasingly frustrated by finding how closely our opinions of others are correlated to their ability to communicate in our preferred language. When someone cannot understand us, it’s easy to write them off, to assume it’s the concept they can’t understand as opposed to the words. In my experience, I’ve found this to go both ways. I’ve heard foreigners mock Cambodian waitstaff for not catching the request from the customer. I’ve also been on the receiving end of these assumptions of incompetence, and I’ve had to resist to urge to respond as Sofia Vergara inModern Family:
I’m working daily to remember this tendency to patronize based on language abilities and to recall when talking to others to dumb down only the language and never the ideas. I must look back to my early days in Peace Corps when learning Khmer was a pipe dream and recall that I could achieve understanding with someone through silence. While I may miss English full and bountiful in its boldness and abstractness, words are not the end-all, be-all of communication. Where words may fail, communication is supplemented by action and mutual kindness. While not foregoing the need to continue my Khmer studies, I need to abandon my fetish with words (sorry, English teachers….).
Ultimately, it’s my responsibility when I feel misunderstood as I did not employ my full arsenal of communication. I must look back to my host mom who would daily work around words to help me understand. I must look back to my own words from three years ago and remember all of the complex conversations that I have had through ‘expressions, gestures, and basic vocabulary.’
I’m not being misunderstood. I am miscommunicating.
