Thoughts from Brussels

Two Germans, two Americans, a half-English, half-Canadian girl from France, and a half-Bulgarian half-Dutch girl from Germany get onto a bus in Brussels on their way to a restaurant. There they meet up with another three Americans as well as a mostly Dutch, somewhat American man. They eat Eritrean food for dinner, drink Belgian beer, eat French bread for breakfast and speak in a glorious mishmash of languages, including folks attempting to mix and compare Flemish with the German dialect of East Frisia, depending on who is sitting next to whom at what time (and how many beers have been drunk).  They are musicians, interpreters, students, and EU Commission employees – and they are all Unitarian Universalists, which is how they all happened to meet.

I have to say, it was a pretty cool weekend. I didn’t really expect that I would start going to a UU church again at my current age. I did grow up as part of a UU congregation but I started to feel rather anti-church (even anti-UU church) during my teen years and a bit after – so when I found myself on the train and going to a service of my own volition in January 2015, I was pretty surprised. But I’ve been thrilled with the community I’ve found there – it’s really quite something.

I could say a lot about how it feels to be going to this church or about UUism in general – and maybe I will in another entry – but this one I wanted to use to talk about something else that hit me while I was on that bus in Brussels.

I was standing next to Claudia who was talking to a very good friend of ours (the half-Bulgarian, half-Dutch girl from Germany). As Claudia is from East Frisia, an area of Germany that is quite close to the Dutch border, she grew up hearing a little bit of “ostfriesisch Platt”, or the East Frisian version of the Low German dialect. Now, you have to understand, East Frisians think that the Platt that is spoken in the town 10 kilometers away is not real Platt, so this is a dialect that can be spoken many ways! One of the fun about East Frisia is its proximity to the border – because that means that there’s a little melding of languages (also, the language was there before the border, after all!). So, she and our friend were trading phrases back and forth in Dutch and Platt, figuring out which ones were similar and which ones weren’t, which words existed in both languages with the same meaning or in both languages with quite different meanings. I was listening and chuckling, but I can’t understand very much Dutch at all and very little Platt (I have a decent passive understanding of phrases like 'Does anyone want another cup of tea?' and 'Oh, what a shame, it’s raining again!' since those are the things I hear around the tea table at birthday parties in Claudia’s hometown – but that’s about the extent of it!).

So, these two were talking and everywhere around me on the bus, there were other languages I couldn’t understand. There were a few Italian men chatting a few steps away, teenagers having conversations in Dutch and Flemish, and the bus announcing its stops French announcements. I have a teensy bit of French in my repertoire (haha) but only as much as three college semesters and virtually no time spent in a French-speaking place will get you. I am of course fluent in English and damn near fluent in German, but that didn’t really matter, surrounded by bilingual Flemish and French street signs. I felt pretty helpless.

I’m not saying ‘Poor me, I only know two languages’. I realize that the company I keep really over-represents bi-, tri- and even quadrilingual people. But that time on the bus nevertheless made me think about the powerlessness you feel when you worry that you might not be able to communicate, might not be understood in a strange place. And I thought about how harshly we judge people who do not speak our own language – even ones who speak it well grammatically, but have an accent that is hard to understand. Mangled pronunciation, searching for words, the inability to form sentences the way a native speaker would: What do we think when we hear such things? We assume, even if it’s only for an instant, that the speaker is stupid.

This is, of course, ridiculous. We know, I know, in every rational part of my brain that a person's foreign language skills have practically nothing to do with their intelligence.  I have also spent a good deal of time abroad and have met people from all kinds of places – and yet I do this, too. It is cruelly common, this reaction.

So, while feeling like I had one of my senses cut off in that bus in Brussels, I appreciated for a fraction of a second what it must feel like to constantly worry about your inability to communicate or about being judged prematurely by strangers because of it. In addition to that I had this experience in Brussels, a few kilometers from the European Commission, where all kinds of decisions are being made about the flood of refugees coming into Europe. I thought about all the upset and unrest in Germany in reaction to the influx of refugees and about this internal bias. A bias which is so very unfair, and which makes it easier to classify strangers as somehow profoundly 'other' and 'less than'.

I hope to be able to remind myself of that feeling I had on that bus in Brussels every time I feel myself falling prey to this kind of bias. We need to realize that we're all strangers most places we go, and that it is a privilege to be able to live in a place where we understand people and are understood.