Conversation

English Conversation is the hardest. I can handle comprehending how mountains formed, analyzing a short story or debating Buddhism but speaking about my own life is the toughest. Back in East Greenwich, half way around the world, I learned how to think, to process, to explain but this is completely different. I sit surrounded by a couple SECMOLpas, all their faces looking earnestly at me. I prepare myself to be honest and clear but each time I worry I will make a mistake.

I am learning the best responses to the easy questions like “I am from the village of East Greenwich.” The word ‘town’ is a foreign idea here and I have abandoned it in the hope that maybe I will seem less foreign too. I try to adapt and leave behind the world I know in America but it isn’t always easy.

Some of the questions like “how do you get water” leave me struggling. I feel so awkward, so strange when I explain that there are metal pipes under the roads that come to my house and then the water comes out of the faucet. And then I scramble to explain that a faucet is “sort of like a machine, sort of like the head of the pump in your village.” A few students understand but the majority look at me like I am an alien and I actually feel weird and confused about the technology we have in America.

By far the hardest questions are the ones directly about my identity. I have been asked about my aim in life, my career and my religion. I attempt to be honest but at the same time I feel pressure to fulfill some hidden expectations. Occasionally I receive smiles when my audience approves of my answer like “being happy” or a “doctor” but my answers only come after several seconds of mulling over the most accurate way to describe something that is so fickle in my mind. I receive the blankest stares when I try to answer the religion question. Wanting so desperately to be honest I normally reply with an “I don’t really know what I believe in yet.” I tack on the “yet” as if to prove that I am trying to find something that I believe in but it is more of a promise to myself then anything else. Rarely satisfied with that answered I have been questioned with a “Well, why?” I have not found an answer to that question either, not one that fulfills my own expectations or satisfies their perplexity.

Often I leave English Conversation questioning my relationship to the world around me. Today it dawned on me, while explaining refrigerators and icemakers, that our American world is so out of touch. While we use lights, cars, plastic bags or heat we are greatly impacting the rest of the real world that survives without any of these materialistic goods. John Mingle, one of our guest speakers, talked in depth about water shortages in Ladakh. One village, which was established over 1,000 years ago, has been forced to move to another site because water has not been able to provide crops. Maybe it is too complex an idea for anyone to fully grasp but I hope that when I return home I will think twice before turning on an extra light or using the water at full force.