Hello Everyone 🙂 UF & UTK Project in India has officially completed the 5th week and begun the 6th and final week! We have been working hard in the communities to spread hygiene and sanitation awareness through IEC material and community meeting. We have also spent the last week working on the preparation for the implementation of toilets in the schools in the communities. Below are the thoughts of the intern team!
Veronica
I’d like to dedicate this week’s blog post to something that is an essential element to communication: language. This week in the field has been a testament to how language barriers can cause disconnect between intent and impact. Of course I knew that coming to work here in India meant being a whole new country, with a completely different culture, and entirely foreign language. I was comforted by the fact that we would have a translator, but I did not take into account that I had never needed a translator before and much less have ever tried building relationships with others being completely dependent on a translator. There’s only so much I can communicate with hand gestures, smiles, frowns, emotions in my eyes, strange sounds with different tones, mini episodes of charades, and the 10 useful Hindi words I know. Our ability to directly communicate with locals in the villages is very limited. I feel that this has hindered our ability to realize our intended impact because it limited our ability to get to know people
personally, to know what their concerns and desires were, and to pick up on important cues from background conversations people have amongst themselves. Even though we did have a translator, there are five of us and one of her. She is limited to what she can hear and how much she can translate for the five of us. In terms of intent and impact, we will never know if the purpose and intent behind our words were translated and understood correctly by the local people. We’ll never know if there was some important information that we missed out on because of our language barrier. I’ll always wonder about it and how the project could have unfolded differently if we were able to understand beyond our barrier. I have come to realize that much is lost in translation including details, tones, emotion, and the ability to be personable. Basically, it’s like going to a friend’s family reunion who speaks a different language and has different customs and trying to understand everything and fully participate. You are going to miss things, no matter how hard you try. There is so much more you can take from an experience when you can understand and communicate in the native language. However, this does not lessen the value of this experience because it has made me realize how valuable language is and I have learned to appreciate the success of communicating the simplest of things with much effort. A funny example of this whole disconnect is when an elderly woman at the Baroji village, probably close to 90 years old, kept speaking to us in Hindi at the community meeting and could not comprehend the fact that we spoke a different language and were not able to understand a single thing she was saying to us. She was confused that she had to talk to another person if she wanted to speak to us. It clearly shows that language is such a core element of who we are but people are people and we find our ways to understand each other across race, religion, gender, and generations, and that’s a beautiful thing.
Natalia