Do you understand the words that are comin’ out of my mouth?!
Oh, that I could actually communicate the things I wanted to say! So often the people here tell me that I am “finished” with language. I really don’t know where they get that from! They tell me I know many things and that I am done learning. Yeah, okay? I often want to point out to them that I can’t have a single conversation where I am not asking them to repeat themselves a hundred times, not to mention that I pretty much stop at asking how they are and how their families are because that is about as far as I can adequately get in the language.
Well, I don’t think that my guards would say that I am “finished” with the language. We have two guards for the house that swap work weeks. So “Sam” works one week and lives here and then goes home for a week while “Henry” works one week and lives here. Don’t ask, that is just the way it was when I got here. So, just yesterday I had a flower pot that was left by the previous owners and it was full of weeds and grass. I couldn’t pull the weeds out so I asked one of the guards, Sam, to pull them up. Right after that I pointed to two little flower beds in the yard and asked him to pull up the grass in them or use a tool to hoe them. About an hour later he comes back with the flower pot full of new fresh dirt from behind the house and one plant from one of the other flower beds he was supposed to weed planted in the pot. Apparently, what he understood me to say was pull up a plant from one of those flower beds and put it in this pot. I really have no idea how he came up with the instructions he followed, but somewhere in there I have a feeling I was the one who was miscommunicating.
A couple of weeks ago, a friend brought me some sweet potato cuttings and I asked the other guard, Henry, to go plant them in the back. There was already a garden back behind the house, so I think I assumed that it was pretty obvious what I wanted done with them. I noticed that he went and set them inside his house, but I assumed that was because he was going to do it later. A week later I was in the garden with Sam and I asked him where those sweet potato plants were. He looked at me weird and said that Henry had taken them with him when he left. He said that Henry showed them to him and then took them to his house (a 3 ½ hour walk up the mountain from here). I just started laughing because I knew that Henry had not done it on purpose, but somewhere in there he must have gotten the impression that I was giving him the sweet potato plants. Guess I won’t be enjoying any sweet potato casseroles any time soon huh? Darn that language barrier!