There was another elder I found annoying while I was on my mission. Well, plus the two yesterday, I could come up with three others pretty easily. As much as I admitted to being mean yesterday, I suspect I am not unique among sister missionaries.
This particular elder was in my Missionary Training Center class, and he was native Lao. He initially thought he would be able to coast, and then found the language harder than he was expecting. He was starting to try harder by the time we left the training center, but months later when we met up again I was amazed at the change. He not only seemed more mature (which you would hope for), but also smarter.
It made more sense because of things I had seen in the field.
He would have grown up like a lot of the children and teenagers I had gotten to know. Many of them were born in the States, and some in the camps. In their homes they spoke Lao, but then once they started school they spoke English there, and then it got to be in the homes that the parents would speak to their children in Lao and the children would reply in English.
The parents knew some English, and the kids knew some Lao, so it wasn't a complete disconnect. It wasn't ideal either. It is hard to have meaningful conversations when you are literally speaking different languages.
For a time we were helping in one classroom with a Lao girl whose teacher wanted to shore up her home language. Another one of the refugees we knew who had taught in Laos was working for the school district teaching Lao. At least some of the Lao students we knew were taking it. I thought that was good for family communications.
When I met this elder again, it struck me that there was an inner language barrier too. It's not just being able to communicate to others, but even for comprehending for ourselves, and knowing our own minds, having words for that is important. Building English knowledge on a Lao base left a lot of those kids with some language gaps. It didn't make it so they couldn't function, but it could be emotionally frustrating and it could be an obstacle to acquiring knowledge, at least for some things.
His mind worked better as he became fluent in his early language, and it made me look at things differently.
That's all very well for mission memories, but it doesn't appear to have a lot to do with my 2017 Native American Heritage Month reading. I just wanted to explain the base I was starting from.
As I took my online classes, that was how I understood the importance of language. We talked about native language preservation in the classes, and about residential schools forbidding the use of native languages. I understood it on one level, and then something happened to deepen and broaden in because of one of the books.
More on that tomorrow.
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