Hearing and listening

I love traveling abroad for the fact that everything is new.  From ordering in coffee shops to music on the radio to casual greetings between neighbors, to public transportation.  

New.

I hate traveling abroad for the exact same reason.  

The safety of hearing the familiarity of my native language, favorite songs, and voices of  loved ones comforts me in a way that I never remember until I'm standing on foreign soil and lacking all that is intimate in my daily life.

Israel is the opposite of familiar for me.    

I don't know the arabic or hebrew alphabet.

I don't speak either language.

I don't understand either language.

Both cultures are foreign to me.

I feel a bit like an alien.  Like all that I've know about relating to others for the past 30 years is irrelevant at any given moment.  Like all social skills acquired until this moment are currency that no one uses in this new land.

It's a completely foreign experience in every sense of the word.

I was pondering this exact aspect of my journey this morning.  I was alone in the hut and had some time to sit, to read, to clean, to think.  In the middle of the my solitude, a regular guest came to visit.

Yasser.

Yasser spends more time in this hut than all of the rest of us.  He's literally here for the entirety of his day.  

And while Yasser is unique for a thousand reasons, he is most unique because of his inability to hear properly.  A kidney disease has altered his hearing to the point that you have to scream your name in his ear, over and over again, until he can get enough of the sound to call you something relatively close to what your parents put on your birth certificate.  

I'm "Kelpy" and I think that's impressive.  You should take note and be impressed, too.  I introduced him to Helga and she's now "Welter" for the rest of her time here.  

So I'm sitting with this guy who speaks no English, no Hebrew, speaks a broken variation of arabic, doesn't read, and doesn't write.  It's just the two of us.  We're sitting together while I make coffee, read, check paint colors, and carry on in daily life.

All the while, we're actively communicating.  And I realize, in that very moment, that I know Yasser as well as I know any other person on this compound, even though we have zero common ground in which to convey the thoughts in our heads.  

It astonished me.

We have complete conversations about how he put a nail through his foot as a small child, how he would prefer to sit in the shade and not in the sun, how the coffee made him more energetic, how he wants to wash his baseball hat so it would smell good again, how he likes to draw, and how he doesn't like spicy food.

These are full conversations that look more like a game of charades than a casual exchange between friends.  These interactions require full body involvement, not passive/half-assed/pretend engagement.  

Honestly, it's taxing at moments.  Sometimes I just want to be able to say that I need space, that I'm not in the mood to talk, or that I'm tired.  But neither of us have that option.  So it always has to be intense, if it is going to happen at all.

It does happen, despite the effort required.  It does happen.

Yasser has no other alternative.  He has something to say so he finds a way to say it.  The language barrier doesn't stop him, because he has a language barrier with everyone.  

I sat next to him for several hours this morning and thought about how I know him better than everyone else here, how we don't have a single word to exchange in a column language, and how he makes me slow down in everything I do.

It was a beautiful moment.  It gave me hope for every person on this planet.  It gave me reason to believe that we can find a way to connect to other people, regardless of how different we are, if we can work to make them see as we see while we work to see as they do.

Yasser has filled me with a kind of hope that I'm not sure I ever had before.  

I hope I can find a way to tell him that.