Kan du prata svenska ? - Ariane

Before this experience, I did not really experience allophony in my daily life. I had travelled abroad and even lived one year and a half in Italy. However, I spoke some Italian and the language is very close to my mother tongue, which was a very prudent choice of mine. This time I am landing in a country where the language is totally foreign to me. Of course, we share an alphabet and some words look familiar sometimes ( English and French influences can be heard) but the pronunciation is from another galaxy. I am hearing a flow without understanding where the words start and finish. I did not measure the difficulty it would bring. I cannot even imagine the experience of someone arriving in a country where English is not a commonly known language. In Sweden, I do have the privilege to be able to communicate, ask questions and get answers, sometimes briefly but answers still. However, communication goes beyond just giving information between two persons, it is about bonding, laughing, understanding the subtlety of what is going on in a room. Is knowing someone's personality possible when you hear a second and distanced version of themselves?

Language has had a central part in my life, as I grew up reading, conversing and writing so much.You could say I am some kind of a professional babbler and yapper. I even picked a literature and linguistic major for my first bachelor. Pride and time has been taken around my words and I have been challenged by quieter people. Silence scares me. Not knowing what someone might think about me. I would rather have the words thrown quickly and sharply at my face like paper planes. Not knowing people worries me. My guesses are assuming the worst. Working with youth has been challenging in this aspect : reluctance, defiance, shyness, or maybe just not wanting to put in the effort of investing time in a person that will leave in the next year. It made me wonder sometimes about the interest of me being here. Am I being more a burden than a help ? When I sit in a room and the conversation is flowing, I have to sometimes interrupt clumsily, thirsty for integration, wanting to feel like I belong in the room. When I hear my colleagues ask the group to please speak in English, once, twice, three times for it to last fifteen minutes, I feel like a disturbance, a hair on the soup. Making the space of the youth center more uncomfortable for youth, for the workers. Being the stranger in the room. Facing the dilemma : should I force myself in, initiate again and again, at the risk of disturbing to find my place but maybe develop relations with youth that might become reciprocally beneficial for us OR remaining silent, a discreet adult presence for the silent tasks, a helping hand when only asked.

I believe the answer might be in between (very easy exit and common choice I know). I tend to take the first option more naturally but I am learning to be more flexible and accepting a less active role in conversations. Listening more, decentralizing myself, learning to unlearn what I was taught explicitly or implicitly, my deeply engraved beliefs : you need to prove your worth and wit through talking, if you do not talk it is because you are not interesting enough to have something to say, you need to have the last word, a conversation is a debate that you need to win, find the funny word even at the expense of the other party, speaking too kindly is necessarily hypocritical, prove your worth every second of being in a room… Funnily enough, bonding with the smaller kids that speak less English is easier, through other things than speaking. Learning to bond without speaking. Ultimately, this position is also accepting to let go partially of being in control. For an independent person, having to rely so much on others can feel very vulnerable. You cannot bond or independently exist in your relations with youth without having to ask for mediation, translation, help. There is no need to deny the frustration it produces, and sometimes the feeling that you are not on an equal foot with the rest of the team. They have to take care of you. You feel assisted but need to also accept that part. Moments to practice that silent attitude might be interpreted as you being down and you might have to justify it too though. So you cannot be too quiet too. Staying alert. Observed by youth that will tell you about all the previous volunteers that they did not like or did not try hard enough in their eyes.You feel some sense of kinship with them, empathy. Tough and hard judgement reaches your ears and you will wonder if they will talk like that about you to the next to come.

Still, being able to observe theories that you have studied about intercultural communication can be pretty cool. For example, I grow more and more conscious about my interruption habit that is not so rude in my upbringing. Here, more space is given to each round of speaking. My very cliche French love for debate and passionate contradiction can be seen as more antagonizing and rude.The sense of humor is different. Words of affirmation are more present here and I try to navigate between being true to myself and adapting to my new environment. Speaking about speech, it was a challenging exercise to write about myself. When I speak I do not have time to think so much about what just came out almost faster than my thoughts out of my mouth. Writing, forces me to see the incoherent, uninterrupted flow of my words, trying to make a sense out of them. Caring about words, the way you can formulate brings the frustration of feeling unarticulated even in a language you are supposed to know well now. English is not my mother tongue but here it is seen as a gift made to me when someone makes the effort to speak it… And we all end up adding our own variation to this very mixed globbish lacking shape and precision. In conclusion, I would say that one needs to be very patient if they want to participate in that kind of experience and be willing to actively do the work to be integrated. Especially working with youth, take into consideration how communication could affect you and what tricks you might need. Eventually, you will get used to it and I do believe I am learning from it. Not just the practical skill of a new language but all the interactions and situations that occur while not speaking the main language of the group. I do think that having been in a privileged position in that point of view for most of my life, I can lack the emotional understanding of this position. I am not saying that I am completely getting it now, as each experience is individual and special, and additionally I put myself actively and knowledgeably there. It was my own choice, and I still benefit from a lot of social relations. Still, my perspectives and understandings seem to have broadened and my empathy grown. Cultivate your empathy. Challenge yourself. Difficulty is not negative. Peace :)

Tips and tricks

Kan du prata svenska ?

They asked

And I could not.

I am finding back those words I wrote some months ago as I was feeling down. I first wrote them with the intention of publishing them on the blog but I ended up finding it too intimate or pessimistic which was not my initial intent and did not send it. As there was already a situation around speaking at the youth center. Seeing them now after a month of Swedish classes gives me hope, but I also thought those reflections could interest anyone wanting to apply to that kind of project or this one specifically or future volunteers here. You are not alone, give it some time. Sometimes it can suck. I think I am progressing ( if I am not delulu).