Dodging tiny senior citizens in large vehicles reversing out of their stalls at Puainako Town Center before work. Encountering hoodlums gathered along a dark unpaved road during field service. Being attacked by a jealous chihuahua after field service. All that was yesterday.
Climbing through a wire fence in the dark (we had permission) and hiking to and from a Bible Study's house through a field of trees aided by hand held lanterns in the rain while being charged at by large dogs. That was tonight.
My, my, I must say that this has been a dangerous week for yours truly.
None of this however, has been quite as unsettling as: THE KILLER AT WORK.
The boss has recently hired an unusually quiet woman who I am convinced will go postal one day very soon. She doesn't seem disturbed or sad or anything like that but she doesn't react to anything going on around her either. Even more unsettling is that not a single word has left her lips the entire 2 weeks she's been around. Frankly, it's beginning to freak me out. I think she said "hi" one morning, although it may have been a burp- I couldn't tell.
But I've begun to see that the problem with said employee, may simply be a language barrier, which is not readily detectable since she works so well. Three other employees speak her native tongue already, and being a language freak of sorts, you may be inclined to think I'd be jumping at the opportunity to learn a few words. Surprisingly, I'm not.
Which sadly shows that I am guilty of the very thing that upsets me about other people who refuse to learn a foreign language: I am simply not interested in this particular language or culture. Don't get me wrong...I don't dislike it. (I know some basic words and phrases which I use whenever I have the chance). But I'm not moved to study it either (perhaps because I gravitate to Latin-based languages like French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian or Catalan) and this isn't one of them. That would explain why I find the above languages to be relatively easy but can't get a feel for say, German, Chinese, Arabic or Hungarian. So maybe I'm not a language snob. It just proves I'm not as industrious with languages as most people think, and prefer to stick to what I know, n'est-ce pas?/ ¿verdad?/non è vero?/nu-i aşa?/não è?
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