Sprechen Sie Deutsch?

I will never forget the time Caylah pointed excitedly at the smooth purple fruit in the box at the grocery store and said, “Look, Mom, it’s a Zwetschgen!  I don’t know the English word for it, but we learned about it in Deutsch class!”  Or the time I was on the phone with my mom and she asked what flavor of “Kool-Aid” the kids were drinking.  The word that came out of my mouth was Himbeere; it was only a few hours later and long after I was off the phone that the word raspberry even entered my mind.

German language is a part of our everyday life.  I find the longer we live here that I think certain things in German more often than English.  One of these is my grocery list.  Obviously, everything at the store is labeled in German, and we look for it in German so it just sticks in my head in German.  The other situation is ordering food at a restaurant.  In fact, we often ask for the German menu because we don’t understand what the English menu is offering for choices.  Fried pork steak and Wienerschnitzel are just not the same things.  We have a few conversations we throw around at home and sometimes we will have simple dialogues in the language.  Bethany corrects us when we make a mistake in pronunciation or word usage.

The three kids have a much better knowledge of German and Joe has his high school classes to fall back on so I am usually the least well-spoken of the group.  I also find that if I don’t know the word in German, I can often throw in a French vocabulary word that comes from the depth of my high school memory and confuse everyone.  The kids have classes in German at school from 3 to 5 hours a week, and although we are not immersed in the language, it is part of our daily experience.

So why am I giving all this information about the German language?  Because we will speak German when we are in the States.  It is a part of us and we can’t remove it.  We may not even realize we are doing it, we may not be able to remember the English word or there may not be an English word equivalent.   We will not do it to make you feel stupid or inadequate or as a way of “bragging” about our “infinite” knowledge.  It is a part of our everyday existence.  Among all of the people we interact with each day on a regular basis, it is very normal to throw German words and phrases around.

We do understand that this habit might get annoying after a while and you may feel uncomfortable around us.  It is always acceptable to ask us politely to not speak German around you and we will do our best to comply with your wishes.  Please also show us a bit of grace and understanding because it is never our desire to alienate anyone but we have been changed by the culture in which we live.

Now if you want to hear some real language bragging, you can ask the girls to sing “Jesus Loves Me” in Korean or ask how many languages in which they can greet one another.  They could probably sing songs in several different African dialects, too.  At this point, you are welcome to roll your eyes and ask them to move along.

Worldview

We went to a mall in the Dallas area the last time we were in the States.  It was filled with people and most of them were much darker skinned than we were. At one point we had stopped to people watch and one of the girls pulled my ear very close to her mouth.  “Mom, “she said, “ why are there so many Africans in Dallas?”

Now if any of you had heard this conversation, you might have gotten a little tense.  Or maybe you would’ve gotten on your soap box about racism or inequality or thinking you are better than someone else.  But my daughter has a different worldview about people that have dark skin than someone born and raised in West Texas.  She has true relationships with people born in Africa.  Every student that is in her class with dark skin comes from an African nation: Zimbabwe, Angola, Ethiopia, Namibia and Nigeria.  So she just naturally assumes that all people that have dark skin are from Africa.  This is her worldview.

My daughter has deep friendships with these children.  She enjoys their time together, goes to their birthday parties, plays soccer with them and cries when they leave.  She knows about their home cultures and how they adapt to Austrian culture; she shares their joy when they see snow for the first time or when they go ice skating.  She can find their country on a map and knows the flag that represents their country.  But more than anything, she knows them as people.

So her comment in Dallas was not spurred by racism, but by surprise at seeing so many people with whom she thought she could identify.  She was naturally very disappointed when I told her that all these dark skinned people were probably Americans whose ancestors had been brought from Africa centuries before.  With eyes wide she said, “When there was slavery?” And at my nod, she replied, “Slavery is bad.  I’m so glad Africans aren’t slaves anymore.”  My daughter says that with more heart felt conviction than most Americans because of her real relationship with African families.

Third Culture Kids like my children have very different worldviews.  They are formed from their birth country added to the country in which they live and, in our case, flavored by the many cultures we come into contact with through our international community. Over the next few blogs, I want to share some of those differences with our friends and family.  Maybe it will help our kids be better understood should we get to come back to the States this summer.  They want more than anything to be loved and accepted by those they love and maybe a little help understanding them will make that easier.