Just having a talk with an old friend
After several failed tries at finding someone on SecondLife to have even a friendly conversation with me, I was beginning to become frustrated and was teetering on abandoning all hope at ever being able to to speak with an Arabic SecondLife user. Then today, my Oman friends from our visiting ESL class, who’s increasingly hard to remember names are escaping me at the present moment, helped me finally grab somebody’s attention. You would expect a time difference in two such geologically polar locations as Lexington and the Middle East and indeed it is, but the real deciding factor was simply the language barrier. With a simple greeting they taught me, “aslam alaikum”, I was able to finally start having conversations with people. The first one, was brief, as I could tell the other user was clearly not mature enough to have a conversation with. The second one, pictured below, was however quite comforting as I was finally able to get some where with someone on SecondLife. We exchanged simple greetings and I asked him if he would be open to talking with me, and he agreed. He, apparently, understood how to read and type in English and Arabic in the characters we use and theirs. So did my ESL partners, and it put it in perspective for me just how common it is for non-Americans to be bilingual. What a different place this would be if the majority of students on campus could fluently speak multiple languages. I would go so far as to say that the US will never be as cosmopolitan as it could be if we never put an emphasis on being multilingual. I believe that deficiency causes us to not be able to understand other cultures and the concepts relevant to their lives as much as we could.
Between Shadow and Light 