Bringing the outsider in...

If you're a teacher, lecturer or a corporate trainer who ever has a foreign learner in your class, the following are some tips for you, straight from the horse's mouth.

1. Don't let your first remark to the person be about their accent. To your own ears, you don't have an accent... but you do. They are no different. Reminding them that they do simply serves to put you on one side of an invisible border and them on the other. Americans are particularly prone to this, in my experience. They mean well, but "You have such a cute li'l accent!" is patronising to say the least!
   
2. Don't let your first remark to them be to ask where they're from. They might live two doors down from you! As with the accent issue (and closely related), a conversation about where they grew up may follow naturally at some point. I once knew a guy grew up in a children's home in South Africa, where there were workers from a range of countries. Added to this, he had been an avid radio ham since boyhood. His accent was a glorious hotchpotch of begged, borrowed and stolen elements that defied definition, but he had never been outside of South Africa.
3. Watch out for 'we' and 'you' distinctions, which is just 'us and them' made far more personal. "In Australia, we..." simply implies, "Whereas in your country, you...' My mother-in-law has a way of doing this whether she is in South Africa, Sweden or the US. She adopts a 'we do things like this and this' manner of speaking that immediately places the person being spoken to in a box labelled 'outsider'. It was annoying enough when she did it to me on my first visit to Sweden (her homeland) and then to the States (where she lives several months of the year with a daughter), but when she started doing it during our return visits 'home' to Cape Town (where she spends the rest of her time), it just became too much!
   
4. If you are debating a point, don't try to trump them purely on the grounds that you're a native to the region/culture. I once comprehensively and deservedly lost an argument about English grammar to a German-speaking Austrian. I conversely won an argument about the tenets of Judaism with a Jewish friend (fortunately we remained friends). When something has 'just always been like that' for you, you may find that you know less about it than someone who has come to it from the outside with a fresh pair of eyes.
5. Don't frame all your requests for input from that person in the context of their differing heritage, so it's not always a case of "How does this work in Sweden, Sofie?" Make sure to seek their perspective based on their job description, or the fact that they have teenaged kids, or that they are colour blind, or whatever.

Of course, this really only applies if there are just one or two 'outsiders' in the group. If the whole group comprises a wide range of nationalities and cultures, all this goes out of the window.

On accents

I was listening to a radio programme today about a BBC project called Voices. In it, they touched on the fact that some of the subjects in the project chose to leave behind their regional accents when they went to university, saying that in order to be perceived as educated, they needed to dissociate themselves from that pattern of speech.

On a previous project, I worked with audio clips from people in what is known as the Black Country. The accents and dialects of this area tend to be treated with scorn, and there was concern as to whether the clips would be suitable because of the accents of the speakers.

During my short stint as a drama teacher, I was faced with a dilemma. It was during the days of apartheid and I was the first white teacher at what was primarily an Indian (as in Asian Indian) dance and drama school. Some of the parents were resentful of my presence. Others would try to wangle it so that their children came to my classes. Then they would take me to one side and ask me to teach their children to speak without an Indian accent and, in so doing, open up a whole vista of new opportunities for them.

Elocution lessons were a thing of the past by then. My own drama school had long since dropped them from the curriculum. While we were taught to adopt other accents for roles which required them, we were not taught to lose our own accents in everyday life. These were considered integral to who we were. I supported this view.

But how (at the age of 19) do you say no to a parent who is paying a fair amount of money to send their child to you for drama lessons? One parent asked me to rid their child of a stutter. This was outside of my remit, but no more so than overriding the culturual influences of a lifetime, albeit a short one. (Side note: while I did not rid him of his stutter in daily life, we found ways for him to lose it on stage... but that is another story)

I have lived int he UK for 10 years. I am still unmistakably South African from the moment I open my mouth. Ron Lubensky has been in Australia twice as long, and yet his accent identifies him as Canadian... to those with a fine enough ear not to mistake it for American.

I love the fact that, during the after-service tea on a Sunday, I can hear a different accent every few paces (although, to be honest all our children sound pretty much the same). It represents such a rich diversity of cultures, perspectives and backgrounds. It saddens me that people feel pressured to lose their accents to get ahead, or to be perceived with greater respect.

pic of the day - every tribe and tongue and nation

We attend a church with a very culturally diverse congregation. This is the first thing that people see as they enter.

The way people think

Just lately, I have been given practical examples of the different way in which people think and approach a project.

I have been up to my eyeballs in recipes. I am compiling a recipe book to capture a sampling of the wide-ranging cultural diversity of our church congregation: Nigerians, Koreans, Ghanaians, West Indians, Finns, Swedes, South Africans, Zimbabweans, Poles, Welsh... and of course, the occasional English person ;o).

The finished book is to be sold in aid of a scheme which provides food parcels to struggling families in our area. Right now, there are more families in that category than usual, and it looks set to get worse. Of course, I'm busting a gut to get the thing done in time to be used as Christmas gifts.

The people of the church were asked to send/give me their favourite recipes, concentrating on nutritious meals-on-a-budget rather than the endless range of sweet treats that usually result from these sorts of projects.

It has been an interesting exercise:

• Some people's idea of a recipe does not start with a list of ingredients - these are revealed as one reads through the instructions; others start with a detailed list of ingredients, including the quantity of water
  
• Some use rather imprecise terms like 'some butternut', 'a medium oven' or 'about a handful of pearl barley' - others are precise to the last detail: '950ml water', '375°F/180°C' or '165g frozen mixed vegetables'
  
• Some indicate how many people a recipe will serve, others do not
  
• Some use metric quantities, others use imperial, still others use cups and spoons
• Interestingly, one Chinese woman uses colours for reference, rather than time - 'cook until mixture is purple then add stock to turn mixture red'
  

Since the book is intended to celebrate our diverse cultures, I have tried to be true to the way the recipes were given to me, without making it impossible for a less-than-confident cook - who is already out of his/her comfort zone in attempting a recipe from Japan, say - to produce something edible at the end of the experiment.

Since the contributor's name appears with each recipe, I have tried to accommodate that person's character and individuality as far as possible. This put me in a bit of a pickle when it came to spelling and grammar errors. Many of the people in our church don't have English as a first language. This has resulted in the most endearing turns of phrase. I decided pretty quickly that I would have to correct the spelling, but I ummed and ah-ed over the grammar. In the end I did correct it, since I recognise that there may be cause for embarrassment and/or ridicule (not to mention misunderstanding), but it was with a heavy heart.

I did, however, opt to leave in little editorial things like "Cheese soup - yes, really!" and "this is optional!!!!" beside an instruction to add an onion in a recipe from someone who abhors the things. This abhorrence is referenced elsewhere in the book, where one person included the instruction that "L***** may substitute a leek".

I'm not earning a penny from this exercise and it has been hard work, but it has been an absolute romp... and I have learnt so much along the way - about cooking, about people.

Off-white

I have always had a bit of an issue with the "ethnic diversity" forms that one has to fill in so often these days. I struggle with the lack of parity in the terms used: a mix of countries, colours and continents. I mean, we might be black, white, yellow, red, brown or we might be African, American, Asian, etc. or we might be mongoloid, caucasian, negroid... but you can't cherry pick some terms from each group and chuck them together into the pot!

For myself, I don't see why this information is needed (apart - possibly - from a census, but even then I'm not always convinced). I'm in favour of people being taken on merit, which is blind to race, gender, etc.

Nevertheless, we are required to fill these forms in all over the place "for administrative purposes" when we apply for jobs, when we enrol our children at schools, when we sign up at a new medical practice.

I have long maintained that it is pretty close to impossible for many of us to state with any certainty what our ethnicity is. For example, there was a rumour doing the rounds many years ago that all Afrikaners had about 7% "black blood". You can imagine that this rumour was energetically quashed by the government of the day, many of whom were fans of the preposterous publications that claimed to prove that black people were not strictly human!

Well, last night I discovered that the originator (stamvader) of my family name in South Africa (my maiden name - Snyman - is a purely South African derivation) was the son of a Bengale slave. Okay, we are talking about the mid 17th century, here. I haven't got as far as the more recent history, but I suspect she is unlikely to have been the only one, since it was apparently common practice for landowners to live with slave women and later emancipate and marry them in order to legitimise their offspring - particularly the sons.

So it seems I am "not quite white". Sadly, none of the forms I have ever seen has a box that I can tick on the grounds of my new-found ethnicity.

And of course, this changes absolutely nothing. I'm still the same person I was yesterday morning before this piece of news came to light... except perhaps for the fact that I'm a little more smug today. I'd like to get hold of all those neo nazi white supremacists who were scandalised by my assertions that none of us could claim racial purity and say "Ek het jou gesê!" ("Told you so!").

Sadly, I think the only result would be that they would begin to treat me as pariah, too.