coffee break

Words can’t come close to describing the beautiful and hilarious nature of my coffee break this afternoon. In the coffee room (with big south facing windows), I sat down with Ebba, who is: Oliver’s girlfriend, small, a dancer, and has Down syndrome. We smiled at each other, and she went back to eating her orange slices. Another woman came to the table, and I asked my go-to question: Hvað heitir þu? She responded that her name is Kamma. I realized that I don’t know whether she is a home person or not - with many folks here, it’s kind of unclear, which I like (because let’s be real, we’re all home people). Oliver joined us, and stroked his tiny girlfriend’s face more lovingly than is normally appropriate in public. But normal rules don’t apply here (hence my freedom to run around in a snowsuit and a cardboard mask). After a few minutes, Oliver asked me if I live in America. Delighted to have understood him, I answered yes! I do! He proceeded to continue speaking, taking my momentary comprehension as a green light. When he realized I was lost, he began soliciting translations from Karin (who was across the room), from Paulo (whose native language is Portuguese), and from Kamma (who speaks about as much English as I do Icelandic). What ensued was an enormously dysfunctional but completely joyful conversation in which very little information was actually conveyed. By the end of coffee break, I learned the following: that Oliver has grandparents in America, that said grandparents live in the place where Icelandic people live in America, that they once got stranded in a boat, that he has family in Stykkishólmur who have “complicated relations,” that he is related to Sesselja (founder of Sólheimar), and that we all think lighthouses are beautiful. But the information itself didn’t actually matter – we could have talked about anything. What was important was how hard we were all trying to communicate with and understand each other. That’s what made it such a good conversation. And I realized that this is true even of conversations I have in English – that most of the value is not in the content, but in the level of investment. You can have an unfulfilling conversation about something important, and you can have a great conversation about something insignificant – what matters is how present you are, how much you care, how much you give, how intently you listen. So as I learn how to communicate with people who speak a different language, I feel like I’m also learning how to communicate in my own language.

- Shelby