Time differences and multilingual conversations

Okay so turns out on day three I typed up a potential blog post on word. Here goes. 

When I was younger my mother would always set the clock ahead by 5 minutes so we would make it school on time. It worked until one day we noticed that our watches and the living room clock never matched, and my mother’s excuse of “oh, yours is ten minutes behind” was getting old. Eventually we unraveled this mystery.

Here on Kuredu, we are one hour ahead of Male time (which is half an hour behind India). Well sometimes we tell our guest it’s so that our guests get a longer holiday. But you can work out the ‘factual’ reason. 1 week and 3 days into my internship I have learnt a lot of things. I have learnt things about people, about the professional environment, about solo travelling and the consequences, about myself, about the island and so many more things. I will try to share with you the different things I have discovered. Sometimes I am busy being here to update my travelogue, but I will try. You can see by the 1 week delay how thrilled I am to be here.

So the experience is special, for me this is the first time I have worked in an environment so diverse. My island host team has been from across the globe, literally. For each and everyone of them English is a foreign language. All my life I found myself able to connect with people because of English, but it isn’t so. It is experiences and feelings which all us of have, which sometimes cross paths and appear similar. That is all. Not language, not nationality, more basic things. It quite complicated and exciting to unravel means to communicate with all the people here.

First it’s just understanding them. All of them come from a culture of their own and have a language to call their own. Often I find myself in the middle of 4 different conversations in 4 different languages and it gives me so much joy to be present there.

And then there is the scenic beauty of the island.