17/11/2008 - We all smile in the same language!
Today is Monday, the second full day of the International Youth Camp here in Dresden, a day that has been packed with tourist activities for the participants. Much of our time has been spent bonding with our new friends and working up our courage to break down the language barriers that separate us—for the afternoon scavenger hunt throughout the city of Dresden, my assigned group of just five people spoke English, Spanish, Turkish, Arabic, and German.
Earlier this morning, we visited the Dresdner Sport Gymnasium, one of Germany’s most well-equipped schools. After a tour, we split up to attend classes. Some of us, especially those who spoke French as their mother tongue, went to provide hands-on experience with their languages to German students; others tried to attend lectures in history, geography, and science in German. Although I myself only speak the very basic conversational German, my friend Marwan—from the United Arab Emirates—and I tried to follow a lecture in genetics completely in German. To our surprise, we were able to follow everything the teacher covered in the class by watching the chalk board and occasionally asking our German-speaking friends for help understanding what was going on. Science is a language we can all understand, apparently!
Getting to know our fellow chess players from different countries has been both challenging and rewarding. Although most of us have a fairly good command of English, we still must be creative to express ourselves; we all have different ideas, cultures, and experiences, some of which are hard to translate into each other’s languages. Later in the day, we split into groups of five and visited the major sites around Dresden. We had to solve puzzles and consult maps to find out how to get from one part of the city to another, and we had to work as a team to tackle challenges along the way, too.
One of our challenges was to write a song. In my group, we wound up composing one that was a mix of both German and English—and we set to work finding German and English word pairs that rhymed with each other, such as “lesson” and “vergessen”. Another of our challenges was to keep one team member in the air for twenty minutes. Luckily, one of our team members was small enough to carry for that long—it was difficult to explain to her at first what we needed to do, but once she was in the air, we were all laughing and having the time of our lives. After all, as the old saying goes, we all smile in the same language.
Jonathan Hilton (USA)
