Out of the mouths of babes—and sweet young things.

While my participants worked largely in Aceh Utara, my trainings, generally speaking, took place in Medan. In many cases they were consecutive, which meant that I would be staying in the same hotel for several weeks at a time. This left me with weekends to fill as well as occasionally a week between programs. So I began frequenting the little travel shop on the first floor for ideas about seeing what Sumatra had to offer. 

Yusnita spoke perfect English. She was still in university and working at the agency. There were indeed things to do, tours to the country and wanderings around Lake Toba. Nita, as she liked to be called, and I struck up a liking for each other, and I got the idea to ask her to teach me Indonesian. So, a couple times a week I would take her to a nice restaurant and try to absorb Bahasa words and phrases with my chili crab. It was a simple language. Words easy to pronounce though hard to remember, very few grammatical traps, a touch of Dutch thrown in.

My linguistic courage grew, and I arrived at the restaurant one evening with a farewell speech that I had written for the celebratory dinner, which would end the weeklong training program.  She looked it over, made three or four corrections on the page and handed it back to me. “It’s fine,” she said, “just a couple things that we would say differently.” I was flabbergasted expecting to have to reconstruct from scratch.

I am uncomfortable with the term “sweet young thing,” but if it ever applied to anyone, it applied to Nita. Imagine my surprise when, as we were walking home from the restaurant and getting ready to cross the street to return to the hotel, a car careened from the left, right in front of us causing much honking, to say nothing of fright. “Did you see what that f----er just did?!” Nita blurted out, catching me totally by surprise.

Later I gently asked her how she learned her English so well and how she happened to know this term (and came to apply it at an appropriate moment, I might have added, but didn’t). The VCR was the culprit. Videotapes of US movies. She devoured what she could get her hands on, which meant her command of street talk far exceeded the content of school vocabulary drills.