Aerie InternationaL - Missoula County Public Schools

and Bosnia itself seemed the equivalent of Narnia or Neverland to me. In the
end, though, I decided that having a great experience to lord over my friends
was worth it and promptly tried to pack all of my stuffed animals into my
suitcase. By the time my father’s contract had extended to nine months,
my whole family began craving the taste of travel, and job searches became
more extensive, leading us to Bucharest, where my father worked with a
nonprofit judicial reform organization, to the Netherlands, where he worked
for the War Crimes Tribunal, and finally to Sudan, where he was with the
United Nations Mission. My mother was a stay-at-home mom of four, then
five, then six children. Of course, “stay-at-home” is not at all descriptive of
her life, or ours, during these years.
AI: How did you learn to speak the Bosnian language and languages like Arabic when
you did not even have a teacher that could speak your language?
ELP: Our family always hired local tutors who spoke English to teach us
privately in our home, but that wasn’t necessarily where we learned the
most. Bosnian was the language I learned best, maybe because I was so
young and my mind was still close to the stage where it soaked up language
and made it usable. A tutor came often to our house to teach my siblings
and me nursery rhymes and short Bosnian songs, but mostly I learned out
of necessity. I attended a Bosnian school with children too young to speak
English (my older siblings at least had friends who spoke their language)
and had to learn to understand my teacher, who knew little more. Day after
day, arriving at school, the other children would practice their English on
me. As we untied our tennis shoes to put on the slippers we wore inside
the classroom they would ask me over and over again my name, my age,
and my state of being. I would respond to their English questions with the
few Bosnian words I knew and then the next child would arrive and I’d tell
them again my name. There was one memorable moment when the class
bully tried to blame one of her pranks on me. Incapable of responding to
this accusation in a language my teacher understood, I repeated again and
again “ne, ne, ne.” I think it was at that point that I decided I would become
expert at the Bosnian language. A few weeks later, I realized that I knew the
word for “sun,” without ever consciously learning it.
Learning Arabic was a very different experience. I was much older, and
I didn’t understand the Arabic alphabet and the sounds that accompanied
each letter. My family bought a computer program designed to teach Arabic.
I painstakingly memorized the name, sound, and shape of each letter, which
I promptly forgot when I moved on to the next. I learned short words
and phrases – how to say hello, how to introduce myself, and how to use
numbers. These last were the most important, as I’d use them when buying
produce from the outdoor food stalls that swarmed with flies. I learned that
the most important thing in speaking Arabic was knowing their slang and
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