Frustration

It's been over a week since I arrived here. So much has happened and so many thoughts that I want to write about have crossed my mind. I think I'll end up writing about them in somewhat random order so they won't be published chronologically.

I'll start with the feeling that was most dominant this Monday morning. Frustration. The frustration of understanding maybe 10 % of what people are discussing around you. The annoyance of needing at least 2 seconds (a moment feeling much longer) to start a sentence when asked a question or even worse asked to speak my mind about a topic I wasn't even aware of. In these two seconds there's usually a loud laughter from the audience. I understand it's not ill-intentioned but still it doesn't help the situation. Also I'm the kind of person who isn't very comfortable speaking even in Finnish in a large group of people who I don't know well or at all.

I need to try and find a Portuguese course and practice more on my own as well. I feel like I might have had more fun in a country where English is more commonly spoken but I believe this will be a great learning experience and having fun wasn't the main idea after all. Still I feel like knowing my lack of language skills the people could make more of an effort trying to help me understand. I feel a bit left out because the other volunteer here at the moment is Portuguese and they clearly prefer going to talk to her. I don't know maybe I should bring this up but that also feels like a really difficult task with these skills and I really don't want to be misunderstood on a topic like this.

It was really nice and therapeutic to have a night (or evening) out with the only guy from the office who speaks English and talk about all those things that had been going through my head, things that were unclear and things I had been wondering. I'll write more about these later. We also had a lot of interesting discussions about which I also write some other time.

Anyways, I'm updating this now the next day on Tuesday. It's funny how a long sleep and good music can do wonders. I think I had yesterday the first of those perhaps inevitable moments of doubt when I asked myself why did I come here. It didn't take very long but I believe it has mostly if not completely to do with the language barrier. I'm sure these moments will get rarer in the long run. Experiences of Minna in whose place I'm currently staying have been encouraging since she herself went to Angola not knowing any Portuguese and now she's lived in Mozambique for 13 years and is extremely fluent in the language.

Here's another one that was played several times in the wedding I attended last weekend.