48 hours

In 48 hours, I am being spoken to in eight different languages.

I left a remote town on the China Burma border (Burmese and Jingpo) yesterday after lunch to travel five hours by car to Mangshi (pronounced through clenched teeth and with the 'shi' cut off by a constricted throat) (also known as Luxi, and Dehong). I spent the night , and left today at noon on a flight for Kunming (Mandarin Chinese), where I connected to Bangkok (Thai). I 'entered' Thailand for a full fifteen minutes to receive a handoff of supplies from a coworker (English), and was immediately headed back through the long list of checkins/immigration/security checks to catch a flight to Calcutta (Hindi, Bengali), where I'll be for about 9 hours (just enough to go to the airport hotel and sleep a little), before catching my next flight to Aizawl airport (Mizo), which is not actually in Aizawl. It's elevation, and the unpredictable mountain weather often lead to delays and cancelations, last time Air India put me up for the night in one of Calcutta's finest 5 star hotels due to several back to back cancelations.

(It was, truly, the nicest hotel I have ever stayed in. Of all the passengers, only about 10 of us went there, the rest were sent to another hotel. They pulled out the suit wearing businessmen, and me, the lone foreigner, from the cue for the vouchers to the other hotel, and sent us to 'Peerless Inn' instead. Peerless perhaps, but Inn a far too humble word for this gargantuan colonial remnant. If it weren't for the tight schedule awaiting me in Aizawl I almost wouldn't mind another delay...).

The final leg, the drive to Aizawl, along a winding road clinging to the sides of steep slopes. Road side houses whose back side rest on legs reaching far down the mountain. Occasional waterfalls that wash over the road, and sink holes that try to reclaim it. To the city on a hill, sprawling vertically as much as horizontally, more stairs than streets, the odd mountain metropolis that is Aizawl, heart of Mizoram.

The training I will conduct in (English) which will be translated to (Burmese), my nascent language skills still depressingly distant from an actual ability to communicate anything meaningful, situated in a city of (Mizo) speakers. (The training will utilize a common language of Burmese, but will be comprised of native speakers of Chin, Naga, Zomi, and Rakhine as well).

A notable portion of my life has been spent as a language outcast, relying heavily on others' polyglotic tendencies, and the international desire to speak English, to compensate for my own lingual deficits (combined with a willingness to humiliate myself through the prolific use of gesture, mime and illustration). (My depressing failure to progress in Burmese also highlighting my lack of discipline and will power, despite obvious benefit.)

My flight has just been called, so I must, alas, embark again. I part on the reflection that, although my periodic (though increasingly frequent) inability to communicate verbally has oft led to delay or frustration, it has never engendered major mishap; testimony to the power of the nonverbal, and the willingness of (most) people to connect, with or without words.