fishing (VAL)

Matt & I are taking a Bangla script class every morning for 2 hours. I will post later about the struggle of walking into an advanced script class on my second day in a completely foreign country, and how it's shaping my perspective on learning/reading challenges and frustration in school and teaching my own students back in Harlem and educational philosophy blah blah blah . . . but for today, I have some lighter fare to share.

Our classmates are a Korean girl named Kyung-Ai whose husband is working 100+ hours a week to jump-start his garment business; an absolutely hilarious Tamil Sri Lankan refugee named Alegs who is working on his PhD in Philosophy; and two Burmese refugees whose names I cannot even attempt to pronounce or spell and who shall therefore be known as Smiley and Serious for the purpose of this story.

To start each class, our Teacher asks us basic questions, like "how are you?" or "where do you live?" or "what did you do yesterday?" Today he asked Smiley the third query and Smiley began a tale, in Bangla, of what I'm guessing was a fishing adventure. The teacher then flipped the conversation to English and asked Smiley how people fish in Myanmar. Matt was absent due to work so he missed this and can't help me recreate the exchange, but here is my best attempt to paraphrase the conversation that followed:

TEACHER: How do you catch a fish in Myanmar?
SMILEY: With my hands.
TEACHER: That is only possible in shallow water. What about in rainy season?
SMILEY (with lots of gesturing): Well, then we put on water glasses and go swimming into the water and dive down and take an arrow, an aluminum arrow, and shoot the fish.
KYUNG-AI (looking super confused): How do you breathe under water? That is not possible.
TEACHER: You only go under for half-minute. We do this too, but without the spear. We use our hands. And we do not have any eye protection.
SMILEY: Sometimes we also use a net. Then you get lots of fish at once.
TEACHER: We use a bamboo hut to trap the fish in, that’s how we catch many at once. (to me) How do you Americans fish?
ME (with more authority than I should have, given my nonexistent experience): With a stick and a string and a hook.
TEACHER: And us too, but with three hooks and a float.
KYUNG-AI: What do you use to bait the hook?
TEACHER: We use bees, the ones that do not produce honey. We also use those things you find in the dirt (draws a squiggle on the board)
ME: Worms! That’s what we use! (notice the liberal use of “we”)
SERIOUS: In my country, I mean I have never done this, but I have seen it done, we sometimes take bombs and use that to hunt the fish.
KYUNG-AI: (laughs, then realizes he was serious, and throws a quizzical look)
SERIOUS: You know, throw a bomb into a lake and then scoop out lots of fish.
ALEGS: In my country, we would never waste a bomb on some fish. We save our bombs for people.