Ben @ Morocco, Peace Corps Round 2: Feeling expansive tonite: Peace Corps/ Foreign Service lifestyle

Watching TO JOY, by Bergman, and thinking how I have my Swedish grammar upstairs and that one day if I work hard and if Serena and I live in Stockholm one day, then I'll watch this movie and be able to speak some of the language!

Earlier I was thinking how if I just had an African language (Sub-Saharan), and do better with Chinese and then I'd know a language on all of the continents. That's the Pro diplomat way!

Now it's cheating if you say: I can communicate in those countries because I know the European language they speak. If that counts, then Spanish, Portuguese, French and English has you covered nearly everywhere. Except maybe Candelaria. Even Middle Eastern countries often speak French or English.

So I was thinking I'll pick up Xhosa. Not now, not in a few years. But, sometime. Even learning a few phrases is better than nothing. People think it's 100% or nothing, and that's a false dichotomy. Being able to order a drink, or make a salute- like Obama does everytime he is speaking before a foreign crowd-- that's cool enough to justify the work, however much you are able to do.

In case you don't know, Xhosa the language made famous by Miriam Makeba's Click Song. And I think that it was the thing responsible for me being invited to Peace Corps. I had an interview with my man Kyle, and it seemed like things were fine but there was never any moment where I felt like I had won him over. My qualifications were scarce, just the minimum, though I had the language background and I had the adventure experience.

But I was interested in hearing about South Africa and Lesotho, where Kyle served 2 years each in the PC. And he married a woman from Lesotho! So I tried to think of what I knew there, and of course I thought about Miriam Makeba. We were standing up and he was beginning to walk away. Then, it came out:

The question that got me into Peace Corps.

"So, did you learn to speak Xhosa during Peace Corps?" I said it CLICK-osa. The right way.

And he looked at me like I had just pulled a gun on him. "I'm surprised you know how to say that." And that was the moment I became a PC volunteer. So I suppose I'm just following that tradition further. Xhosa is like Quechua. There may only be 8 million people that speak each one in the world. But that's 16 million. And those doors would be closed to you otherwise.

Part of the process, then, is watching, observing. And what better way to do that than to watch a movie in Xhosa that won the Golden Bear @ the 2005 Berlin Film Fest? It's already at the top of my queue and will ship this week from Netflix!

A remake of Bizet's CARMEN opera, set in South Africa

I used to say that learning another language is like looking into the same room full of the same things, but you're now looking through a different window. The objects are the same, but you see different sides of the same things. It's not the same world anymore, things are more 3-dimensional. The relationship between things is more clear, the positioning of one thing to another is elucidated. Looking through just one of the windows, you only see things in 2-D.

I discovered to my dismay when I finished school that I hadn't learned anything new. I was telling my grandfather about this, who never went to college. I didn't learn anything new; instead I learned how to say what I already knew in 3 new ways. So now what I'm trying to do is learn more, as well as open those new windows.

But while a language is a window, I think it's also a key to completely new places that you've never seen. So much of the Sotomayor opening remarks at her confirmation hearing were trying to paint her as biased, prejudiced and racist. I disagree with that, but I think that some of prejudice just comes from the physical inability to communicate and share with another person if you don't know what they are saying. It's easy to transfer your feelings of impotency to them and paint them in your mind as base, not as smart as you.

So, here's a fun video: