Inadequate

On Friday Chrissy and I walked about a half a mile up the hill to have dinner with a family we met this summer. They are a very interesting couple. He is from Haiti. She looked Hispanic to me at first and their three-year-old daughter is a typical kid. I first saw them at the Bon Festival the first week we were here. Then we saw them again at the Summer Festival in downtown Nishinomiya. When I saw them for the second time, I decided to introduce ourselves to them. It turns out that she is from Bulgaria, but they met in Canada. She is here completing her doctorate in sociology. She is studying minority groups in Japan. We ran into her again at the grocery store about 3 weeks ago. She told us that they were leaving a couple of months early. She is now pregnant and she wants to give birth and receive medical care back in Bulgaria. She invited us to dinner.

Dinner was delicious. We visited quite awhile. What impressed both Chrissy and me most was their daughter. She was watching “Charlotte’s Web” when we arrived but at dinner she ate with us. She goes to an English speaking day care. When her mother enrolled her there, she told the staff that her daughter didn’t speak English. The staff looked confused and said that she spoke English well. Which she does, quite well, but she speaks with an accent. At the daycare there are mostly Japanese students and teachers. At this daycare, she is solidifying her English, but also picking up Japanese.

Her mom claims that she is behind many of the Japanese students her same age, because she doesn’t write well enough. The Japanese students at her school are ahead of her. She is three, but on the wall behind my chair she had some of her art displayed with her name signed on it. Some of the letters were backward, but they were all there.

While we visited the little girl would speak with us. I asked how she would make the transition back to Bulgaria, how would she make the transition. Her mom said, “She speaks Bulgarian.” It turns out, that when she was two, she spent time in a Bulgarian day care and functioned quite well.

That was not all. As the evening went on, she got tired and a little cranky. In her increasingly emotional state, she went and sat on her dad’s lap and began speaking French. Haiti is a French speaking country, of course. She wanted to play hide-n-seek, but the adults were still talking. Her dad got up and took care of her a bit.

Chrissy and I were amazed that this kid could speak and understand four languages. She speaks English, French, Bulgarian, and Japanese. She speaks English with a little accent, but don’t forget, she is three.