Communication gap

I mostly lived away from my home town or home country since my childhood as my father served for army and he would be posted to one place no more than 3 years. I happened to privileged to visit many places and experienced different people from different cultures. Sometimes it was fun and exciting while at times it was intimidating and unpleasant experience. I found myself stared by people in attempt to know my origin and my native place. I, at many times had difficulty understanding different people and situation due to language and culture barrier. Throughout my school career I face this situation where teacher would taught in class in different language than suppose to be because majority of students were from that language. And whenever teacher happen to see my confused face among them, she would returned to language I understood. It happen that my school days would go by like that in state of back and forth. As I used to consult textbooks it did not harm my grades. I would not rate those incidences as severe may be I had learned to cope with such situation. But in one of my incident in botanical garden I met this guy who only understand his native language and cannot speak though is not deaf. I was in the garden for my biology excursion with one friend. We are walking through those bushes and grasses trying to learn something about the plants found in the garden. I do not remember how I start interacting with this person. I recall that he might have seen us trying to learn something about plants and paying more attention to plants than other people in the garden. He looked at us and gave big smile. We gave him a big smile back in return not knowing that he cannot speak. On getting our smile back he started interacting with us in sign language which we hardly understood. We tried to make him understand that we are students and go to school and doing some assignment. I know I am not very good with signs but he seem to understood what I said. He was more delighted to know that we are on school project and he took us to places that were full of unique and different types of plants. I am pretty sure we would not be able to explore those places by just ourselves. I was kind of indebted to him for his generosity and his knowledge of plants. But there was his speaking inability which was handicapping me from learning more from him. At times I felt helpless and so sorry for myself. I was upset about it but his enthusiasm was not less in any ways. He was taking us to all those places and he also crafted beautiful stuffs from those parts of wild plants. It was interesting for us to see how he created all those stuffs and tried to teach us all. As the end of the day, we departed from him happily thanking for his guidance and sharing and dinning him in restaurant. I still have his picture with his crafts. I am happy despite the fact that we will not understand him completely he approached to us and spend his considerable amount of time with us.

That time I thought that my inability to understand sign language is great barrier and tried not to interact with such people. That incident changed my fear of not able to understand the sign language. When I am recalling that incident I am not sure if I would deal with that situation any different now than that time. But recalling had made me realize that I should interact with different people and express myself using gestures and non verbal communication. This interpersonal communication class is making me realize of the importance of communication.