GeekForce

When I go make deposits and stuff for my company, I make an effort to go to  Kabira’s teller window.  Every time I come up, she’s got a word or letters for me to work on.

Her Slavic language is used by perhaps two-and-a-half million people (including infants and geriatrics) worldwide…there’s nothing mainstream about it.  Latin derived, it’s alphabet is half Latin (which we can recognize; A, B, C, etc) and half Cryillic (letters that this keyboard or human brain can’t summon)..’east/west’, if you will.

She told me that the biggest problem she had when she got here in ‘98 (the year of largest influx of Bosian refugees to the U.S.) was to remember that nodding meant ‘yes’ here, and shaking the head meant ‘no’, exactly the opposite of what every Bosnian reflexively does at her home. To describe her long trouble through this transition, she said (and I quote):  “That was wierd.”

She now counts US currency through her fingers a hell of a lot faster than I ever could.  The pictures on the side of her space are of two pretty girls, eight and two.  She doesn’t have a ring, but quite often that often doesn’t mean anything with Bosnian, Spanish, or American (or Sri Lanki, Uzbeki, French, wherever) ladies nowadays. 

That her smiles and socially engaging demeanor creates a constant line at her window, given the absolute SHIT her family went through and probably still is?  Now that’s meaningful. 

We’re becoming friends, and I’m going to learn how to talk to her at the counter in Bosnian, by, say, …..

….Independence Day!!