Village Trains and the Great Wall of Noise

Our family arrived in our new country a couple weeks ago and are staying in the home of some teammates who are away. Landing in this new place with a house already set up has been a godsend.

We are also blessed to have daily help from Rania, our teammates’ house helper. She’s a wonderful guide into our new culture and is helping ease our transition.

One afternoon I brought my toddler Autumn into the kitchen. Rania stopped cleaning to coo over her and ask me how to pronounce her name.

“Own-tum? Ow-tem?” she repeated. I tried to write a phonetic spelling of her name on the kitchen whiteboard. How I wished my husband and I had considered ease of pronunciation when we named her.

Eventually, Rania finished cleaning up, kissed Autumn’s round check, and went home.

But moments later, I heard her knocking on our door.

Flags and streamers lined the wagon, and a huge speaker blared children’s pop music.

“Train!” she announced when I opened the door. She was smiling and animated. “Come see the village train! Bring Ow-tum!” She spoke in a mixture of English and local phrases.

I had no idea what she was talking about. Nevertheless, I swooped Autumn into my arms and shuffled my feet into a pair of sandals. We followed Rania as she hurried to a rustic wooden shelter on the corner where several neighborhood women and children stood waiting.

After a few minutes, the “train” came into view. It was a rusty, chugging jalopy towing a bench-lined wagon. Flags and streamers lined the wagon roof, and a huge speaker blared children’s pop music from the back. A few merry-go-round horses bearing proud children were mounted on the back of the tow vehicle.

As we climbed into the wagon, smiling mothers urged their children to scoot over to make room for us. The train wheezed and popped around the neighborhood, winding down impossibly narrow alleyways. It even did a full U-turn on a street that was only wide enough for a small car. Kids laughed and danced as their mothers tried wiping the dust off their young faces.

These first weeks are exhilarating, confusing, and wild all at the same time.

I never did ascertain the occasion for this fun activity. When Rania explained it into my Google Translate app, the resulting English was an incomprehensible word salad.

This exhausting adventure is a perfect example of what some call the great wall of noise. When we enter a new culture, sights and sounds swirl around us. As new observers, we have no categories of meaning to put them in. This makes it impossible to absorb everything we want to know, even though we’re bursting with curiosity.

It won’t always be this way. We are determined to learn the language so we can understand the people with whom we’re called to share the Gospel.

But in these first weeks, it feels exhilarating, confusing, and wild all at the same time. We are having fun—even though we mostly have no idea what’s going on.