Lebanese Chicken and Semantic Fields

Yesterday my hosts asked me whether I was open to cooking a meal before departing from Mexico: this is course like asking a pig whether it would like to roll in mud, or a kid whether it wanted to visit the candy store. It was clear to me that I was going to have to overcome two challenges: since I am living with fellow monks I was sure that the kitchen would be missing key tools of the trade or that the ones available would be sub-standard. I was not disappointed; the peeler was indeed rubbish, as my blisters this morning prove. I also expected to have to improvise as far as ingredients were concerned, and again, it was so: there is an overabundance of limes here, but lemons are almost impossible to come by. And the vegetable section was selling something which looked like large green animal ears, but I was told they were cactus leaves and you could grill them. Even I stuck with red beet and almond salad, Lebanese chicken and fruit salad (hence the blisters).

But what I did not reckon with was the linguistic challenge involved in making this meal. I have been living here for almost four weeks now and my Spanish, while faulty, has allowed me to go out with friends, participate in international leaders’ meetings, play UNO with little kids and facilitate consulting sessions; but trying to head up a cooking crew for a 19 person meal was an unexpected challenge. How do you say “peel”, “simmer”, “chop into cubes”, “bite-size chunks” in Spanish? What’s a bowl, strainer, blender, lemon squeezer in your wonderful language? My friends were very gracious, but even so it proved a surprising and somewhat humbling experience, trying to explain (sometimes better, sometimes worse) what needed to be done: so no wonder the apples got hacked, not chopped, and the chicken got basted in garlic paste more slowly than it otherwise would. All par for the course!

But once it was all over and the meal eaten (to general satisfaction, I understand, except for the lack of a nicely chilled Pinot Blanc) I had to think how often such things happen to us: we think we know the “language”, but somehow we totally miss what is going on. I remember my first weeks in the PhD programme, after more than twenty years away from academia. I was sure people were speaking German, yet I had no idea what they were talking about: different semantic field. Friends assure me the first weeks, maybe months, of marriage are like that: you thought you were marrying someone from the same country, but communication seems strangely difficult: different semantic field, maybe also different planet!? And of course when we enter the religious sphere, the same holds true. Most of us are not used to the language, symbols, culture so pervasive in churches, monasteries, religious communities, and we feel totally out of our depth, disorientated, frustrated.

The temptation in all those situations is of course to bolt: get me out of here, back into my comfort zone! Get me a sous-chef who can speak German, let me drop my PhD and return to what I am at ease with; let me run from this relationship and hang out with my friends from Mars; let’s leave this religious nuts to themselves and go back to suburbia! But of course the exposure to this new world, this new semantic field or culture, is what makes growth possible. The learning zone, so educationalists tell us, it outside the comfort zone, and just short of the panic zone. So now I know how to squeeze a lime the Mexican way and have learned that a cooking pot is called “olla” in Spanish. Maybe next time you are tempted to flee a learning experience, be it academic, relational or religious, remember Lebanese chicken!