The Gashi family is here.  And tired.   And concerned about front doors that seem fragile to them.  (I suppose any front door would seem fragile after the Serbians broke down my old front door,  and caused me to leave.)

I can't decide whether I'm more struck by how much we have to learn to be able to help them, or by how much I'm learning about the members of the sponsor group (me, included) because they are here.  On the latter subject, isn't it amazing that the women in our group have observed that mother and sons and daughters are tired, overwhelmed, and incredibly hospitable to visitors?  While the men have observed that they are hungry for social contact, and that the men in the family are the leaders?  Same family; different observors.  Perhaps we see what is most accurately a reflection of our own needs.

On the former -- what we need to learn to be able to help them -- I am awestruck by how inept we are when our communications skills fail us.  I think we are more impaired by this language gap than the Gashi's are, probably because the mother and elder daughter are illiterate, and aren't wed to language of any kind.   We, or at least I, rely on my language skills for everything.  My greatest asset is my articulateness.  When it's useless, I feel useless, too.

I watched Elsie with the Gashi family.  She quickly realized that pictures would be helpful.  She drew a clock to show when she (or the next visitors) would be there.  When it was others, she drew a stick figure or two of appropriate sex, and printed our names under them.  She did the supermarket shopping, having brought over flyers to show the family what products were available.  In the supermarket, she said, they often pointed to things in other baskets, and then they would find them.  It took her little time to realize that mother wanted to be baking bread.

Following her example, my life partner and I went off to the local large bookstore, and picked up a monolingual pictoral dictionary -- Canadian version -- to bring to the Gashi's on our next visit.  It has wonderful photos of classrooms, hospital rooms, grocery stores, small town main streets, shopping malls and so on, with numbers on various elements and a corresponding list of words at the bottom of the picture.  It may or may not help them learn English; it will definitely help them to communicate with us, because they can point to the picture of what they want, or need, or what is concerning them. 

I realized that it was especially helpful to have a Canadian version, because it has Canadian money in it, and Canadian documents (including health cards, social insurance number cards, and so on).  I liked that the pictures were not all of white people; in fact, if anything, they were selected to represent what some of us would like to see (a black woman interviewing a white man for a job, a man playing with the baby, etc.) than what is.  But I'm less concerned with the politics than with having a means to understand their wants and needs, and to communicate those things which they need to be attending to, like language assessment, and so on.

We found out that Mr. Gashi (Dad) is alive and well and living in a refugee camp in Turkey.  I bet there's a hell of a story about how they ended up in different countries, since mother and children arrived from a camp in Macedonia.  We also found out that they come from a farming village, considered themselves middle-class, and are Muslim in the cultural more than the religious sense. 

I wonder what they've found out.  From the brief reports we've had from other members of our sponsor group, we've found out that they are used to buying groceries at least several times a week, that they were  very relieved to have a cassette player so that they could listen to Albanian music (which they'd been missing!), and that the men are gregarious while the women are more reserved.  The eldest son is the quickest to pick up what we're talking about in English; the second eldest son is the one who has learned English in school, but he's loathe to use it much.

I wonder how much Albanian we'll learn before they learn English.   I wonder if we'll grow to be friends. I wonder if they'll stay in Canada.  So much wonder.  So little time.

P.S. Update on the dog: he's fine! Hurray!  The problem seems to have been something very localized, and may have been an insect bite or something equally innocuous.  (The squeamish should stop reading here.)  The vet did check his anal glands; I didn't know he had anal glands, but he does.  All male dogs do.   It's like what skunks have, but it's for marking territory.  As the vet said (and note the very clinical language), "The glands are supposed to be expressed with each defecation, but this doesn't always occur."  I could translate, but I won't.  I tell this part because as we were holding the little beast, and she was doing unspeakable things to his rear end, he whimpered and barked, but even though I had his snout up to my face, he only licked.  I think, in his place, I might have bit whatever was nearest.  We've decided our dog isn't dangerous, which makes us even more thrilled that he's also not ill!

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