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by ggm
1754 days ago
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One of the Afghani refugees here in Australia spoke of how confusing it was to be welcomed into a completely secular western culture, and then have to cope with Sunni dominated mosques and expectations of behaviour. The Sunni imams were a bit distressed they weren't showing up, noting that if you didn't live close to the mosque here, and hadn't yet learned to drive, (drive: She was functionally illiterate, and dealing with a 6 month old baby with a hole-in-the-heart who was born in refugee camp. what a nightmare) that was .. hard. (because we don't somehow welcome mosques as much as we might, and they wind up being in bush locations, away from public transport, and only do Shia-imam stuff on alternate tuesday afternoons type things) It sounded like a next to impossible balancing act. Somehow, a lot of them wound up in construction: specifically tiling. I wondered if the "silk road" building culture of decorated tiling had paid off, as a work model for them or if this is just that one lucky Afghan who gets a job and then hires his friends, to make a "thing" happen. I was also told the whole Fasi/Dari thing was really funny from the Farsi side of things. The Dari speakers sound like they're enunciating olde-english, chaucer style, to modern english ears (if you see what I mean) -and the Afgans said that the Farsi interpreters were often mis-interpreting things which made for horrendous Immigration problems. |
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I definitely see what you mean, and he said similar things when we talked about language diversity in Afghanistan. Him being a native Dari speaker caused multiple misunderstandings amongst the local Pashto speakers, through accent but also Pashto is just a totally different almost guttural language compared to Dari. That discussion was the first time I think I felt resentment for how American education does not demand fluency in multiple languages at a young age.