When I got back to Berlin after spending 10 days in the UAE, I was sad and listless for about two weeks. While I was cycling in to the office today, it hit me why.

I had this moment when Krishan and I were walking around Deira when we walked into a cobbler’s shop because Krishan needed his shoes polished. I started chatting with the guy in Hindi/Urdu. I learned a little bit about him – he was from Afghanistan, and he’d been living in the UAE for over ten years. When I asked him about his life back home, he told me that there weren’t a lot of job opportunities. To be honest, our conversation itself wasn’t super remarkable. However, the fact of us having that conversation is profound. We would not have been able to have it if I didn’t know some Urdu and that man hadn’t been living in Deira for so long. He told me that he only learned Urdu once coming to the UAE (maybe he had some formal schooling in Urdu when he was a kid; I don’t know what they were teaching in provincial Afghani schools in the 80s? 70s? The dude looked pretty old). What are the odds that someone born in the USA talks to someone born in Afghanistan at his cobbler shop in the UAE, all the while speaking a non-native language for both?

This conversation reminded me why I wanted to learn Urdu in the first place: I wanted to talk to people in the UAE. People like the cobbler. I wanted to know their stories better. More than that, I wanted to humanize the people I encountered for so long in the UAE. The people who drove taxis, or made food at canteens, or swept floors, or ran tailor shops, or worked at the bank, or butchered meat. Why were they in the UAE, so far from home? Did they like it? More importantly, I wanted to get a peak into their worldview. Ultimately, I wanted to humanize them in my own eyes. I think the reason why I felt so sad when coming back from the UAE is because I had, to a significant degree, realized this dream/desire that I’ve had since I was 18 years old.

People from Afghanistan and Pakistan are so often villified or written off in the USA/the West, even in the woke millieu that I inhabit. The story goes that so many of these people are sexist, conservative Muslims who ascribe to backwards ideologies and hold bigoted worldviews. All of those things may be true (and can also be said about people in the USA or Germany!), and I don’t necessarily think that people have a responsibility to interact with people who actively want to hurt them, but I do think that one of the few ways of understanding where someone is coming from is by talking to them in a language you both understand. Not through a translator or an app, but face-to-face. You both sit there exposing a tiny bit of your soul, especially when speaking a second language. Your accent and word choice tell so much about where you’re from and how you learned the language. When we talk to someone face-to-face, we’re engaging in something primal, something deeply ingrained in the human spirit – an experience that simply cannot be replicated in any other way. Maybe the person you’re talking to is bigoted and full of hatred, and maybe that’s only part of the story. Maybe they are also full of love, tolerance, and compassion at the very same time. You will only encounter this paradox if you talk to people. Again, I truly believe that no one has a responsibility to interact with people who they suspect might hate them for who they are, or worse yet, might actively wish or even attempt to harm them. You gotta protect yourself, and you have to know what your limits are. That said, as a white guy, I do have certain privelages in the world. I can walk through so many spaces without having to worry about being harmed. In fact, I can walk through most spaces oblivious to any harm that people around me may or may not wish opon me. I think its worth asking if its worth leveraging those privelages to have, at the very least, conversations with people that I don’t understand.