My wife and I are going to Indonesian classes.

Yes, it is a very mid life crisis thing to learn a new language but, it is better than learning and instrument (everyone has to listen to you practice) and it is most definitely better than buying a sports car!

We are doing it at the Adelaide WEA and our instructor is a wonderful Indonesian man called Budi.  (There’s a great little video about him coming and living in Australia at YouTube)

He not only teaches us the language but teaches us about the culture, his culture, and where sometimes we just don’t quite line up.  I did a foundation course with Budi before setting off on this year long course.  One of the things that stuck in my head about the difference in culture was that he said he rarely told his children or relatives, including his Mum and Dad that he loved them.  He most certainly didn’t do it every time he said goodbye or at the end of every phone call.  He said he didn’t need to because they knew he loved them and they knew because of the way he treated them, respected them and behaved as a man respecting their values and the values of the family.

In our last lesson we were learning about terms of address, similar to our Sir, Madam, Mister and Miss etc.  The must common term we were using as a sign of respect was ‘Anda’ which was probably best equated to English as Mr/Mrs/Sir/Madam.   We were also learning about telling people about ourselves where we would use the word ‘saya’ meaning ‘I’.

Someone in the class asked Budi about the capitalisation of the words, does Anda always have a capital ‘A’ and does saya always have a lower case ‘s’ as that is how Budi had been writing it on the whiteboard.  He explained it like this:

“In Australia “I” is always in capitals as the centre of the Universe is I or me – in Indonesian culture the priority is the other person,  Anda,  or You.  So in Indonesia saya (I / Me) has a small ‘s’ and is always secondary to Anda (You) which has a capital ‘A’.

There was some nervous laughter in the class, but there was also a bit of a realisation that ‘I’ is the predominant focus, the capitalised word, in our culture.

I wonder how my day would go if I just, even for one day, decided that everyone else in MY word was more important than me;  that I would stop telling everyone I loved them and show them instead, that I would stop being the centre of the Universe.