Pantai Ini == Pattani

I just finished my 3 weeks working as an interviewer for this interview research study on Phase I clinical trial participants.

I'm really happy with the opportunity, because I met and talked to a wide array of people from Baltimore; from the stereotype young or middle aged Black man (who may or may not be doing drugs) and only in it for the money (not that I blame them), to the curious paradox of a big Black man that scared me at first until he smiled and told me he was Vegan-- and he's like ridiculously rich and yet in grad school which is another interesting paradox; to one Asian/Italian/White (we put in Mixed Race on the form) man who I would have loved to be friends with in real life (in fact I don't know if he saw my ring, but he seemed to have contemplated or attempted to ask me out :P); to the White woman who said she never even took the money and only did it because it's stupid to die from diarrhea-- and she refused to answer the question "Who is the head of the household?" because it was archaic; finally to the gentle older Black men who are so smooth and funny and wise I kinda wish I could take them home with me so they can be my Uncle or Grandpa.

Interesting notes:
1) The people I interviewed who I thought were the most intelligent would always have trouble with rating the statement:

I am as smart as most people.

2) Almost everyone laughed when I ask them to rate the statement:

If I met the exact copy of myself, I would enjoy talking to this person.

AND ok, I just realized I started this post to write about something else.

I wanted to write about my last day there, and how Dan asked me out of the blue if I was bilingual.

I paused and counted in my head, and I hesitated to say "I might be tri-lingual, depending on whether you consider this third language I know is an actual language or a dialect." (Btw, if you thought I was thinking of Russian as a third language, no, because I don't think I qualify for that. A certain checkers game on an Amish Farm with some Russians showed I still remember how to understand them, but that I have very little confidence to reply)

Obviously, such a statement would spark questions. And I found myself nervously explaining Klantanese language and Pattani and the history and culture and as he nodded and absorbed it all in I couldn't help but feel tremors of FEAR that I am poisoning his mind with wrong facts.

So now that I have the leisure of looking stuff up, I'm happy to say I did remember my history correctly and gave the correct gist of things. At least sort of. But the wikipedia page on it makes me unhappy. I feel that I came from a place and a people that have such rich history and I need to READ it properly first before I open my mouth to strangers and impress upon them certain ideas that may be false!

The thing about being outside 'the motherland', especially if your motherland is shrouded in mystery to most people outside of it, is that you'll get many interesting questions about things you never would have even thought would qualify as a questions.

Example:
Q: Would all Muslims understand some Arabic?
A: (long "Um") We do read the Quran which is in Arabic. But it's a higher poetic form of Arabic that is quite different from the spoken Arabic that most Arab-speakers speak. So the answer would be, we might recognize some root words but unless we were Arab or learned Arabic, we probably don't really understand Arabic.

Dan sweetly asked if I could write down a few Malay phrases, and as a joke I decided to write them in Malay and in Klantanese. Now I'm convinced is just a dialect. :(

But it's not!!!! The problem with documenting Klantanese is that it doesn't seem to have a systematic written component.