“No child must die”

One of the means by which the schools in Nuuk encourage kids to socialise and reduce bullying is to have ‘food group’ events. Each month, a group of about five children from the same class – children who wouldn’t normally play with each other – converge on one child’s home for a few hours to do activities, play, and eat dinner together. I used to try to manage the kids when we hosted these events. Now I just let them get on with it. They don’t really need me. And when I do try, they tend to react with bewilderment to my clunky Danish, which I find a bit demoralising. For example, at one food group afternoon, I asked a kid, in Danish, whether she was hungry. She stared at me blankly. My son, sitting next to her, said exactly the same thing, in Danish, and the lights of recognition blinked on. There’s not much worse for your self confidence in learning a language than having your Danish translated into Danish, and by a child, whose second language is Danish.

Meanwhile, the kids seem quite capable of communicating between themselves even when there are multiple languages involved. A memorable food group afternoon involved five seven year olds with four different first languages – English, Danish, Greenlandic, and Faroese. All of them spoke at least two languages, to varying degrees, and some three. Simultaneous translation happened seamlessly, with not even the smallest disruption to their games and conversations.

Now, at age ten, most of them have seen enough YouTube and online games that they understand English remarkably well. So I can justify speaking English under the premise of contributing to their language skills. The kids get an even better English workout with my husband, whose Danish is worse than mine. He uses Danish only if he really has to. And his style is even more hands off. Hosting a recent food group without me, he gathered the recently arrived children to explain the rules for the afternoon.

“There is only one rule,” he said, “No child must die.” With that, he gave them a couple of ice axes and released them onto the snowy street to find an icy slope to hurl themselves down.