In America Laughter is a sound of joy and happiness, occasionally it signals fear or uncertainty but the majority of the time people laugh for good reasons. There are all kinds of studies that show how laughter makes you healthier, it reduces your stress levels and releases endorphins unfortunately I have come to hate the sound of laughter.

I have been living here for over a year now and consider myself decently competent at speaking the Malagasy language, yes there are many times when I still do not understand what people are saying to me or when I do not know the word for a specific action or object so I find a way around that missing word. A bat becomes "that animal that lives in caves and flies at night like a bird and eats mosquitoes" the water cycle becomes "the road of the water" ect ect. Sure maybe these are not perfect ways to describe things but it works, in general I can make myself understood, if the person I am talking to has a little bit of patience and creativity and I can understand what is being said to me if the person I am talking to is willing to occasionally back track and explain a certain vocab word or concept. Unfortunately a lot of people here do not have the patience or the desire to understand what I am saying and instead of helping me when I screw up they laugh at me and for the past year I have been ok with that. Laughter is necessary when you are trying to live in another language and culture but I have about reached my limit.

I am sick and tired of being mocked and laughed at, and I can not even make the people I love the most understand why I get mad when they make fun of me. Joking and laughing and pocking fun are a fabulous way to make friends and integrate into a new community but there is a thin line between joking and mocking and it is a line that is crossed much to often for my sanity. I can not walk down the street with out having almost every child I come across mock my intonation or the adults I stop and talk to laugh at my syntax. When people here make attempts at speaking English do I laugh and mock them ever after? No, I do my best to help them learn and explain repeatedly why "what's news?" doesn't really work or why "I am Thank You" isn't a sentence.* But I am simply an object of entertainment to be laughed at and mocked with no regard to how that effects me.

All I ask is that I be told why the things I say are incorrect; help me speak your language and then maybe I will be more willing to teach you mine.

*In Malagasy the most common greeting is "Ino ny voavoa?" which directly translates to "what's news?" so somewhere along the line the person who wrote the English curriculum for this country directly translated a Malagasy greeting and has taught generations of students that that is also the correct greeting in English, though if any Malagasy person ever tried that sentence on someone not familiar with the Malagasy language they would most likely get a blank stare.