In my passport country, training in critical thinking skills begins at birth. Families give little ones simple puzzles to groom their spatial abilities. Some people play classical music in hopes that the "Mozart Effect" will make their children smarter. In my education classes, I learned about models like Bloom's Taxonomy and how to work towards higher order thinking skills.
That kind of grooming doesn't happen here in the Solomon Islands. If you look at Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, our friends here live mostly in the lower half of the pyramid. Their culture is just different from the culture in which I grew up, and their brilliance shows up in different ways, too. They laugh at me because I have to write everything down (language learning, grocery lists, family trees), while they can keep it all in their heads. The things we've been asking the translation team to accomplish this week would be difficult in any culture.
Imagine having a sixth grade education and needing to read a paragraph and then tell back the meaning in your second language. And yet my strong friend, Kiko, fills this role day after day during the translation consultant checking. And I'm so proud of her. Lugging bags of produce around market and making cookies for afternoon tea and buying reading glasses for their tired eyes all seem like incredibly small ways to say thank you.
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