Codes

There is a small cottage located on the coast about a twenty minute walk from the center.  Once owned and inhabited by the telegraph and radio pioneer Marconi, local legend has it that he sent one of the first transmissions of Morse code from the site just down the road from where I sit writing this.  It seems somehow predictable that Northern Ireland would be home to one of the first transmissions of code, as people here are very skilled at sending and receiving information using enigmatic communication.  Home to a conflict between people of more or less the same genetic origin, people here quickly developed ways of determining the identities of those around them as friend or enemy.  It's rude, of course, to ask someone their religion.  Rather, if asking their name yields ambiguous results (Sean and Bill are dead giveaways; Michael and Nathan are not), and asking where they're from offers little more assistance (West Belfast--probs Catholic, East Belfast, probs not), you could always inquire as to the name of their primary school as a more covert means to discovering the Truth About Your New Friend (or not, as the case may be).  The funny thing is that to people from here, all of these questions mean only one thing: asking someone whether they are Protestant or Catholic, making the whole song and dance around the actual question fairly unnecessary, in my humble opinion..  What's even more entertaining is watching someone beat around the bush of a foreigner, say a Jewish foreigner with, hypothetically of course, a distinctly Jewish name. In such cases, the same old codes and sensitivities may not exist.
I can't even count the myriad of creative ways people have come up with to ask me if I am Jewish without asking me if I'm Jewish.  A standard introduction goes like this:
A: My name's Yael.
B: Oh.  Is that a Jewish name?
A: Yes.
B: Do you have any connection to Judaism or Jewish people?*
A: Yes, in fact I do.
(awkward pause while A gives B a chance to be direct, to no avail)
A: I'm Jewish.
B: Oh, (trying to cover the tracks of having inquired about religion) I was just wondering why you might have a Jewish name.

*this is a direct quote taken from an actual conversation. 
I feel lucky enough to have been raised in a society in which I feel no discomfort at telling someone my religion without worrying about the effect of how it will cause me to be perceived, which makes it all the more jarring when you go to a place in which stating one's religion can carry not only a specific implication about one's political beliefs, lifestyle, upbringing and community, but also considerable risk in some cases.  The ways in which people's minds conform to the conflict in sending and interpreting the codes of everyday interaction are incredible.  In order to take what you need to know from these interactions, a person needs to know the basic population breakdowns of nearly every street in Belfast, not to mention the podunk towns all across the six counties composing Northern Ireland.
What codes do we learn as children in the US?  At ten years old, having just had the first round of health courses in school, I was scolded for asking my grandmother if she had been through menopause.  Yet the subtleties of emotion that so often dictate the way we understand our surroundings are equally coded.  Over the past few weeks, Andy's mother in Texas has been fatally ill with cancer.  (Andy, a Texan, is the assistant to Paul, the center director, and lives on site with his wife, Mary Lynne and their five-year-old son, AJ).  For weeks, AJ has understood that something is wrong, yet the only information he has been told explicitly is that his grandma is sick.  No details, no diagnosis, only the knowledge that she isn't well in combination with the myriad of communications that do not involve a direct verbal statement.
As a person who is very direct and hardly bashful about verbally articulating uncomfortable sentiments, the system of codified information in Northern Ireland is fairly difficult to get used to.  Why ask someone about their primary school when I can just ask if they are Protestant, Catholic or neither.  Unfortunately for me (but probably fortunately for everyone else!) I don't make the rules of social engagement here or anywhere else.  And every once in a while, I am made aware of the codes that I speak, or, as Paul says, the statements behind my questions.
During a training with Paul yesterday, we introduced ourselves to the two new midterm volunteers from Ohio by saying our name and where we are from.  While Roland, Sari, Valentin, Franc and Anthony said the countries from which they came here (Philippines, Hungary, Germany, Cameroon, Ghana, respectively), Michaela said Armagh, Jeni said Belfast, Andrew said Ohio and I said New York.  After going around in a circle, Franc raised his hand and asked why the four of us could say our city or state and expect everyone to know where it is, while he would never be able to tell a group of foreigners that he's from Bamenda and have people recognize that as a city in Cameroon.  I explained that I said New York because the new MTVs are from the States and would doubtless want to know where in the US I was from, and that furthermore I have never met a single person that had not heard of New York.  Similarly, Jeni and Michaela assumed that because we are in Northern Ireland, we would all be at least vaguely familiar with its major cities.  While both of these statements are both true and fair enough, the point about the US is clear: the domination of Western culture in our so-called diverse community is blatant in our accurate assumptions of other peoples' knowledge.  As soon as Franc posed his objection, I felt myself getting defensive even though I could see the validity of what he was saying.  It felt good to recognize the statements behind the codes and appreciate where he was coming from in his frustration with being on the margin of Western hegemony.