Dusty thoughts

Today I walked into a room that had only been opened twice in the last two years. The language lab was thick with dust and spider webs, broken chairs and locked cabinets with lost keys. Tape recorders and headphones, televisions and language texts. Think of a room belonging to a Jules Verne scientist with a bit less Frankenstein and a bit more WKRP in Cincinnati. It should have been filled with students panicking over not being here the difference between the English voiced and unvoiced “w” or trying to remember what “duck” (a bird they’ve never seen) is in French (the language of a country they’ll never be allowed to visit). Wearing oversized headsets, students should be mouthing Italian and Arabic, German and French along with a range of languages rarely heard off this continent. Instead, it is left unused and wasted.

A satellite dish sits on our roof that doesn’t work; a neighbor’s looks like a rusted out World War II antiaircraft gun. Every house in this country has a fireplace but I have never known one to be used. Sitting in a storage room near here is a collection of crumbling records – the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the soundtrack to Hair. Doorbells here occasionally work, as does the internet.

It’s easy to be critical when you experience something like this but don’t all of us let much of what we have go to waste? How many opportunities do we ignore? How many people do we meet in a day who could be our teachers but are never asked a question? We waste our day, not enjoying our time but trying to kill it. How many talents do we leave undeveloped to gather dust because we don’t see how they might be used in the future? We leave doors locked and the dust seeps through.

In the next few weeks I’ll be opening that room daily. I’m looking for an instrument to start playing again. I’ll be reading more – important things, not just email and the few English novels I’ve tracked down here. I’m trying to relearn much of the local language I have forgotten. And the language lab? In the next few weeks I’ll be opening that up, dusting off the equipment and putting it to use.