Life is a foreign language.

• Author: Mattox, Henry E.
• Position: Editor's Note - Editorial

Our contributing editor recounts a linguistic adventure in an exotic mountain kingdom long ago. Sometimes one must make do with the bare essentials and hope for the best.--Ed.

The American writer Christopher Morley observed in a work published in 1925 that life is a foreign language. To support his assertion, in a sense, I offer an anecdote from my Foreign Service days many years ago in the Kingdom of Nepal. The occurrence described took place some forty years ago, before Maoist rebels made it dangerous to travel in or visit the remote western areas, those stunningly beautiful lands looking up to the looming Himalayas west of the historic village of Gorkha and not far from the mysterious fastness of the Mustang region. It was, and remains, a spectacular, little-frequented area of South Asia.

The story following depicts especially that scene in the particular period about which I write. The small American embassy in Kathmandu at that time shared its official presence with what was termed by some her "senior partner," the USAID mission. The latter was considerably larger in structures and staffing, having been in-country a good bit longer than the embassy. (U.S. diplomatic relations long had been conducted from New Delhi by a nonresident ambassador.)

To cut to the chase in this story, the Foreign Service sent me there as a second secretary in the late summer of 1966; Ambassador Carol Laise, who had served previously in New Delhi, arrived as ambassador that same year, a bit later.

One aspect of the story needs to be set forth at this point. I had earlier studied at the Foreign Service Institute and served in French- and Portuguese-speaking countries, achieving the passable skill level of "3" (out of a possible "5") in those two languages. A language whiz I was not, but I was taking an hour a day of Nepali language tutoring, starting from a level of zero upon my arrival. (Nepali, I might note, is an Indo-European language not totally divorced from remote ties with the languages that developed in Europe.)

About Ambassador Laise's language skills I knew little or nothing, but I assumed she had some facility in Hindi from her earlier years in India. Mine not to reason why or to question her language skills in any case.

Not long after the ambassador's arrival the deputy chief of mission and the AID director arranged an orientation trip for her to the western part of the country using USAID's small contract helicopter. I disremember where it was...