My Experience At Vacation Bible School

Over my high school’s spring break, I went on a mission trip through my church with my family to Jamaica. When there, I had multiple situations where I had some misunderstanding in communication, most commonly when speaking with the native Jamaicans. On our second day there, my church group had planned out Vacation Bible School sessions for the kids in Jamaica. I was talking to one of the boys there, who was around the age of 13. We were sitting at one of the tables and some of his friends were around too, chiming in and adding comments. In Jamaica they speak English, however they speak it very fast and have slang words and phrases that I wasn’t familiar with and didn’t understand. I felt very bad and a little stupid for having so much trouble …show more content…
Being able to see his and his friends body language signs and hearing their tones helped to see some of their patience with my slow understanding but also get an idea of when they were trying to pull a trick on me. If real life subtitle were a thing much of the confusion, I feel, could have been avoided by eliminating some of the miscommunication from the quickness of their speech and slang. There also was some breakdowns in the feedback I provided for the boy, leading to further trouble in the communication. I had become nervous about saying much more than “I don’t understand”, or “could you please repeat that again and very slowly please” in fear that they would laugh at me. Even when I tried to repeat back what I thought he had said to make sure I was understanding, the boy’s reactions and laughs told me I wasn’t anywhere close. My emotional state, as the receiver, may have added in some more noise and distractions by becoming nervous and focusing on trying to understand him as to minimize making a fool of myself, but in reality I would miss some words by focusing on what another was or meant. I wasn’t able to decode the words and attach the right meaning on to them based on my past experiences and knowledge as oppose to the Jamaican boys’ who live a very different lifestyle than our own here in State College. The channel was often interrupted by outside noise along with the internal distractions, such as emotion, leading to further miscommunication. The setting had a large impact in contributing to distorting the message. The table we were sitting at was outside with a bunch of other kids of varying ages running around, jumping over and off a nearby short wall, and yelling and screaming. This extra noise, on top of his quick, quiet speech greatly contributed to the difficulty of