bilingual activism

I've been trying to get involved with Greenpeace in Rome since I came back in September and decided my Italian was at a reasonable social level. Everyone there is really friendly and they meet near my house (bonuses) but unfortunately they meet on monday nights and since the beginning of October I've always had to work then. Anyway, on saturday there was an action day to keep up the pressure on the Copenhagen meetings and I finally managed to force myself to volunteer to go and help out. (I haven't before because generally I'm working (most of the others are students) and because I'm quite shy in Italian and not very sure of myself with regards to speaking to the public!

Anyway, Saturday was the day of my debut performance as a Rome Greenpeace activist. There was a kind of small festival in Piazza Farnese - the title of the day was "100 piazzas for the climate" - with a stage for speakers, games for children and a range of stalls from organisations ranging from Greenpeace to organic food to Christians for the planet or some such. It was a nice sunny day but VERY cold - my outfit choice of tights and miniskirt quickly revealed itself to be a poor one and I shivered in my Greenpeace t-shirt until a fellow helper convinced me to tie my coat round my legs to warm them up a bit.

We were giving out leaflets and information about the anti-nuclear campaign (Italy wants to start investing in nuclear power stations, Greenpeace don't want that to happen), selling merchandise to fundraise and also taking photos of people wearing masks representing the different G8 leaders standing in front of an "Historic Agreement Now" poster. As for this last activity, I wasn't entirely sure WHY we were doing it - this is one of the things about doing things in a second language, alot of general facts that in your native language you would pick up as you go along you miss out on. Not wanting to seem ignorant, I failed to ask anyone what the purpose was as I posed for a series of photos - the guy who was volunteering with me on the stall decided to use me as part of his sales pitch: "come and have your photo taken with the lovely Mary". Bemused passers-by must have assumed I was a)famous or b)a prostitute.

Another thing about comprehension of a language in which you're not completely fluent is that it's very closely linked to context. If you're expecting to hear something, frequently you can understand it. If someone makes a comment or asks a question that is unexpected or surprising, you'll generally respond with "huh? what?" This wouldn't be such a problem if people just repeated their comment, but all too often on saturday people would look at me more closely, and realise "ah! sei straniera!" [you're foreign] and then either give up, or attempt to explain in English. I was expecting questions like "what is greenpeace?" or "what size T-shirt is this?" but I wasn't expecting "where's via del Corso?", "where can I get something to eat?" or "can you hold this bag open for me while I transfer into it the contents of my other bag which is broken?"

I spent alot of time hiding behind other volunteers, letting them do the talking and dealing with people part, and feeling useless and unhelpful. My proudest moment was when a man asked "what does this mean?" of the title of the Greenpeace calendar, which is in English: "Standing up for the Earth."

Not so great was when a drunken old man, stinking of alcohol, came up and looked at some baby t-shirts. I asked if I could help him and he replied, with a horrible lear, in English, "Do you have something in my size?!" Then he marched off, cackling.

Probably the worst part though was when I was ambushed by a couple of girls who asked if they could ask me a question. Given that I was standing at a greenpeace stall wearing a greenpeace t-shirt, I really didn't feel I could say no, despite fears that they would reveal the gaping holes in my political knowledge, so I tried to summon my powers of articulacy and said "yes." They asked "what are your hopes for Copenhagen?" While struggling to frame a decent response, in Italian, I was most deterred to see them whip out a video camera and start filming me! I was stammering about agreements and they said "oh, you can answer in English if you prefer." I did, obviously, and gave a response to the effect that I hoped to see a strong agreement, the richer countries leading by example and setting a good precedent for the developing world. At that moment a campaigner, ie someone who is actually employed by Greenpeace and alot more knowledgeable than me, came up, just in time to see them walking off with their footage. He pointed out to me, very nicely, that any interviews and filming are usually left to the campaigners and not the volunteers...of course! I felt utterly humiliated as it looked like I just wanted to hog the limelight and as I risked embarrassing the entire organisation...I had nightmare images of me, saying something inappropriate in bad italian, being broadcast on international TV as "a Greenpeace spokesperson"...I apologised and assured him that I'd said "personally" (I had).

He said it was fine, and, of course, the footage hasn't surfaced anywhere (that I know of) - I mean, they were hardly from BBC News 24: they were both pretty young and to be honest I'd assumed they were probably doing a school project or something!

I sloped off at 6 o'clock, thoroughly chilled and needing to warm-up and de-stress...working for causes you belive in is all well and good but really takes it out of you.