Communication Barriers

Travelling along my own impossible quest to discover and share the incredible stories that so need to be celebrated and encouraged, I meet beautiful people from all areas of life, often with backgrounds very different to my own.

These backgrounds result in different life experiences and different understandings. Occasionally, this can create an initial communication barrier, as both I and the interviewee quickly adjust to each other’s language and world-view. This is sometimes further affected by different accents, by disabilities, by emotional barriers, by technological issues or by my own opening cultural ignorance. I have been fortunate that everyone I interview is patient and understanding enough to bridge through this first restriction in order to have a conversation together that is truly limitless.

Being a traveller myself, talking to the intrepid Sarah Ouhiba was both remarkable and personally inspiring.

As a solo female traveller, who completed a round the world trip and hitchhiked to Antarctica while living on 10 euros a day, her story is truly inspiring for those of us infected with wanderlust. However, we had a big communication barrier. See, Sarah, being French, lives in Paris and I live in Australia. Initially we had to negotiate time differences and reshuffling to try and work out a time that could work for both us. It took a few attempts at late night (Australian) calls… Once we had finally managed to connect, a new problem emerged. Phone calls overseas, and particularly ones conducted over WiFi, tend to be very patchy and occasionally delayed. And we both had very different and strong accents over a muffled line. And I was trying to record the interview at the same time. Needless to say, the recording of the interview involves a lot of “Pardon?”, “I can’t hear you” and “Can you please repeat that”…. But we were both relaxed and patient, and at the end of an hour, her incredible story was shared and our technical and linguistic communication barrier overcome.

Although I love people and I love exploring new countries, I can unfortunately and accidentally be quite culturally ignorant. When interviewing Tara, a determined and passionate Indigenous Australian, my first question betrayed my complete ignorance of her culture and created the potential for a barrier of unfamiliarity.

I asked, out of genuine curiosity, “What ethnic percentage are you?”.

Now, I’m half Catalan, half English/Irish/Scottish, and I love the novelty of being biracial so a question like this seemed both natural and relevant to me. But to many Indigenous Australians, this question is a direct reflection of the horrific assimilation scheme aiming, often through rape, to breed out Indigeneity. Indigenous Australians were measured and classified on their percentages so to ask that question today is to basically ask ‘what percentage validity do you have to be Indigenous?’

Tara was incredibly open-minded and understanding of my ignorance, and throughout the rest of our fascinating interview on the impossible struggle of reaching and succeeding in tertiary education from an Indigenous Australian background, she answered any and all of my questions about her culture, and when I asked or said something that could have been offensive, she would explain it to me. Together we flowed through what could have been a serious cultural barrier into an interview that was enlightening in so many areas.

These are just two beautiful examples of remarkable people and stories I’ve had the fortune of sharing with you and they have both overcome their own barriers to reach their impossible. Like them, we all face limits in our quests, whether they are small, like my own interesting communication restrictions or huge, such as overcoming deep bias against Indigenous Australians.

It is not the number and difficulty of the challenges we face, but the grace with which we overcome them as we seek the impossible.

If you have an impossible story of overcoming barriers, don't hesitate to send us your story!

#embraceimpossible