My fumbling fingers stumbled over the now-warm keys of my laptop. It seemed to hum comfort to me.
"Hello," I typed and paused. What should I say? How should I start this? Frowning, I continued to type:
"My friend and I are doing an English project. It is what is called the ethnography..." I smiled and nodded to myself as the words rolled off my fingers and crashed into the email document.
"Thank you," I wrote, "Sincerely, Leyen Trang" and grinned at my accomplishment.
There--that was that. I sat back, spinning around in anticipation. Well, I won't be getting a reply in a few seconds... However, within the hour, I had gotten a reply.
With shaking fingers, I moved my mouse over and opened the message. My eyes skimmed its contents, but I only knew one thing:
I was still waiting for my reply.
They hadn't directly answered my question, instead, choosing to tell me that they had forwarded the email to the staff of the Brookdale Library.
Great, more waiting.
Finally, Tuesday the week before it was due, Pakou and I decided we couldn't wait any longer and took matters into our own hands. After school, we met at the Brookdale Library where we marched over to the Information Desk.
Voice slightly shaking and nerves bundled into a jumble, we introduced ourselves to the lady at the desk and told her about our English project and how we were doing an ethnography (without saying ethnography). She raised her eyebrows and directed us over to Alicia, the teen volunteer coordinator and our would-be cultural broker.
Once repeating the story over to Alicia, she laughed and told us that they had just been talking about us and our project in a meeting before. She walked us back over to the Information Desk and introduced us as the ethnographers.
That afternoon seemed to fly over my head. Alicia helped set the dates we would meet and observe and without further ado, she bade us good day and waved us off until Thursday afternoon.
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