How do you say, "Please share your magic markers with your friends" in Serbian? How about "yes, that beach ball does have a hole in it, but I don’t think patching it up with paper and a glue stick is the answer"?The four of us had no clue. Our trusty translator, Mira, was inside the church working her magic on our testimonies to the women’s group in Parta, a tiny town near Bela Crkva and Vrsac, leaving the rest of us surrounded by a veritable herd of beautiful Serbian children on a Tuesday afternoon…none of whom spoke three words of “engleski.” Talk about your immersion!Most of the children were enjoying a beach ball relay race with Leigh Anne, but some were finishing their collages and trying earnestly to get us to understand a variety of queries, requests and demands. I think I was using the same few words over and over again to tell them thanks, yes, and that their artwork was lovely. The phrase I was using most, however, was “zao mi je, ne znam srpski” – “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Serbian.” Michelle later remarked to me that when it was clear that she did not understand what the child had said the first time, he or she would attempt speaking slower and louder to see if some kind of Pentecostal fire of understanding would descend upon our beings. Mostly, the pointing, pantomiming and over-exaggerated facial expressions worked for menial communication. Incidentally, the four of us would now make one heck of a mean charades team.At one point, I was busy cracking up the kids unintentionally with my broken Serbian; trying and failing countless times to pronounce their word for elephant, which to the English-speaking ear sounded like the stifled yawn of someone with a sinus infection. Serbian could at times be a beautiful and subtly expressive language, but more often than not, it would be far too complex for my weak, untrained American ear and tongue to mimic. In fact, when Mira showed me about 5 Cyrillic letters and their ch-like sounds, to me, they were so similar that I could barely distinguish among them – it almost seemed like Mira was doing her impression of a choo-choo train.For all this, the kids that day were some of the most patient, determined and even stern language tutors I could have imagined. It’s really quite something for a child to be able to teach an adult something new, both for the teacher and apprentice. In Serbia, we were given this gift, to see the world as children do – discovering cultural differences and similarities, learning about the people and the land, and trying to grasp the sounds and nuances of a new language. When Sarah and I finally made the right combination of consonant sounds to say the word correctly, a cheer went up – “bravo!” Even though that word was thankfully familiar for the both of us, the smiles spoke far louder than anything else - and for one brief moment, all language barriers were breached