5/25/2016

The perks of working with people with Autism

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I had to do a bit different working shift today, where I had to take one guy home to the other end of the county from a social group he attends in Graz. It was an unexpected shift in thay sense that I found out about it two days before and had to change my work schedule for that. Was all worth it, because....  I got into a following situation:
I went to pick my client up and along with him came another autistic guy, claiming that he is all the time taken to a certain bus stop in Graz by the workers who take my client home. Alright, no need to doubt, my client also seemed to be used to it. We sat in the car, the new guy in the front and my client to the back. The new guy (seemed like a high-functioning autist or Asperger to me) asked me about my accent and as soon as he found out I'm from Estonia, he started telling me how fascinating he finds the Baltic States. My client was already starting to get nervous (obviously, me picking him up was out of his regular routine as I used to have him 2 years ago and he was still a bit insulted that I had to give work with him up unexpectedly and now I was talking to other guy actively) and I tried to calm him down while the new guy kept going on about the situation with the Russians in Estonia. Aaaaand then, he said something. I felt like being hit by a brick. I asked him to repeat it. "Kaks" (two in Estonian, it somehow fit into the current topic we had). And then he said he had been studying Estonian by himself at home and told that he finds Finno-Ugric languages interesting and told that "Yeah, Estonian and Finnish are really similar but Hungarian is completely different". It seemed to me that he knows more about why Hungarian belongs to this language group and all the details related to it but I didn't have time to ask him more. Unfortunately. Every now and then he would drop another Estonian word to me during our conversation and eventually, when I managed to ask him whether he has met any Estonians in his life, he said "No". He then added that he knows Eda-Ines Etti and our president and that he wanted to look more into the background of the new Austrian president (Van der Bellen) as he has Estonian roots. He also told that we changed our money recently and that our previous currency was  "Kroon". Pronounced as perfectly as one can expect a German speaker to say it (with the German "r"). He said the word in Estonian though.  I told him that I still have some Estonian money left at home and he said he collects money and asked me whether I could give him one of them (unfortunately I have them in Estonia, but now, when I think about it later I might try to organize something for him). He also asked for my phone number (which I didn't give, because you know, clients). When I dropped him off, he said "Nägemist" and "Aitähh" to me (Seeya, thanks). My client was by that time already on the edge of banging his head on the window and my attempts in trying to calm him down were not working too well until the other guy had left the car and he could have me only for him for talking).
To sum it up- I met a random probably Asperger guy who is so fascinated about Estonia that he learns the language by himself, knows probably a lot about my country and actually has no real contact to the country at all. I was the first real Estonian he had ever met. I must say, probably he spoke more Estonian than many foreign boyfriends of Estonian girls do. Now that is something extraordinary. And he should be one of the people I work with, one of my clients....
I most sincerely hope I get to meet this guy again and be able to talk to him a bit more.
This stuff just doesn't happen, except that it did today. I'm still shocked (but positively).
Aja, he said that he was motivated by Daniel Tammet (the author of "Born on a blue day", another random autistic guy who has learnt Estonian because he liked how is sounds). What is it with autistic people and Estonian language?? We must have a perfect language for autistic people (for some weird reason).

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