Halfling, says the Wikipedia,

Halfling is another name for J. R. R. Tolkien's hobbit and is a fictional race sometimes found in fantasy novels and games. In many settings, they are similar to humans except about half the size. Dungeons & Dragons began using the name halfling as an alternative to hobbit for legal reasons, but since then the race has taken on a life of its own.

Halfling is a term that my daughter Natasha has adopted as an appropriate term for her ethnic situation, and the situations of others either born into families of mixed ethnicity or born to a family that lives entirely in a cultural milieu not its own.

I was writing to Taran in Trinidad, one of the outspoken techies on the Digital Divide Network, a discussion community I belong to. I'd been through his flickr photos and realized that he, too, is a halfling. I wrote to him, "I see you're a halfling. My daughter is one, too, the daughter of two halflings. It isn't always easy to be a halfling, because you see things that other people do not."

I don't think that bi-cultural people (which is what I was calling us before Natasha took up the old Dungeons and Dragons term) see things that are strictly speaking unavailable to others. Edward T. Hall, who introduced me to the concept of nonverbal and unconscious cultural codes, is for all I know a total American, from one place, from people from that one place. But I think it is undeniable that those of us who have become conscious of what makes us residents of two or more worlds see things that others don't. We often ask ourselves the question: Is what just happened a cultural experience or a universal one?

More often than not, it's cultural.

Case in point: Natasha went to visit her boyfriend's parents Thanksgiving evening, bringing cake. And they had a discussion that was wholly out of the realm of American conversations between a boy's parents and his maybe sorta kinda girlfriend. They talked about the boy, about his shortcomings, about their fears about him, about their aspirations for him. They INTERVIEWED her as if she were a prospective wife. They wanted to know where she stands, what she thinks, what they can expect. They are a bi-cultural couple, and she could negotiate that split and that difference because she's a halfling, and a conscious one. She knows what the boy's father means when he says, I think you would be good for him. She understands when he says that if his son married a woman he could approve, he would buy him a house, a car, provide for him. Dowry discussions are part of his culture, and she knew that, and was clear with them.

Natasha talked this morning about her bitterly angry discussions with the far-left liberal students at her far-left liberal university.

Her half-Indian friend said, "I'm going to make a list of all the inconsiderate and offensive things people say to me about not being white. They are so OBLIVIOUS."

And Natasha answered her, "Oh, then do I get to make a list of the offensive things you all say about Southerners?"

"It's not the same thing."

Of course it is. Damning, ethnocentric speech is common to all cultures, even far-left liberal ones. Every time we identify our "we-ness," we condemn somebody to a "they-ness" somewhere else. And, as Molly Ivins says, "The antidote to hate speech, is not less free speech, but more free speech."

No, we cannot know what it really feels like to be black or even brown in a country of white people. I cannot know what being Nepali really feels like, but I can learn the language and I have the ability, as a halfling who has spent her life studying culture, to "get" a lot of it. I have the ability to recognize a cultural code when I find one.

Case in point: This week, I've been trying to get myself a business visa for my visit to Nepal. The tourist visa is only a month long, and I would like to have the authorization to ask my clients to actually pay me a small fee for the work I do for them. Legally, then, I need a business visa. I notice on the government web site that "technology transfer" is one of the investments in Nepal that the government is supporting. I am a technology transfer agent. Ergo...

So I wrote to a man I thought could help me. We talked on the phone. "It's good you called," he said. "Everything in Nepal happens through relationships." "I knew that," I told him. "That's why I wanted to talk to you." He has connections. He fired off an email to several of them and one wrote back. He sent me a copy of her response with the suggestion I write to her directly. Then he sent her a thank you note.

But what a thank you note! It was lyrical. Sincere. Heartfelt. And very, very Nepalese. If I sent you that thank you note, you might be suspicious of the flowery turn of phrase. What the hell? It was just a routine networking favor thing. One hand washes the other. I'm grateful, but let's not gush over it. That note has convinced me to get better in the ways I thank my Nepali friends when they help me out.

More importantly, it is an illustration of the ways we answer the question: Is it cultural or is it universal? It's universal to thank another for a favor granted. The language, the frequency that thanks is expected, the form in which it is couched, the nonverbal or indirect speech associated with it-- these are all cultural. And these are what we need to get if we are going to do business with foreigners.

More than once, I've come up against how much of a beginner I am at technology transfer. There's so much to transfer, for one thing. Virus protection, firewalls, networking, open source software, operating systems, email clients, donor tracking databases, events organization, fund raising auctions, online strategies of all sorts and for all purposes, volunteer management, org technology assessment, strategic technology planning-- the list goes on and on. I have an intuitive grasp of database theory and design, and I know something about Microsoft's Access database application. I have designed web sites and I know how to do it from scratch, with a text editor. I know how to execute a database project, what the steps are. But I just scratch the surface when it comes to even the basic minimum required of a technology worker in the international nonprofit market, which is where I'm working.

But I have something else in my toolkit that few can claim. I have years of research, up close and personal, in the field of intercultural communication. I live with a Frenchman, which ought to qualify me on its own merits, but my skill development doesn't stop there. Because I myself am a halfling, and have known its loneliness, its neither-here-nor-there-ness, because "belonging" is not going to be my situation, now or ever, I have spent most of my life thinking about how culture works, how it excludes, how it makes room for The Other in its midst, how blind it mostly is, how rich and complex. I've traveled far and often, and I've reached for that moment of contact, when two human beings know they have encountered one another across the cultural divide. I know a whole lot about how I can create a bridge between cultures. I am also humble before my many failures, even though I know that one of culture's many quirky traits is the mechanism to reject The Other, i.e., me.

"We don't have any business," goes the leftist political argument, "waltzing into other countries, telling them how to run their technology. Tech workers should all be locals. They know their own context. They know their own people. They know what works for them and what doesn't."

What, then, am I doing charging off around the world with my bag of tricks and my laptop?

I am bringing a bag of seeds, and I'm bringing my experience as a halfling. I don't expect to eliminate hunger in my lifetime, and I don't have any quick fixes for the problems of homelessness or hopelessness. I have some seedling ideas to share, over a meal and a pallet on the floor or a place on the living room couch. My sojourn is my own idiosyncratic offering for world peace: travel to share. Halflings know they have to share; the very division inside of them requires it.