I was on my way out to my car when the two little Muslim sisters (I knew this because they both cover their heads with scarves) passed me. I greeted them and somehow, we began talking. A group of their friends, all girls, gathered around us, all talking to me at almost the same time. I asked them where they’re from, and one girl said that she’s from Afghanistan.

“Do you speak Dari or Pashto at home?” I asked. Her jaw dropped.

“You know those?!”

“No, no, not how to speak them. I just know they exist. I know they’re the primary languages of Afghanistan.”

She smiled ear to ear: “We speak Pashto.”

“I’m from Iran,” another girl said. “I speak Persian at home.”

“Oh — Farsi, right? Isn’t ‘thank you’ in Farsi ‘Mersi’?” I asked.

Another jaw dropped.

“I just always found it strangely beautiful that it’s a loan word from French.”

“Do you speak French” the lone boy asked.

“Un peu,” I responded, winking, hoping he wouldn’t push me beyond my meager limits in the language.

But before that could happen, one of the young covered girls announced, “I’m Fatima!” They’d been telling me their names, and she finally got hers squeezed in.

“Oh, like the prophet Mohammed’s daughter, right?” I asked.

Her eyes got enormous and she ran back into the classroom, presumably to tell someone.

The fact that I know these little tidbits seemed to me simply basic education about other cultures. I know Dari and Pashto were Afghan languages because of our country’s involvement in that country and learning a little about it and its history at that point. I know “mersi” was one way in Farsi to say “thank you” because I sat next to an Iranian woman and her child on a flight from Charlotte to Munich in 2015 when I followed K and the kids to Poland a few weeks after they’d left. I know Mohammed’s daughter was Fatima because I read parts of a book about the supposed apparitions of Mary at Fatima. I know a bit of French because I too two years of it in college. Just a few tidbits of knowledge about these girls’ (and one boy’s) language and culture, but it seemed to make their day.

So little go create so much.