Presenting Pakistan to Five Year Olds

My son's preschool teacher has traveled recreationally to 30 countries. She lived in (what was it? Taiwan, maybe?) for two years, teaching English to kids. A big part of her lesson plans include teaching the kids about the different parts of the world. The celebrated The Day of The Dead, Mardi Gras, Nowruz, and countless others I can't even remember.

She asked M if he would come and talk about Pakistan to our son's class of 12 five year olds. She did that with another kid whose father is from Chile. We did that once before, last year, for a different group of kids. He read a kid's book about Pakistan, told them a few words in Urdu, and they tried on a mirror-decorated kid's vest. They couldn't try on the hat as there'd been a recent lice outbreak.

The kids are older this year, and can probably handle a little more information, so I'm soliciting suggestions. M thinks he should print out pictures of, as he said "markets, buses, farmers, some new buildings, people with folk dresses." I think he should write out all the kid's names in Urdu on pretty paper. LuckyFatima suggested we play a little music and have the kids do some bhangra, which I thought sounded fantastic. I can't think of any foodstuff we could share - it would have to be pre-packaged and contain no nuts. I thought of kulfi but that would be expensive and very heavy for the kids...

(I am trying to be sensitive to our kid's feeling about this. I'm not going to force him to monkey around as a prop and say things in Urdu or dress him up, but I'll ask him how he would like to participate, if at all.)

Any other suggestions?

He Meant Move, Not Cow Poop

It took almost ten years of being in an intercultural relationship, but I've finally found the funniest example of the V/W Distinction problem. My Pakistani-born husband speaks English wonderfully, but occasionally his native Urdu trained tongue slips and he pronounces certain english words the same way he did 9+ years ago when I met him. Usually this happens when he's been speaking a lot of Urdu, such as this weekend after skype-ing with his brother and mother in Saudi Arabia.

I've tried to describe the V/W distinction to people before, usually I use the west/vest illustration. When I met my husband, he couldn't pronounce the two words differently. He even once said he couldn't really hear the difference. Now he does pronounce and hear the difference, it just took practice. Just like the difference between my dental and retroflex t sounds when trying to speak Urdu. I couldn't say or really hear the difference and still often require correction from my family and my ever-patient Urdu teacher, LuckyFatima. (She even makes house calls!)

From now on, though, when discussing the v/w distinction, I'll probably reference the conversation my husband and I had this weekend. He was painting some cabinets in the garage and wanted help moving them around without messing up the paint job, so he came inside to ask for my help. But what he actually said is "I'll need your help to manure the cabinets."

See, folks? The difference between v and w is important. You might want to say maneuver, but you'll get a ton of crap from your wife instead!