So, I stepped outside the Teeny Tiny Apartment© (which Leah has posted some photos of on her Facebook page) … and I was headed to the li’l dumpster that serves as our community trash can … when I was intercepted by a guy in a green-and-reflector-orange jump suit.

I mention this for two reasons — because of the item I wrote about litter, a day ago, and because I had another one of those weird exchanges particularly common in Abu Dhabi between two people ostensibly speaking English.

It turns out, Abu Dhabi actually does have little trash-picker-up elves following behind its litter-chucking populace.

I met one of them today. He had a broom and a pan, and was walking down our street sweeping up things. He saw me headed to the dumpster with my plastic bag of junk, and he intercepted me, and took the trash from me.

OK, thanks, I said.

And then he tried his level best to converse with me, and I tried like heck to figure out what he was saying.

I believe he was speaking English, as best he could. Either that, or he assumed I speak Bengali. And I say Bengali rather than Hindi or Urdu or Malayalam (or any of the other languages commonly spoken in South Asia and, hence, here) … because I thought I heard him say something that sounded like “Bengal” … or “Bangladesh.”

First, he asked me where I am from. Or I thought that might be what he was asking.

I said, “United States.” His round, pleasant face betrayed no hint of comprehension. (For all I know, he had asked me what time it was; I just get “where are you from?” fairly often.) So I tried again. “America,” I said. “California.” I pointed to myself.

He wasn’t ready to give up. He stood there looking at me.

I said, “Where are from?” And I think he said Bengal. It began with a B and had a G sound in it. He didn’t really respond. So I said, “Bangladesh?”

And he might have agreed.

Mostly, we were looking at each other, trying to figure out what was going on. Both of us trying to find some group of words the other might understand.

He said something that may have been, “You should go (visit) Bengal.” And, doing the geography quickly in my head, I confused Bengal with Kashmir — a province on the other side of India that is split between Pakistan and India. So I said, “Bengal … in India or Pakistan?” Meaning, which side of the border was he from?

Which could only have served to muddle things further.  Because I was talking about the wrong part of India.

He may have said Bangladesh, again, and I nodded and repeated “Bangladesh” — which didn’t really sound like what he was saying.

He made an additional statement. A couple of sentences. I had zero idea about any of that. I made a palms up “sorry, not getting you” gesture, and that was that. I may have said goodbye, as I went on my way.

Anyway, we have conversations like that all the time in this country. English is lingua franca, but aside from the native English speakers, it’s generally heavily accented and grammatically garbled. Well, sure. My Urdu would be, too.

It has occurred to me, as we go along here, that the mastery of English is just critical in many parts of the world. This one, certainly.

If you can speak English fairly well (in addition to some other native tongue), you have a good chance of getting an office job. Something inside, anyway. Something that doesn’t involve heavy lifting. Maybe work as a grocery checker or inside a hotel.

If, however, you speak little or no English, you’re probably going to be what is euphemistically referred to as a “laborer” — someone who works at a construction site or a gardener or a litter-picker-upper.

And how fair is that, in a cosmic sense, that the guys who went to a school that had a decent English teacher (or went to school at all) have so many more opportunities in this country, and absolutely can make far more money … while the guys with little or no English are going to be doing back-breaking labor, on the whole.

This little guy — maybe 5-7, maybe 25 years old — was trying his best to engage me in conversation. But we couldn’t make it happen, and I felt bad about it.