“Which way is your house?” I asked the boatman. He couldn’t have been more than 14. “Water coming,” he answered and pointed upstream, against the current. It took me a while to catch on. “Oh, you mean upstream. In English we say ‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’. I gestured ahead and then behind our boat to demonstrate. “No, no, madam,” he said as if to a child, pointing just as I had done. “Water coming, water going.”