Moving between cultures...

Moving between cultures
I have white skin, he has black skin. This is a very minor difference. He comes from a little village near the Congo, I come from the Eastern suburbs of Sydney... That is more of a divide. We are now flatmates. How are our cultures going to meet, how are we going to move between cultures? We have no common language, no lingua franca to at least ask simple questions like ‘where is..., when do..., can you pass me the...?’ He constantly misread my body language, I misread his. His assumptions about why we are living together are undoubtedly different from mine.
For instance, I’d be happy for him to help me with food shopping and cooking for me, but he wants to do everything. He would happily brush my teeth if I handed him my toothbrush. He observes all my moves and at the slightest completion of an action, he tries to anticipate what I will need next . We are eating dinner together in semi-darkness and unavoidably, heavy silence reigns. I finish eating the wonderful fruit salad he has prepared, I put my spoon down, he gets up immediately to take my plate away. I literally don’t have the words in Kinyarwanda to tell him: ‘It’s OK, Jean-Baptiste, I will have a second helping of your wonderful fruit salad, thank you. All I can do is silently grab the plate back and have a second helping.
Such interaction can be the source of negative stereotyping of ‘the other’. I feel frustrated, inadequate, unable to relax during meals. I find it difficult to be so relentlessly reduced to muteness. I have my second helping and I go to bed, angry at those guys who built Babel!
So far, I am not moving between our different cultures too well...