Spanglish

Today is quickly coming to an end, as is my time on the internet, so I will just add one thought. In our time here, the people we interact with more regularly have quickly caught on to what we can and cannot understand, as well as ways to act out or describe the concepts that are over our heads. Despite our mutual efforts, most conversations end up with a lot of inferences and assumptions on our part. Slight differences in word choices, tenses, and timeframes make huge differences in how functional we can be day to day. For example, yesterday morning at PE class my understanding was that we were early and class would not start for forty minutes. I inferred this by hearing the words "forty minutes" and "class" and noticing that no one seemed to be in a particular hurry to get ready. It turns out that class was actually about to start, we were almost late, and we had just forty minutes with the kids.

Similar misunderstandings happen all the time in the kitchen; I can hardly count the number of times I have unknowingly insulted our host mom by thinking that she was asking whether I was going to cook for myself rather than whether I wanted some of her food. I am quickly learning to just answer yes to everything, it is less likely to be offensive, and then deal with the consequences. The latest consequence of this method was the small bowl of fish heads and scraggly dried meat (I am positive the same meat was hanging on the clothesline next to my socks a week ago) that ended up in my hand after I stupidly said yes to some incomprehensible question.

That is about all for tonight. We are all pretty exhausted, evidenced by the 3 hour siestas this afternoon. Tomorrow we will head back to the school we visited Monday, in hopes that this time we can avoid trying to run a session in the middle of recess!