This week hubby is on a business trip to Belize, Central America. Our teenaged daughter and her friend Bethany went along with him. While hubby works, the girls will be spending a night with the natives and attending a local high school, gaining all sorts of interesting cultural experiences.
It is no small thing for two homeschooled girls from Indiana to spend the night in a tiny, third world village with limited electricity and no indoor plumbing, so they are building up to it. Last night they visited the home in which they will be staying, had dinner with the family, and checked out the surroundings.
While driving back to the hotel, hubby gave me a call. I could hear the girls chattering incessantly in the background. He shared that the house had only one light, and all the bugs swarmed around the single bulb. Bethany happened to be sitting under that light during dinner and bugs were continually dropping into her food. Apparently picking them out became quite a chore because I heard her pipe up proudly, “I finally just started eating them!”
While in Rome… nah, forget Rome. This girl would make a great Belizean!
Hubby said he really wished I could have been there. I thought that was incredibly sweet until I found out why. The parents only speak Spanish, and the children speak English but are not adept conversationalists. He did his best to keep up a dialogue, but it was quite awkward and no one said much at all.
That’s why he said it would have come in handy to have me there because I can ramble on incessantly for hours and fill any conversational void. That doesn’t mean what I’m saying is intelligent or interesting, it just means I can’t stand awkward silence. So, if no one else is talking I feel as though it is my personal duty to keep things from being too quiet. In other words, I can’t shut up.
I pointed out that had I been there, I definitely would have kept the conversation from lagging, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t have been awkward. Last time I was in Belize I was trying to converse with a Spanish speaking woman whose eleven year old daughter did her best to act as our interpreter. The woman was showing me an old photograph of her deceased mother and I was trying to convey that my mother is dead too.
After I rolled out about 20 words that did not mean dead, the woman literally threw her hands in the air, rolled her eyes, and said very emphatically, “NO MAMA!”
“Yes,” I replied, “I mean, SI! Si, no mama!”
The same thing happened at McDonald’s in Mexico when I tried to tell them I am not a coffee drinker and that I had ordered a coke. I don’t think java is a Spanish word but all I could think of was, “No java! Coca-Cola!”
That repeated phrase, coupled with a series of universal hand motions and some random Spanish words that probably had nothing to do with the situation, finally resulted in a nice, cold Coke.
I am pleased to say that at least I wasn’t yelling. I have learned that Spanish speaking folks have the same capacity for hearing as we do, and speaking vociferously does not make me more coherent.
Had I been with hubby last night I would have asked all kinds of questions, and then been afraid that I had offended them, so I would have tried to explain myself and probably would have ended up offending them in the explanation process.
And who knows what Spanish words would have popped out of my mouth. I might have finally remembered the word for dead and shared that my mama is muerto and no longer drinks java. I’m sure that would have gone over quite well.
Hopefully conversation will come a little easier for the girls when they are staying in this family’s home tonight. I told them to take a flashlight for trips to the outhouse, and a bed sheet that they can wrap in to protect themselves from bugs. Unless, of course, they would rather just eat them.
Leave a Reply