Learning a language is difficult in the best of times. One’s head fills itself with words and sounds; some of which are correct and others which are just that: sound. This challenge is ever the more exacerbated in times of stress. I just spent the past four days in San Andres, Colombia putting myself through the truest of tests; the foreign family vacation.
I forget sometimes how short a time it has been since I’ve been speaking Spanish. Yes I took a couple university courses in Spanish, and vacationed/studied a little bit in Central America, but it really has only been about a half a year where I’ve really put myself through the stresses of learning the language. I’ve gotten to the point that when my mouth opens or I type on the computer the first words that spill out, for better or for worse, are in Spanish.
I understand things well, when one person is talking to me. However, when pushed, and I have an excited family of Peruvians laughing and chanting at the same time I might as well be listening to a chirping pack of hyenas as they devour their prey. I must, to others around, look like I’m having a seizure as I try to twist and turn my head to catch as much of the action as I can. There are times where everything is clear as a bell. And then you have set backs, like when you’re proud that you finally had a dream in Spanish, and then you wake up only to realize that you don’t think you understood a word in your dream.
Each language, too, has its dialects and each person idiosyncrasies in their speech. Some people speak with a mumble, and others speak at the speed of a machine gun with a jammed trigger. In language, simple stresses on different letter could be the difference between ordering chicken or a prostitute. And a simple one letter switch could leave you confused for two or three days. For example, when toasting me with a “salud” my girlfriend’s dad would toss me a “socio” meaning “partner” or “buddy.” But for the first three days of my Caribbean vacation I thought he was calling me “sucio” meaning dirty. And to be quite honest, I wasn’t sure I knew how to take that from the father of my Peruvian girlfriend.
San Andres itself reflex a similar image to that of many of the other Caribbean Islands. It offers white sea shell beaches, clear turquoise blue waters, and a variety of water related activities. Its buildings are thickly coated in full colours of blue, yellow, and pink, as they fight to hide the effects of pounding tropical rains and humid salty sea air. Its history brags of a colonial past where pirates made refuge and proxy wars were fought via free-wheeling privateers.
But like many of the Caribbean Islands, there are two different sides to the San Andres coin. There is the afore-described San Andres that the bourgeoning Colombian, Peruvian, and Argentinean tourists see. It’s here where the grinning white teeth welcome the herds of tourists with saying of “no worries” as they lead them off to their all-inclusive, or should we say all-protected, resorts. While in the towns and back streets people live in hurricane ravaged houses and people live in constant threat of violence. At night, while the tourist sit locked in their resorts, the streets just blocks away are riddled with strife.
The resorts too can themselves be descriptors of the social/racial hierarchy that persists in Latin America. Upon arrival to the resort, my first spoken thought to my girlfriend was “wow, there’s a lot of gringos (a term once used for Americans, but now for all western people) here!” As I started to explore a little bit more I started to realize that all the “gringos” were speaking crystal clear Spanish. In the age of Spanish Colonial Rule there was a strictly adhered to racial hierarchy. Peninsulares (those born in Spain) were the top dogs followed by Criolles (pure bread Europeans born in the ’New World”, then it was the Mestizos and Mulattos (those of mixed European and Indigenous or Spanish blood), the Blacks, and finally the Indigenous people. Today most disregard that racial divide as a thing of the past, but it really does only take a foreign eye in a Latin America shopping mall or an all-inclusive resort to see that it is, still to this day, the white people that have all the money. The racial divide is still alive and well, even if we don’t want to talk about a subject that seems to have become off limits.
As I’ve settled myself into my foreign family vacation I start realizing how good at faking it I’ve become. I’ve learned quite quickly that the tone of someone’s speech can describe what type of avoidance response should follow. The stress of a sentence offers me clues of whether I should pass on a si, a “claro (of course)” or a “no, que pena (too bad)” or if the sentence requires a more constructive response. The goal for the uncomfortable is avoid strict engagement, but yet not to appear to be a mute.
In any case, as the foreign family vacation proceeds and the typical ‘in-law’ family tensions begin to fade, we all start to realize that regardless of place of birth or language good people are good people. And it doesn’t take an exchange of verbal language to describe that.
Coming up…
- Buses in South America “To Look or Not to Look?”
- The sleeping backpacker
- Tourism: The Cultural Clash
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