The highlights: the family goes to EMS to buy our 40 freeze dried meals for our backpacking trip. Frances and I share a shopping basket, and I leave it in the middle of the women's clothes section on the floor, meanwhile my mom checks out and we don't realize we don't have any food until we try to pack later that evening. I drive all the way back, lose my wallet, find it again, and on the way home see a dog wandering down the road. Somehow I decide it would be a good idea to help this wandering dog (an example of how my stress was clouding my rationality) and it begins to attack me! I was attacked by a dog! No cuts or bites thank god, otherwise I would have rabies needles in my stomach right now, but it charged me 3 times on this road that is in the middle of nowhere, crashing into me with its shoulder and snarling at me. I just started screaming my head off, not that anyone could hear me, but then a man drove by and rolled down his window.
"Are you ok?"
"Um, yeah, I just stopped to help this dog, but it's attacking me, so I think I'm just going to leave"
"Uh, I think that's a good idea"
"Yeah, ok, thanks"... I leave and just go home, slowly backing away fro the dog and jumping in the car. And life goes on. It was really weird to be charged by something, that is just a weird feeling, and gives me the shivers to think back on.
But all of this is ok, because now I get to blog about Guatemala. I have been looking forward to this/trying to do this for 2 weeks since I got back, but haven't had an ounce of energy left after 12 and 14 hour work days on Camp Roxaboxen, our homemade day camp. Now I have no choice because we are leaving tomorrow for 10 days in the wilderness of northern Maine to backpack on the Appalachian Trail! So, no more internet for a while.
I went to Guatemala!!!! It still makes me smile so much to think about... not only all of the fun that I had but I smile because of how small my world was before I went and how much more I feel as though I understand after coming back. And I smile because I got to hang out in the house of one of my closest friends from K College, Luisa, in her home country, something I had never thought I would be able to do. I never thought I would be able to experience her family life like I m able to with my other friends, but I did!
One thing that I now understand more about, is what it is like to be a speaker of a second language. Communicating was definitely the hardest thing for me on this trip. I thought I spoke spanish... took it for my whole life, took the AP level my senior year... but I don't. I was so lucky to be visiting my friend Luisa at her home and hanging out with her family, and my experience was invaluable because of this. She was infinitely kind, always making sure I understood what was going on, and catching me up in conversations. But I was in a hard place because I knew the words for simple things that I wanted to say, but when I tried to say them I was suddenly paralyzed, blubbery and clumsy. I felt so incapable. It was really hard not being able to easily say exactly what I wanted to say when I wanted to say it. Especially when I was having incredible new experiences... I just couldn't formulate sentences that would do justice to my emotions, and because it felt useless to say something in English, I would often just not say anything. Ugh, it was s crazy and hard, I have compiled a list of some things to keep in mind when learning a new language that I want to remind myself of for Spanish, and also Thai soon!:
1) Don't try to directly translate between languages. Many times I would ask Luisa how I could say a certain colloquial phrase from english in spanish, and she would suggest a very simple word that I kew how to use, but hadn't connected as a synonym. I wish I had focused more on absorbing the pattens of the language, and trying to repeat them in the context of things I wanted to say. I wish I had acknowledged earlier that spanish is its own pattern and sequence of words and phrases that have no orientation around English whatsoever. We can translate to draw connections, but sentence structure does not match.
2) Just go for it! So many times I felt myself recoil when I started to tell a story, or say something complicated that I was unsure about, because it felt weird to hear myself say new words in a new language. But it couldn't have sounded weird to them, because I was using words that are familiar to them... so what if they are in a jumbled mess, saying them in a jumbled mess is better than being too scared to say them at all for fear of being wrong. I now know that I sounded stupider kind of fizzing out and shying away from saying something rather than saying something incorrectly but with confidence and charisma. Making mistakes is the only way to learn, and luckily for me I was always being corrected :)
3) There is a certain part of our second language that we will never understand. Language is something that socializes you, and establishes a network and foundation off of which many hoer "slang" or "colloquial" phrases are built. Being on the receiving end of so many phrases and words that strayed from the unrealistic rigidness of my spanish education gave me so much perspective with which to think about the English language and how many small phrases or groups of words we just throw around, but that don't have any structural significance, only social significance. But so, so many people who speak English as a second language participate in these colloquialisms! This is mind blowing to me, and incredibly impressive! It represents an incredibly literate level of proficiency in the language, a level that I feel will take an eternity for me to get to in Spanish.
Gosh, there are so many cool things to write about... I wish I could make this post 100 pages long... maybe I can add later...
The highlights were definitely getting to see Luisa's neighborhood, school, and country. We also went to Peten, the northern region of Guatemala and saw the Mayan Ruins there... wow. They were absolutely mind blowing, and so HUGE and old! We went to Antigua, the colonial city, and Panajachel, a lake surrounded by volcanos. The last thing we did was spend the weekend at an amusement park in the south, I forget the name :( but it was super, super fun, like a resort, except way nicer and way less crowded than anything I have seen here! I was definitely in a winning situation getting more value for my dollar down there, because everything was so cheap.
Oh, and the FOOD. Oh man, I don't even know where to start... well maybe with the avocados, and mangos, and pretty much every other "tropical", as they were known to me, fruit that I got to eat and try. I loved the amount of coffee we drank (pretty much with every meal), and all of the staple foods (eggs, beans, plantains, tortillas <3). There was a lot of salt, and lemon/lime, but these foods just make your life better. To be honest, I really, really enjoyed everything that I ate. It was all just so different. For example, if I cookie was sweet it had a different twinge of sweetness than I am used to. My degree of familiarity with everything that I put in my mouth was just far more removed than I am used to. For example, plantains are everywhere, you eat them with everything, and I had barely heard of them before. It took me a while to really be able to imagine what it would be like to eat them every day, but for someone who that is all they know, it sounds so weird not to. I LOVED the meat. Life lesson #43: season your food (rarely happens in our house). Marinate it, shake something on top of it, or put sauce on it, but season it... it's so much better!
Finally, I feel as though now I truly understand the meaning of culture. Culture has been so ambiguous for me in my life, and in the communities I am a part of... my family and region does not really have a culture. In Guatemala, the culture was so real and strong, I feel like only now do I understand more about what culture is, even though it seemed to be such an elementary concept. It can be as simple as tradition, food, and historical influence over the trajectory of a society and how culture developed from that, or religion, but it can also be the way people relate to one another. Everyone in Guatemala was so warm and compassionate, always incredibly polite and friendly, even when interacting with other strangers. Being a part of such a warm environment really gave me a change of heart about the way I relate to people around me, especially my family. It's the difference between independence and interdependence. I want to set more of an exempt of interdependence in my life, and create stronger every day bonds with people I care about.
As Luisa told me, and I agree, it was so SO good to do this before study abroad, and in such a warm, supportive family environment!
Things I want to remember:
-That I want to go back
-That culture is such a strong, real thing, and I want to experience it more!
-That the little things matter so much more than the big ones
