Ch. 5: Yo hablo americano

I need to get vegetables.

Okay, I think I’ve communicated that I’d like to buy vegetables. He’s calling his girlfriend / my host sister over, letting my host mom know what I just said, and it looks like he’s now gesturing for me to get in the car.

Oh, now the grandmother’s getting in the car. I wonder if we all need vegetables.

No, we are dropping off grandma at her friend’s house.

Well, there’s goes the supermarket.

I wonder where we are going.

I could ask. Should I ask? I believe the question is “A dónde vamos?”

I have asked.

I literally did not understand anything they just said.

Well, now I have to say “Okay”, because I’ve already asked them to repeat it twice.

Looks like we just picked up a new person. I think she introduced herself as Jasmine but there is 50% chance that I’m wrong.

We are parking the car and I think my host sister is trying to communicate the reason for said parking.

I think she is saying they are going to go vote in the city elections.

I am smiling and nodding not because I understand but because I don’t want to hold up the process.

Now we are going somewhere else.

This is definitely someone’s home.

I have no idea who this lady is but she is offering me cold tea and a seat by the fan.

Their conversation looks like so much fun.

I wonder if I look as worthless as I feel.

Jasmine(?) is now kissing my cheek goodbye and I think this is when I say “Encantada”.

Dang it, I hesitated too long. There she goes.

We are passing by an office supply store and my host sister is remembering that I wanted to buy a map of Cartagena.

We spent more time in there than I’d thought.

It would have helped if I had known how to say the school supplies I’d wanted to buy.

I just spent the last of my money.

Okay, she definitely just said, “mañana”, “comprar”, and “verduras”, so I think we are going home now.

I need to get vegetables.

In my first few months in Cartagena, I lived anywhere from 3 seconds to 30 minutes behind — trying to process what word was just said to trying to figure out what brought us here. I became very aware of the clear difference between “listening” and “comprehension”. I could do one, the other, but never both at the same time. I’d do a fist pump if I could recognize the words, and then silently repeat them to myself as I searched my internal dictionary for the meaning. I’d hear tiny kids crying to their moms while conjugating verbs flawlessly and think that they were geniuses. I relied heavily on keywords and non-verbal cues —tones, gestures, and expressions — which, to my surprise, turned out to be enough most of the time. Turns out we often use more words than we need to.

I’d done this before — floundering helplessly in an unfamiliar language — when I’d moved to the U.S. However, it was angrier going through it as a 25-year-old. I hated sitting in the backseat in complete silence. I hated being lost (and never quite found) in group conversations. I hated coming across as shy and quiet, the last words I’d call myself.

And when it was all over, I’d look at the angry rant I’d just scribbled in my journal and see a plethora of different ways to say, “This hurts my ego”.

There is a quote that goes, “Until you are broken, you don’t know what you’re made of”. As it happens, a case of broken language will do you just as well.