Listening In, and Learning Spanish

New photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/meghanhatch

"Confronted by the foreign we grow newly attentive to the details of the world." --Pico Iyer


Tomorrow I leave Otavalo after 2 and half truly wonderful weeks in this mountain town, center of a certain kind of world. I have had to change my original plans to farm outside of this town, and so I will head south to a farm in a small village near Baños, a major tourist center situated in yet another valley. But whereas Otavalo is dropped down in the middle of the two parallel strips of Andes mountains (the Eastern and Western Cordilleras) Baños borders the eastern Andes range and the Amazon basin. It's subtropical, so it's lush and green but still hemmed in by some of the largest peaks in the cordillera, including Volcan Tungurahua, which last erupted in 2006. Mom, Dad, don't worry. Right now, she just belches bunches of tourist-thrilling smoke. (There is no current concern regarding the danger of Tungurahua, promise.)

While here I have been living above a cafe, La Casa de Fruta, with a woman named Cherie and her daughter, Sasha. Old School Hippie and Hippie Nuevo. They have made me so welcome and have opened not only their home and their kitchen to me, but their lives as well. And while I have had so much fun here with them, it is time to go and begin the sweaty, muddy labor of love that is the farming. The question remains: will I love it?

The most important thing I've been doing in Otavalo is studying Spanish. I've had lessons for two weeks, 4 hours a day, one on one with a woman who speaks zero English. I have come away from these classes with more than just a larger Spanish vocabulary and the understanding, finally, of what the Present Perfect Tense is. Learning a new language is an exercise in humiliation, frustration, and well, it can make you feel like a total elementary idiot. However, if you let it, it can change the approach to and the experience of traveling.

One can choose to travel and hear nothing, or one can choose to treat it as a constant exercise in becoming a better listener. We get so used to anticipating what someone is going to say that we often answer without having listened to the question. I find myself newly attuned to everything going on around me. As an English speaker in this Spanish speaking world it would be so much easier to shut out the conversations around me, or to conclude what I want to hear. And often it wouldn't even matter. Not to them. People here are so used to gringos and tourists not understanding that they make concessions for us all the time, like when we say yes to a question when we mean to say no. Or when we say "yes" to a question that requires a response like, "blackberry" or "double occupancy" or "later this afternoon." I know I could go a whole year here and scrape by on my meager vocabulary and survive, but why would I? Because I'm insecure? Embarrassed? Self-conscious? Yes. I am all of those things. But what I missed on my last trip here was the deeper experience of getting into people's lives, histories, stories.

As I often do I compare all traveling experiences to that Ghanaian summer. I had such profound moments there, so much worthy of writing about, so many conversations that blew the lid off of everything I thought I knew, things that made me ponder and think and question. And it was because I was able to talk with people. Yes, as I said many times, the English there was far and away different from the English I was used to, and much was lost in translation, but still I could ask questions, respond, inquire, joke, explain. I want to have those moments here, in Spanish. Fluency may be a far off dream, but this is not the point.

Spending 4 hours a day in a room with no respite, no English moments, forced me to think differently, and to let go of a rigidity that is natural but unconscious. I think in English. Why wouldn't I? But expressing myself in Spanish beyond telling people what I want to eat or what kind of room I'd like to sleep in, this requires thinking in Spanish, mentally uprooting nearly 3 decades of what I've learned and honed and practiced as an English speaker. That is the trickiest and most elusive practice in learning a new language. To put forth my thoughts or to ask the simplest of questions means constantly rearranging the structure of my phrases and changing the words.

In most cases you cannot directly translate an English sentence into a Spanish one, and this goes beyond just putting the adjective after the noun. Spanish will have one single word for an entire phrase, and this is magical and concise and confounding. The verbs for To Be (Ser) and To Go (Ir) are the exact same words in the past tense (Fui, Fuiste, Fue...). "Um, excuse me, Señora, so, were you going, or were you being? I missed something..." You can say "Espera" and can mean "Hold on" or "Wait" or "I wish." Sometimes it's as though certain words are just...missing from the language, or so it seems, but then I read Marquez´s One Hundred Years of Solitude in English and I am awed by how phenomenal and expansive the Spanish language must be, and how terribly little I will ever really know.

During my lessons I sometimes felt like my brain would not allow a new language to seep in. Maybe I'm too old, it's too late for me. My mind is certain and set in its English speaking way. I nearly wept with frustration at how I would constantly repeat the same mistakes again and again, or how I could never remember the difference between To Put and To Be Able To. Nancy would see my anger, or would hear me say Mierda! under my breath, and she'd respond, "Es normal, normal."

Sometimes I hear people speaking Spanish out my window, and I think that if I just look out I would see them with subtitles. Perhaps it is an American trait, but I'm so used to getting what I want, when I want it, and how I asked for it just by asking for it, that this is not only a lesson in listening, but one in humility as well. I must adapt. I must learn. Or despite the many memories and trinkets and bracelets, I risk going home empty handed.

On our last day of class, Nancy told me that I surprised her again and again throughout our lessons. She said I was "muy differente" than other students. I asked her what she meant and she said that I was bold; that I dared to ask questions, and that I attempted to construct complex sentences and stories whereas others routinely stick to the basics and just silently copy down what she says or writes on the board. She told me to be confident in my Spanish voice, and to keep daring. With this in my mind, I head south...