Approximately every time I open my mouth here I feel completely stupid. And that's when I'm speaking English! Spanish is worse, because I feel not only entirely inadequate for the situation and the relationship, but I also feel sorry for the person who has to so patiently deal with this glazed look on my face normally reserved for the inhabitants of a mortuary. And no amount of repeating will make me understand if I simply don't know the word they are using. Add in the ambient sound effects of children screaming, dogs barking, sports announcers rambling, Lauren Harlow losing her sanity and my skin catching on fire and you have a delightful recipe for my complete failure to understand.
Something so humiliating, however, cannot help but have a life lesson embedded somewhere in it. For me, it hasn't been a grand revelation of a new truth but rather a fulfillment of something I expected that at the same time defied my expectations. It is the fleeting nature of intelligence and its symbiotic relationship with language. Back home, it is so easy to look at someone who can only speak broken English and sort of just assume they are less intelligent or impaired or simply very un-American (which for some is synonymous with the first two). A little grace with people who speak a different language goes so far, as I experienced over and over today. So whenever you have a difficult experience with someone of a different ethnicity just remember that somewhere in the world you, too, would be completely at the mercy of someone else. To be primarily a receiver of the love of Christ through others is a stretching yet beautiful experience. When you are in a comfortable environment the illusion of self-sufficiency and knowledge are able to solidify to a degree, but they are nothing more than the wishful phantasms of broken people clinging to a wholeness they never had. Being here has made very clear to me the reality of our total dependence on the Trinity for all things and our perpetual state of helplessness before God.
That's probably enough reflection for today. I just wanted to prove that I didn't spend ALL of my time dwelling on Ke$ha...only most of it.
Also, fun fact: The 5th grade english textbooks here frighten me. The first half teaches you how to learn english and the second half teaches you to love America. Seriously, the second half is arrayed in red, white and blue and gives reading assignments about Abe Lincoln, Mount Rushmore and Uncle Sam. I wouldn't like these even in America, but here it just doesn't seem very helpful. At least they're learning! I was impressed by some of the kids' vocabulary.
It's raining again. Talk to y'all later.
-Mateo
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