Una Nueva Lengua

Call us naive — or perhaps a bit arrogant — but we were expecting more folks to speak English here in Ecuador. Our crash course in Spanish over these past 10 days has perhaps been the most challenging part of our trip thus far.

Thankfully our in-country coordinator, José, is also the director of the Spanish school where we are each taking ~2 hours of private lessons every weekday. Maria of our host family was an English teacher and tutor as well, and has been instrumental in helping us make sense of things we encounter during our days. But apart from a few volunteers at Camp Hope from Germany, Switzerland, and England, we are the only ones consistently speaking English in our daily interactions.

Erin studied abroad in France back in college, and the similarities between Romance languages is paying off. I took Spanish for much of high school but my lack of applying over these past two decades distinctly shows. Connor and Keegan started their journey being able to count from uno to diez, and not much else. Our initial conversations with the locals were laughable. However, it’s been interesting to watch our progression through these initial phases of language development via daily dinner conservation with our hosts, Maria and Marta:

Day 1: Erin and the Boys have no idea what anyone is saying. I pretend to understand by repeating every ~tenth word I actually recognize, while simply mimicking the facial expressions of whomever is speaking and nodding my head.

Day 3: See Day 1 but instead repeating every fifth word. Maria is taking pity on us by repeating her key points in English after saying in Spanish.

Day 5: The Boys sing “Itsy Bitsy Spider” in Spanish after learning in class. A breakthrough! I’m starting to understand some of dinner conversation and translate for the family. Maria chimes in when I get something blatantly wrong.

Day 7: Whole family is exchanging pleasantries in Spanish. Erin understands much of conversation. I’m attempting to respond in Spanish until I run out of key vocabulary words. “Como se dice…?” applied liberally.

Day 10: Enjoyed a nice conversation with our hosts about parallels between U.S. and Ecuadorian immigration policy and recent elections, with them speaking Spanish and us in English. Information effectively conveyed bidirectionally. Progress!

We are all now starting to reflexively respond to simple questions using Spanish instead of thinking first in English and then having to quickly translate. I believe this is the next inflection point. Escuela daily has been helpful to provide the framework, but there’s nothing like being thrown in the deep end to learn how to swim.

¡Deseanos suerte!