This semester I had the chance to volunteer at a local kindergarten/pre-school, Chikicole, where I got to play with darling Mexican children and teach a little English. This helped fill the hole that the kids at La Casa de Amistad (a Hispanic community center in South Bend) left in my heart this semester, and was a good chance to practice Spanish with people who had absolutely no reservations about correcting me or telling me they had no idea what I was saying: namely, 4-year-olds.
My most embarrassing language-barrier story from the semester comes from Chikicole, as well. In my defense, it was early in the semester, and the first time we went to the pre-school. I was playing and chatting with one of the little girls at recess when she pointed at a Nigerian girl from my group and asked blatantly, “Why is her skin black?” At first I was a little put off, but as Mexico is significantly less diverse than the US, I tried to turn it into a teaching moment. “Well, she’s from the US,” I explained, “and people have all different skin colors there: black, white, and brown.” (Many Mexicans refer to themselves as morenita, or brown.) And this was where I went wrong; the word for brown is moreno, but what I said was morado, which means purple.
Her eyes got wide. “Are there blue people, too?” she asked. Confused, and not yet realizing my mistake, I replied that of course there weren’t blue people, just people like her, me, and my African friend. But she was clearly entranced by the idea of people of all (and I mean all) colors in the magical land of the United States. When I explained my confusion to someone else in my group, they caught my mistake immediately, and I experienced true mortification at the hands of a 4-year-old. I can only hope that someone set her straight before she got too attached to the notion of blue Americans.
I hope I helped teach a little English to the kids at Chikicole, but I know that they taught me just as much, not least of all that the colors unit in Spanish 1 might come in more handy than you think. We have almost exactly one week left in Mexico, and we head to the Yucatan peninsula tomorrow to log some beach time and visit some Mayan ruins before coming back to the snowy Midwest.
Viajes en Puebla 