Skip to main content

"CAN I BORROW SOME SOUP TO WASH MY HANDS, I´M PREGNANT? or "How to Learn Spanish"



I hopped off the back of the pickup truck that had given me a ride from town to the place that I knew as the rural farming cooperative “La Quinta”.  There were a group of farmers sitting just off the road in front of a stone cattle pen.  They had finished hand milking about 20 or 30 cows and had sent the galvanized pails of milk into town for sale.  They glanced up at me as I hoisted my backpack and walked towards them, puzzling over this strange gringo.

After nodding my hello, I began trying to explain to them, in a hesitant and very poor Spanish, the reason for my being there.  I wanted to know if I could stay there, as part of my internship with a university in the U.S.  (In my bad Spanish, it was probably something like “Me want living with you.  Me study boy”  I wanted to have the experience of living and learning from their experience of cooperative farming in the middle of a revolution and civil war – to write about their challenges and successes. (“Know me live here farmer together - revolution and fight – write something.”

After about five minutes of my increasingly nervous blather, during which time the farmers watched bemusedly and what seemed to be uncomprehendingly from in front of the corral, one man who later turned out to be the president of the cooperative stood up, came toward me, made a sign for me to basically just shut up, reached out, grabbed my arms one by one and roughly pressed each forearm between thumb and fingers, testing to see if there was any muscle there.  He then smiled and said;  “Sure, you can stay with us.”

That was the beginning of my 8 month stint as an adopted member of the cooperative, construction helper, field hand and, eventually, learner of Spanish.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

VYZYATKA, HABAR, BAKSHEESH, PAYOLA (or A BRIBE BY ANY OTHER NAME …) “Dokuments, please.    Spaceba.   You are coming from where?  Going to where?” “And how many beers have you had, comrade?” I was ready for the question from the moment that the Kyrgyz policeman first stuck his head through the driver’s side window into the new Russian-made Niva truck.   “Beer?  I have had no beer, Officer...”  It was worth a try, wasn’t it?  But the look on his face immediately told me that it just wasn’t going to work.  “Oh, Okay.  Look, I had one beer with lunch.”  “But comrade, you must know that it is illegal in Kyrgyzstan to drink and drive.  It is the same in your country, da?”  Okay, okay – the bribe was offered, accepted and we were once again our way.  Given that we were stopped within 15 minutes after starting on our 12 hour drive SHOULD have given me an indication that it was not going to be an easy trip....
1 comment
Read more

ALL THE WORLD IS KINDA LIKE A STAGE

In the summer of 1975, while pursuing a degree in Theatre Design at Penn State University, I headed to Dayton, Ohio to work as a stage carpenter at Wright State University.   The summer theatre season put on by the University included six productions:   the musical Man of La Mancha based on the story of Don Quixote; the psychological thriller Veronica's Room (by Ira Leven –author of Rosemary’s Baby); the classic black comedy “ Arsenic and Old Lace ”; “ After Magritte ”, a surreal comedy by Tom Stoppard; “ The Real Inspector Hound ”, a one-act audience participation ‘whodunit’ also by Stoppard and, finally, Shakespeare’s “ Twelfth Night”.   You can well imagine the craziness of pulling together SIX plays over a four month period, all on the same stage!   The set designer, whose name is lost both to me and the internets) was considered one of the best of his time.   In order to meet the heavy schedule, we first completed the first set – in this case for Man...
Post a Comment
Read more
On Gentrification, Group Living and Other Delights An NPR report on gentrification made me think of the different circumstances in which I have witnessed it firsthand in my life.   As a rule, gentrification of a neighborhood impacted primarily on economically disadvantaged populations and people of color, as younger, upwardly-mobile couples (“Yuppies” in the vernacular of the day) began to move from the suburbs back into urban neighborhoods in search of cheap housing and shorter commute times.   The North Side of Pittsburgh in the 1970s was one example; in this case, the influx of well-to-do young couples impacting on ethnically diverse working and middle class families whose livelihoods and security had fallen away from them with the closing of plants and mills associated with the steel industry. As fallen-down houses were renovated and businesses designed to service the newer, upwardly mobile, predominantly “professional” population increased, so did the tax base - for...
Post a Comment
Read more