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"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.

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