true life planet

I´ve been meaning to take the time to write about funny language mishaps I have here. Unfortunately, I have had quite a few. Although my Spanish improves day by day, it´s still beginner Spanish. Combine this with the fact that the Spanish here is somewhat different than where I have traveled in the past, and it´s easy for language mishaps to happen. Additionally, cultural differences abound-sometimes people don´t talk about a certain subject directly-or when they do, it´s done in a certain way.

Here´s an example:

One day a dog followed me home. Not sure if he was there to stay, or simply there for a meal, I fed him and figured he would go back home. The next day, he was on the back patio, waiting to be fed again. This happened for several days, so I finally named him Captain Jack Sparrow(Jhonny Depp and pirate movies are very popular here.). Captain Jack made himself comfortable on the back patio, and seemed to have decided Catalina´s home was his new permanent home.

I became concerned that when I finally left to go back to the States, my family would stop feeding Captain Jack. This was a valid concern, as as I have mentioned before, people do not feed their animals here-at least not regularly. Very few people have pets, who are coddled over and well fed, as our animals are in the US. So I was worried about his fate, and trying to figure out if I should take him to a friend´s house who has pet dogs here.

So I asked my family if they would feed him when I was no longer here. But what I actually asked them was ¨Tu come mi perro?¨, which means, ¨Will you eat my dog?¨!!!
This left everyone quite shocked, their mouths open. Once we all realized my mistake, we all cracked up laughing. As a matter of fact, they tell this story over and over again, every single day.

Here´s another example:
The other night, I was attending church with my family. Half way thru the service, the woman next to me started speaking to me. I couldn´t hear all of what she had said-there was alot of chaotic activity going on at the time, and quite a lot of noise- but I did hear her say something about ¨….a person had died ….¨

. So, all I heard was that someone had died, in the church.
Right after she said that, I was looking around at all the people near me. Suddenly, I realized the woman who had been rather fervently dancing in the middle aisle was lying down on the cement. She was in the position of someone who had been laid out-and she wasn´t moving. Was she dead?, I wondered? She did not seem to be moving at all, and people began praying over her. She did not move.

Oh My God.

I am sitting 4 feet away from a dead body, I thought.

Everybody kept singing, praying, dancing, and jumping-it did not seem to matter to anyone that the poor dead woman was in their midst.

I was freaking out. I mean, I was trying to be calm, thinking to myself that this was just another cultural experience-but honestly-I was reeling.

Trying to remain composed, I was about to point out the dead woman to my hostess-she had been onstage and had just come back to her seat-when…

The dead woman suddenly leapt up and started dancing!

Oh my God, I almost had a heart attack! I fell backwards off my seat, and my hostess looked alarmed.

I explained that I had thought the woman was dead! I explained that another woman sitting near us had explained to me that someone had just died, and that I thought it was the (now) dancing and jumping woman, who had been lying on the ground and not moving moments before.
Great hilarity broke out in my family-and they began explaining in Ngobe why I was so shocked when the woman leapt up minutes before to the surrounding people on the benches. With everyone laughing, Catalina explained to me that no had just died-the story I had been particially told happened a year ago. A missionary had died building the church-no one had died that night.
gg

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 1:05 pm and is filed under 1, Cultural Differences!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.