LANGUAGE BARRIERS – AUGUST 2ND, 2006

A short preamble is required… I started writing this quite some time ago. In the meantime, I got distracted with, gasp, work (oh no, not that!), and fun writing sort of fell by the wayside. As a result, though this starts out with “last night”, none of this happened last night but rather about two weeks ago…. Still, here it is! Better late than never!


Last night, about eight o’clock, I went out to let Tofi back into Zee’s yard for the night. As I was coming back across the road, I realized I hadn’t checked the water level in the cistern for quite some time. I try to remember to look regularly so I can let the landlady know I need water before I run out completely. So, before I went back inside, I walked over to the cistern to see how much water was left.

The lid to the cistern is a concrete block about 24 inches by 24 inches by three inches deep. It has two pieces of iron rebar threaded through it to act as handles, and the lid itself is reinforced with more iron rebar. The entire setup weighs quite a bit, but effectively seals the cistern up from anything larger than a smallish rabbit, prevents unfortunate accidents, and just generally protects my water supply. I rate it pretty high on my list of important household items.

So last night, I squatted down, balancing on the balls of my feet, and hauled this lid off the cistern. It is too heavy to hold up while maintaining your balance, so I tilted it up to rest it on the edge of the cistern opening. As I did this, the concrete slid back on the rebar and caught my hands between the concrete and iron. This, as I’m sure you can imagine, was quite uncomfortable. Startled and in pain, I shouted a few words I won’t print here and let go of the lid, expecting it to settle back into the cistern’s opening. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that the difference in size between the hole and the lid is minimal. As I watched, the lid slipped easily through the opening, creating an impressive splash on its way to the bottom of my half-full cistern.

There I was, rocking gently back and forth on the balls of my feet, contemplating the opening in the ground that is slightly larger than me and the very necessary and very heavy lid sitting on the bottom some 15 feet below ground surface. All I could think was, “I wonder how on earth I’m going to deal with this in Spanish! I’m pretty sure no lesson I’ve ever had covered this situation…”

I know it’s trite. Everybody knows on some theoretical level that the words you learn in a classroom rarely apply to most real life situations. Once you actually spend some time living in another language, however, you begin to recognize just how deep that chasm is. There seem to be a number of reasons for the disparity, many of which I’ve encountered in the last week or two.

The first reason I find myself struggling is simply that I never learned the necessary words. Yesterday, I was driving home from the grocery store, and my check engine light came on. This seems to be a poorly named light, because all it really tells you is that you might want to swing by the bank on your way to the mechanic. Whatever is wrong with the engine, transmission, or exhaust system is bound to be costly! And you’ve still got to figure out what the problem is.

I came home and asked Zee to call her mechanic and tell him she was sending someone over. Luckily for me, Zee has a mechanic (and has had the same mechanic for 25 years!) who makes his living repairing all the work trucks (which are all Rams as well) for the University here. But regardless of how familiar he is with the inner workings of my Green Monster, I still had to explain the things I’ve noticed about the truck over the last few weeks. Standing in the yard of Miguel Angel’s shop, I realized that not only did I not know any of the words for the various hunks of metal underneath the hood of my truck, but I also didn’t know how to translate the things we say to describe their functioning (or lack thereof) in English.

While idling, my truck has been running roughly. Kevan suggested that this might have to do with the timing between the transmission and the engine. How, I wondered, was I going to explain this in Spanish. To me, describing a truck as running roughly while idling is loaded with colloquialisms. Can you translate those words directly to Spanish? Or are there a different set of colloquialisms in Spanish? Or do I just not know enough about mechanics to figure out what works and what doesn’t?

Miguel Angel is truly an angel. He was as patient as patient can be, and with a great deal of pantomiming and lots of laughter at the ridiculousness of it all, we seemed to manage to communicate. He kept the truck for four days. At the end of those four days, I was happy to discover that the pantomiming had been successful, and the truck seems to be happy again. We’ll see how it goes!

Yes, that pun was intended…

Sometimes, the language barrier is less about knowing the words then it is about being prepared for a situation. A few weeks ago, the kitchen sink developed a leak. Luckily, it developed it on Wednesday, the day that Zee’s handyman comes to fix, fuss, and garden. When he arrived, I asked if he could pop by to help me with a problem when he was done. He readily agreed and went off to do his work.

In the meantime, I realized that I had no idea how to say the word “leak” in Spanish. So, I popped into the office and looked it up in the handy dictionary. Armed with my new, handy word, I waited for Tonio to arrive.

Two hours later, he came to the door. I led him to the kitchen sink, proudly proclaiming that I had a leak in the sink. He bent down, looked under the sink, and said, “No you don’t.”

Just an aside here. Tonio is quite convinced I’m a total, complete, utter, incompetent idiot. Some days, I’m not sure he is wrong, but I know a leak in the kitchen pipes when I see one! I wanted to insist. I knew all the words individually, but together? For some reason, this situation just struck me dumb. Trying to wrap my brain around the conversation that needed to happen proved impossible. After a few false starts, with Tonio looking more and more disgusted at each one, I finally gave up and told him I’d let him know if the mysterious leak reappeared.

“Si, senorita” he responded, with a barely concealed roll of they eyes. He walked out, leaving me to ponder the workings of the sink pipes in English solitude.

Still, sometimes the language barrier, or the assumption of one, comes in handy. When Kim was here visiting, we drove to Taxco for a weekend away. The route is relatively straightforward, though at a couple of points the highway signage leaves a great deal to be desired, even by Mexican standards! At one point along the route, we reached a toll plaza. A line of booths stood in front of us. In the four left lanes, the booths were marked as closed with big red x’s glowing above each lane. Off to the side, the two right lanes had big inviting green arrows glowing above. No signs were in evidence. I did what seemed to me the obvious thing and pulled into one of the lanes marked as open.

As a rule, I make conversation with the toll booth man by asking him if I’m heading in the right direction. It gives us both something to do while one of us fumbles for change. So, as I handed him my bills, I smiled and said, “Is this the road to Taxco?”

“Taxco? You want to go to Taxco? But you need to be over there!” He pointed at the four booths marked as closed. I watched a car sail through. Oh dear…

Apparently, the red x’s, which everywhere else in Mexico indicate a closed toll booth, here indicated that there was no need to stop and pay a toll and you should feel free to keep driving right on through on your way to Taxco.

Sighing, I asked the man at the Tollbooth how to get back on the highway from the exit I was apparently pulling off at.

He sighed. He explained that this was quite impossible. There was no way back on the highway, he insisted.

Now, this struck me as problematic and illogical. Surely, if you can get off the highway, eventually you can get back on…. I decided it was time to “not understand”

I smiled sweetly, nodded, and said, “Oh, o.k., and am I going to go right or left after that?”

He looked puzzled. He insisted again that there was no way out of the exit and back onto the highway.

I nodded eagerly and said, “Yes, yes, but then do I go right or left?” I was determined not to understand.

By this time, a crowd had gathered. The army man with the submachine gun who guards the toll plaza sauntered over. The vendors who sell everything from a windshield wash to fresh baked bread to the cars stopped at the toll plazas gathered. The men all looked at each other, they looked at me. They decided that the easiest thing to do was to get the 8 cars and 5 tractor trailers lined up behind me in the lane to back up enough that I could get back on the highway. It was either that or make the gringa understand Spanish, and given the choice, well… It was no competition.

So the vendors fanned out waving madly for all the cars and trucks to back up. The army man conducted it all with his machine gun. High pitched beeps filled the air as the big rigs started moving slowly out of the way. The cars sandwiched between had no choice but to follow along. Soon enough, I had crossed back to the highway and Kim and I were on our merry way to Taxco, leaving the confusion of the drivers trying to get back into line at the tollbooth behind. Sometimes, language barriers can be most effective!

This all seemed quite funny until a couple of days ago (and yes, now I really mean a couple of days ago…). I was talking to some Mexicans the other day and, of course, we were speaking Spanish. Then some Americans joined us and we were switching back and forth between Spanish and English. After a few minutes of this, one of the Americans turned to me and, to offer a compliment, said, “Wow, your English isn’t too bad. Where did you learn to speak it?”

All I could think was, “Oh my god, I’ve been here long enough that I make only marginal sense in any given language at a time!” My new biggest fear is that I will return home to face the same language barriers, but in English! So please, when you next see me in the US, be kind and patient with my fumbling for words and badly constructed phrases. And rest assured, I don't make any more sense in Spanish!