Sometime last week I accompanied my language buddy, Ruth, to this hangout sesh at a radio station after classes. She had gone once before, ensuring me that it's just a fun group sitting around and talking, listening to music. Sure, I thought, time to branch out.
As it turns out, we were two girls in a small group of 20-ish year-olds, sitting around round table, in a sound room. Plenty of microphones to go around. The DJ brought us on air, where we would be heard across the globe by anyone tuned in to the Internet station. The topic was First Love. Three of the boys, one sporting a Yankee's hat and a long tattoo down his arm, would be singing (rapping) about Love.
The DJ told the world that they had an extranjera guest today and my brain said AAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!
My mouth gave an introduction, I guess, and off the mic went to the next guy.
One by one they began to recount their first loves, or how first love is just an illusion, or how they've learned that being with someone for the sake of having someone doesn't compare to meeting that SPECIAL someone, etc. Things were gettin' real.
The mic gets to me and my brain said AAAAAAAAAH!!!! and I handed it off to the next guy.
I have a hard enough time putting together a grammatically correct sentence in Spanish, let alone an intimate anecdote or a thoughtful lesson learned. This was radio, here, there's no getting by on the cuteness of being a smiley foreign girl. Needless to say I was sitting as though perched on a cactus.
At some point Ruth told the world that Dios is everybody's love, first and foremost and forever after. Oh! Huh. I didn't know that about her. And the rest of the radio agreed to some extent. Huh. Whaddya know. Turns out this is a radio "limpia y diferente" (clean and different) that ties all subjects back to the "gracia de Dios."
Check out some daily Biblical verses on its site at: http://www.rkmradioecuador.org/
So the uncomfortable atheist found a smile on her lips, and the group cheered as the mic came my way again. WELL, I figured I'd never need to see any of these people again, and began to sputter out something about being 15 years-old and and and... I looked back and forth between the kids in the room and the group of adults in the recording room, and found that they were all waving their arms madly at me. One guy with long hair sneaked in and moved the mic closer to my mouth. They hadn't heard a thing.
Well, too late! Off to the next person! I motioned, swinging the mic away. Booooo, they thought. Suck it, I thought back.
My face returned to a normal color shortly thereafter, and my heartbeat followed suit. My tail, however, remained under my butt for a long time after that one.
More than bonding on a deep level, the majority of my interactions with Ecuadorians so far have made me feel emotionally and mentally itchy. This is unfortunate, kinda, but not really. Being uncomfortable is awesome! Only in retrospect, of course. The reality is that nobody else gives much of a shit about you, one way or the other. This is great news, as with this mentality being shy proves pointless and sounding stupid is a type of sound that you hear the loudest.
In this case, in retrospect, the kids around the table were cool, and I would have loved to make a few friends. At the time everyone was just a terrifyingly intimidating Spanish Speaker, and the more fluidly they relayed their messages, the dumber I'd look when I opened my yap.
I'm very slowly but surely starting to react with an inner laugh instead of a sigh at my many points of discomfort. When I first got here I used to think that my confidence would grow alongside my Spanish, but it's been nearly 10 weeks since I first moved to Quito and I ain't a whole lot better in respect to either. I had chosen some arbitrary point in the future when I'd jump at the opportunity to interact with locals with a carefree smile, but this arbitrary future point is always going to be in the future. I will always be making mistakes, I will always sound, to some extent, like a gringa. It's only a matter of not letting the inner AAAAAAAAAH scare you into taking on a different perception of reality.
Furthermore, this is Ecuador. If you do end up sounding stupid, they will laugh at you. But they laugh in the same way anyone from the States would laugh if a friend were to accidentally spray Coke on themselves from their straws. HA! Ya fool! The whole ordeal would probably take up two goodnatured seconds, and then would never be thought about again.
It's only self-conscious little me, a week later, replaying in my head how I mistakenly used the imperfect tense when I should have stuck with the preterite. Well, poco a poco, they say.
And with that, que Dios les bendiga!
No comments:
Post a Comment