Sister Act

Yesterday I was excited to finally get to talk to my sister, who's currently studying abroad in Bolivia. She's tried to call before, but because of the utterly craptastic reception I get from T-Mobile, I've always missed her calls. She's calling from a phone booth in South America, and I'm the one dropping the calls. Great.

She's doing a great job down there, but of course it isn't easy. Her stories bring back memories of when Holly and I were in Mexico together during nursing school. The exhaustion which comes from meeting so many new people and constantly speaking a different language than the one you think in, eating unfamiliar foods, the disbelief that there can really be so many poor hungry homeless dogs, and remembering that story from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark about the family who brought home a Chihuahua that was really a rat. Add that to your challenging academic coursework and some serious gastrointestinal upset and boy, time has never passed so slowly in your life.

It goes without saying (though I'm going to say it anyway) that you learn some hard lessons, though. One of the biggest for me was how deeply ingrained is the assumption that if a person speaks your language poorly or not at all, he or she must be less intelligent than you. I was ashamed to realize that some formulation of this idea had existed in my subconsciousness--not in a malicious way, but in a gee-I-never-really-thought-about-it way. But my first few days in Mexico, as I babbled my kindergarten-level Spanish grammar to have people look at me either with contempt or confusion or pity, I wanted so badly to break through the confines of my inferior language skills and yell "Hey, where I come from, I'm considered kind of SMART!" I can only imagine how painful that is when it doesn't go away, when you're not going home in three weeks (or ever), and when it's combined with so many other obstacles to getting a decent job and schooling and proving what you know (or hope) is true about yourself. I had always had sympathy for non-English speakers, but this newfound empathy dawned on me with a whole new appreciation for the fact that they had knowledge and skills of their own--which I could no more understand than they could mine.

Anyway, I'm sure Rebecca will come back with revelations of her own. (Which may include one of mine--I'm not leaving the country again for at least two years--though I did subsequently get married in the same country that had caused me to say that.) Either way, we're all proud of her and miss her lots! Keep up the good work, Sneebs!