A friend of mine asked that I follow-up my last "Meet Your Neighbors" post with a little bit of information on what happened with "Alberto" and his Mixtopek speaking friend.
Sadly, I have no idea what happened. Which is pretty common. Actually, it's the norm. Which is hard.
To avoid talking more about that, I'm going to change the subject. Stay with me.
Sometimes when I am speaking with someone in Spanish I get this sense that I must be understanding the story wrong, that my language skills just aren't cutting it and I need to ask more questions to figure out what is going on.
When I was talking to Alberto the other day I kept coming back to one thing that I thought just HAD to be a misunderstanding. Alberto had told me that his friend, a man in his late thirties or early forties, spoke some Spanish, but his son did not. "That can't be right," I thought. "If he can speak both Spanish and Mixtopek, his son should be able to as well."
And so I asked him about the situation again, trying to clear up what was, to me, a glaring inconsistency.
"No," he said. "That's right. He can speak Spanish but his son never learned how."
"Why not?" I asked.
"When my friend and I were kids, our parents had enough money to send us to school. By the time we had our own kids, everyone was worse off."
Oh God.
A third man sitting in a chair and listening to the conversation, a migrant himself, spoke up.
"The whole country is going backwards."
What do you say exactly?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment