our week

This week was a bit of a hard one for the Elledge family – emotionally, physically, and spanish-ly.  All of it directly related to this …

On Tuesday morning, as we were getting ready to head out for school, Emerson fell in our driveway and fractured her tibia.  She has to wear this cast for 2 1/2 more weeks.  And, because of the location of the fracture, she can’t put any weight on it.  Which means that our little girl who cherishes her increasing independence as much as anything, is now more or less completely dependent on one of us at all times (something emotionally tough and physically tiring for us as well as her, though so far she is definitely handling it like a real trooper).  This also means no school for Em, which means no school (or maybe/hopefully just LESS school) for me.  Now that we’re all a little more adjusted to “life with the cast”, we’re going to try seeing how Em does sitting in class with me tomorrow.  I’m not really expecting it to go too well, but we’ll see.  Maybe it’ll be doable.  It’s definitely worth a shot.  A funny, somewhat-related, side note:  Whenever Em and I go for walks, I used to talk to her almost exclusively in Spanish.  Inevitably she’d ask me “Why you speak in Spanish!?”  Then if I persisted she’d get a bit more testy “NO you speak in Spanish!”  She’s fine speaking in Spanish with Spanish-speakers, but she’ll have none of it with me.  So, we have a deal that while we’re in Costa Rica, I’ll only speak to her in English when we’re out, but once we get to Argentina, it’ll be all Spanish outside of the house.  She’s accepting the deal for now.  We’ll see how it goes when we get to Argentina

So, that’s our week.  I did have one cultural/personal observation to share that came out of the experience of Emerson breaking her leg.  My Latin self really has to work on the whole opinion-expressing thing that I mentioned in this post.  I’m just not a guy who readily, all the time, goes around offering my opinion on things, especially if I don’t feel that I’m in the “general expertise” level on a given topic.  If I do give an opinion or make a suggestion on something, generally, I use enough modifiers and qualifiers to potentially leave the other person completely confused on what my actual opinion is.  And, if I do offer a strong, clear, non-caveated opinion on a subject, then you can be pretty sure that not only is that what I really think, but also that I think it’s pretty important for you to know that I think it – for whatever reason.

So, again, as I mentioned in the other post, that’s just not the way Spanish speakers seem to talk.  Opinions are expected, and regularly and freely stated – in just about every scenario, and as I’m starting to see, even if the other person might not exactly know what they’re talking about.  Normally, I’m completely fine accepting this in Spanish conversations.  When I’m talking with someone, and they express a strong opinion, I’m usually able to logically process it, evaluate whether or not it’s likely something they really truly believe, and respond to it with a more-or-less appropriate response – usually thinking something like “cool, here’s another chance to practice using subjunctive”.  And since I’m generally in a conversational position of learning everything that I possibly can from whoever it is that I’m talking to (both culturally and linguistically), it hasn’t really posed any big problems.  Until Tuesday, when Em broke her leg.  As you may or may not know, when you break a bone, there may or may not be swelling or bruising.  In Em’s case there was no swelling or bruising of any sort.  So, as we got into a taxi to head to the hospital to have it x-rayed, the ensuing conversation went something like this (obviously all in Spanish):

Taxi Driver: “Where to?”
Me: “Clinica Biblica, please” (a private hospital that the school recommends we use because a doctor that works there also works 2 days a week at the language school and basically serves as the family doctor for most of the students)
TD:  “Is your daughter sick?”
Me:  “No, she fell and hurt her leg.”
TD:  (looking back to look at her) “Are you sure you want to go to Clinica Biblica? There’s another hospital closer.”
Me:  “Yeah, I’m sure.  Our doctor works there.”
TD:  “Is there any bruising or swelling?”  (at least I think that’s what he said at this point)
Me:  “No, but when she tries to walk on it, she starts crying pretty hard.  So, we want to get an x-ray”
TD:  “Oh, well with leg injuries, if there’s no bruising or swelling, I’m sure it’s not broken.  You just need to put ice on it for the first 48 hours, nothing else.  This happens all the time when guys are playing soccer.”
Me:  (having already heard another spanish-speaker assure me that her leg was not broken, and being pretty certain that there was something wrong, I find myself at this point having a bit of a hard time accepting his suggestion/opinion as just a genuinely, culturally appropriate way to express his concern for my daughter, and instead decide I’m done with the conversation.)

Maybe it was just all the emotion of the moment and the protective instinct that kicks in for a parent when their kid is hurt, or something like that, I don’t know.  But I do know, that while I didn’t outwardly express any anger or anything like that in the conversations, I was inwardly having a hard time, and growing increasingly defensive.  And I’m sure that if my Spanish were better, I’d have been more able to express why I was pretty sure there was a problem, maybe even preventing the conversation altogether.  But, all of that to say, I definitely still have a long way to go in this whole area.