This may be the last part.  I didn’t introduce you to my main “Ayudante” or Language Helper, my neighbor Guillermo.  If I get to that, I’ll post it later, and introduce you to him.  Right now we are in the middle of our break in between trimesters and I’m planning on continuing FARO (with this language route) next trimester.  Next week I’ll give some end of the trimester thoughts about my experiences doing this and share with you some of my thoughts about what will be different this next Trimester.

When I began my language learning route downtown I wanted to find a place like this where I could eat on a regular basis and begin to get to know the people there.  I also wanted to find a place to drink coffee and study after talking with people.  Well, I found the coffee place first (that’s next weeks video) and struck up a friendship with one of the workers there.  I had been going to various places for lunch but hadn’t found any place cheap and put alot on your plate.  Carlos, my new friend at the coffee shop, asked me where I ate lunch and he said that he goes to place that is cheap and gives you alot of food…BINGO!  So, he invited me to go to lunch with him.  After going the first time I knew this was the place I wanted to frequent.  But, at the time there was no way I could go there by myself.  Everything was so fast and I didn’t know how to say what I wanted to eat.  So, the next time I saw Carlos I had him right down for me exactly what I would say to order what we ate.  And that’s what I did the first time I went by myself, i read what he wrote.  It was funny, the workers there all stopped what they were doing, looked at me and stared for a moment…some laughed but they knew what i wanted and I got it.  Tony didn’t laugh though, which is nice now that I look back on it.

Also, if you remember this post (An Awkward Situation Over The Word Casado), the plate of food that I eat here is a Casado.

I say I’m going out on a limb because its a little unnerving doing this while I’m still in the acquisition stage.  Nonetheless I wanted to give you a taste of what it looks like and what I do.

I’m experimenting with a different way of posting these videos.  I didn’t want to have to mess with editing these segments into one whole piece, so i uploaded each file and made a playlist.  When you press the play button, each segement will play one after each other, but not as a single file.

(And I hope you don’t get motion sickness in some of these segments, as I said I was trying to be as inconspicuous as possible and look normal, so it got a bit bumpy at times.)

Here’s the link to part one

This first video you start with me at breakfast,  then you go with me to school, and then we go catch a bus downtown for my language learning route (FARO).   I hope you enjoy these video posts.

(When you click play the segments will play one after another)

Today specifically I noticed an improvement in my ability to understand and my ability to talk.  All my conversations today were good, not perfect mind you, but I’m getting the structures down and I’m hearing more and more words (I’m recognizing when I don’t understand a word, as opposed to just recognizing words I understand).  The relationships with these people on my route are growing and we are becoming friends and that is satisfying.

One of the men on my route is a believer.  We didn’t discover that we both were believers until about a month into our conversations.  In one conversation about family he described his family as walking with God.  In a conversation about free time he said he reads his Bible often.  Eventually he got around to asking what I did and why I was in Costa Rica, when I told him i was a missionary he became really excited.  He made the comment that he too was, in a way, a missionary in his work.  That kind of perspective does not come from a nominal or cultural christian.

Two weeks ago I had been having a bad week, I was really discouraged.  It was a conversation about television, in my memorized monologue I put together, I mentioned that I had had a lot of stress since being here in CR and one of the ways I relax is by watching sports.  He asked why I had stress.  (these monologues are for the purpose of creating further conversation and this did it).  I tried to explain as best I could and decided to tell him that I had been really discouraged recently.  He asked why.  I tried to explain that I was feeling as if I’d never learn the language.

He began to encourage me, telling me that I was here in the first place because God brought me here.  That God is able to help me learn the language, that I needed to remember the reasons I am going to Argentina, the reasons God put in my heart.

He then asked me to do something, I didn’t quite understand quite what it was.  He said I needed to make or write some sort of sentence (oracion).  Huh?  Ok, later that day Tara told me that that word can also mean prayer…Ooohh!  So he wants me to pray or write a prayer and bring it to him?  Weird.  Ok.  So I finally got around to writing down a prayer.

Since the beginning of the 2nd trimester, my teachers have been expecting us to pray before classes…in Spanish.  This has been so hard for me, so much so that I haven’t been able to and I have refused to do it in Spanish.

It’s been in the back of my mind that I’ve needed to concentrate on learning to pray, so I took this as an opportunity to start.  So I wrote a simple prayer, thanking God for Andres and his encouragement, asking God to help me learn Spanish, and to keep the people of Argentina on my mind.

I shared it with Andres today, and again what an encouragement.  Through my broken Spanish he was able to lift my Spirit up again.  He marveled at the prayer I wrote, said that it was from God.  It was at that moment that I realized that it was my first prayer in Spanish, and I told him so.  He then said that I needed to guard this prayer and to pray this prayer every morning.  So that when I get to Argentina and am able to share God’s love, I can look back and see how God answers prayer and how able He is.

I walked away from that conversation lifted up and encouraged.  The family of God, crossing borders, crossing cutures, crossing language…how amazing!

I have an irritating habit, or something (I don’t know what to call it).  When I’m in a conversation trying my darndest to understand, and I hear a word that is familiar to me, my mind grabs ahold of it and starts to play with it.  “Oh,” my mind thinks, “I know that word, that word means corner”, “He just said, turn left at the corner.” My mind continues these wonderful little games, “I learned that word 2 months ago, in class.” “That was interesting the way he pronounced it (as my mind sounds out the sounds), esqu-ina, no thats not it, e-squi-na, no thats not it, es-qui-na, yea thats it”  This goes on while the person continues to talk, of which I hear practically nothing because my mind was a coddling one of the few words that it absolutely knew.  It’s as if my mind was starved for meaning, and it finally found it in that word, and it ate it up, ravenously…totally oblivious to the feast of meaning that is surrounding it if it would only pay attention to the other words that are flying by…”Oh no!” my mind finally realizes…

…”what did she say, I just missed a ton of what she just said, what was that?  Casado, did she just say casado?  Why is she asking if I’m married, thats weird, we’re talking about food…” At this point I start feeling a bit awkward, and I stutteringly say “Uh, yes, I am married”.  She looks at me kinda funny and senses the awkwardness.  You could see it in her eyes, she was thinking, “If i did ask him if he was was married that would be awkard, but i didn’t, but he thinks i did, oh boy…”

Then she patiently explains that the word “Casado” has 2 meanings in Costa Rica.  One, as what I knew it as, means “Married” or “Married person”.  The other meaning, in Costa Rica,  is “Plate of food.”  Actually not just any old plate of food, but a plate of food that consists of typical Costa Rican food.  So it was entirely in context, we were talking about food and she was telling me about “Casados”.  But i had no idea she was talking about casado (food), i thought she was asking me if I was casado (married)!  I later found out that the reason Costa Ricans call this plate of food “Casado” is because that is the first food a newly married woman learns to cook for her husband.

The fun, and sometimes potentially disastrous, situations you can get in when learning a language!

I would guess that I’ve already been to this park 20 times or more since we’ve lived here. They have a farmer’s market on Saturdays that we used to go to pretty regularly. And it has a running track, which is a nice alternative to trying to navigate (and survive) the local roads while maintaining a killer 12 minute mile pace. But honestly, apart from the farmer’s market and the track, I was never too terribly impressed with the place. It’s not that it isn’t a nice enough park, I guess. It’s just that it’s, well, not anything close to as nice as ANY park that I would ever go to regularly in the States.

But, without being too dramatic, I’d say that on Thursday God transformed this place into a much needed place of respite for me. I sat down for a minute on one of the cement benches with a bit of shade. And instead of thinking “why in the world can’t they have some halfway comfortable benches to sit on here”, I found myself genuinely thanking the Lord for the park because of the rest and relief it was offering me. It was the same park, the same graffitied walls, the same unemptied garbage, the same unkempt grass, the same broken playground equipment. But after 2 tiring hours of walking around the neighborhood in the heat, while being literally unable at times to hear the person talking to me (standing just 3 feet away) because of an engine-braking truck or a blaring horn, this park was amazingly refreshing. And in a very real way, a much appreciated gift from the Lord. I could still hear all of the same sounds, but here they were just distant enough to be ignored. And there’s something pretty cool about being able to thoroughly enjoy something that is just enough. Not perfect, not too much, but just enough.

A pic from the park