We All Live in a Jell-O Submarine

Throughout the first eight months, each of us have had our struggles. Missing friends and community. Advancing our language skills. Changing our diets to reflect the economics, scarcities and abundance of local food. Learning to live with uncertainty and realizing that advanced planning is a preference and a privilege.

One of us, however, has approximated “going native,” or at least becoming bicultural in her bones. Last week at breakfast, Risa had a request for us. For her snack at school, could we please stop sending peanut butter cracker and carrots? Instead, she would prefer an arepa with cheese. Wrapped in tinfoil. In the shape of a heart. Each morning, she and her friends at school eat their merienda, morning snack, together. She would like to be like them. Unlike the rest of our family, who instinctively grab the arepa like a burger, Risa looks around for a napkin to eat the food the same way everyone else in this country would. However, she holds tight to her vegetarianism despite her friends adding all kinds of meat to fill their arepas.

Spanish has six different ways of conjugating verbs. Victor has mastered the patterns, but choosing among the three past tenses is a challenge. Anson has learned to conjugate present and preterit with study and practice. Their progress this year is impressive, and Victor recently noticed that folks he found difficult to understand early in our year now sound comprehendible to him. After twenty years of speaking Spanish, I feel fairly comfortable but make occasional errors. Then, we have our truly bilingual daughter. Risa feels the conjugations intuitively, with only a few mistakes that mimic not an English speaker, but a young child raised in Spanish.

The months in Venezuela with my family gives a new way of experiencing this society, quite distinct from my previous years here as a younger person. I see how the kids’ classrooms and sports teams value both conformity and community, with a tight-knit affection among students. I have spent a lot of time discussing with Risa why she is the only girl on her gymnastics team who doesn’t have pierced ears. After living here a year, it doesn’t make much sense to force her to wait until age ten, and she will get earrings in the fall for her seventh birthday. After years in Latin America among beggars in public places, Anson has engaged me in difficult conversations about why this happens, and how begging is tied to personal circumstance, cultural practices, national policy, and global inequalities.

Risa’s classroom has an English class in which the teacher, a college student, teaches them Beatles tunes. My daughter loves the class because she gets to master songs that she had heard before. To my amusement, she has learned them with the ear of a native Spanish speaker, belting out at the top of her lungs the songs in her classmate’s accent. Why the heck wouldn’t we live in a Jell-O Submarine? Yum!

Learning from the Radio

In Des Moines, we were pedestrians, especially in the summer. In Mérida, we drive. A lot. Every day. We listen to the same radio station on our trips through the colas, the traffic jams that double our driving time. "Paaaaaatience, much paaaatience, with the traffic jams," the DJ urges us. The emisora that accompanies us is 97.5: Tourism Radio. How perfect!

Run by the government, the programming includes regular, fairly long live broadcasts of Chávez speeches, and the news reports are pro-government. I hear the perspective that is so reviled by many of my university colleagues. I pay attention to how the state frames the news, and I even got to hear Chávez utter his hot new insult, pitiyanqui, from his own lips.

The play format has 100.3 ‘The Bus” (a Des Moines ipod-shuffle radio station) beat by a mile. Want to hear a gaita song, the traditional music from Maracaibo, Venezuela? Check! How about “I kissed a girl?” Presente! What about some 80s Venezuelan pop (the music of my youthful sojourn here)? You got it! And what if I’m in the mood for The Cars? Or salsa? Or “Endless Love”? Check, check, check. It’s called adult contemporary, and when we are willing to sit through the chattiest DJs ever, we reap a station playing range of musical styles, almost all of which fit my tastes. Except maybe the Lionel Riche/Diana Ross duet -- but Risa loved it.

Until yesterday, the ads on noventa y siete punto cinco (97.5) annoyed me to the point of changing the station. To my ears, they are overly repetitive and hyperbolic. Little did I realize, they serve as my secret Spanish teachers. In the past day, Anson and Risa have begun calling out the words and phrases they recognize from the ads as they listen. This morning, they sang along with the merengue-style furniture store ad. They chant the call numbers in time with the announcer. Little sponge-brains are amazing! And, their noticing the sounds and places of Mérida brings Latin America to me with a whole new set of eyes.