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!

How do you say, ‘Can I play with you?’ in Spanish?

The blog stopped last week for our new schedule of school and sports. Anson started 5th grade and Risa 1st at the Colegio Pequeño Mundo, the small world school. While we are still trying to pull together the complete uniform, with help from some Venezuela friends, the kids have the special pants, with shirts soon to come. By Venezuela standards, the school is small and laid back, with a strong emphasis on art and music and no homework. Risa has about twenty classmates, while Anson is in a combined 5-6 class with 14. This suits us, as the children have studied in combined age classes their entire school years. Their teachers are sisters, and the school is run by a three generation family that is not related to the sisterly teachers.

School meets each day from 8-12:30, with a great deal of this time used for recess and snack. Also, the classes meet two afternoons a week for more drawing, art, and music. Each student studies piano or violin (ours will do piano), as well as recorder. Although I know they will encounter difficult days with language and relationships, the children up to now bound into school each day excited to be there – a joy to see!

Each morning and afternoon class begins with a warm greeting (cheeks together, make a kiss or a hug), and a hello to individual classmates. Anson has our friend, Ale, in his class. A sixth grader, she went to school for four years in the U.S. and helps out with translation. While I am concerned that this will slow down Anson learning Spanish, he keeps a notebook of words he learns or wants to learn in Spanish. Dodge ball, banned at our Des Moines school but a favorite of Anson’s, is an occasional recess game, much to his delight. The kids also love to draw, and pictures are “sold” each day at recess for pretend currency from a little house that also serves as an imaginary ice cream shop. They also wrote a short play the class performed this week.

Risa’s discussions of school revolve around friends and play. Each day, she issues the report on whether or not she “has a friend.” If a child decides not to play with her, Risa describes that the girl “doesn’t want to be my friend anymore.” Even though I know this is not the truest of characterizations, oh how my mother’s heart aches! She wants to be included in the classroom play with blocks, and to tell her story as well as understand those of others. The determination and patience required push her limits, in a way that I hope encourages her language learning as well as growth of that undefined characteristic of “personal fortitude.” This week, she has mastered use of the verb, “jugar,” to play, and practices with me how to say “¿Puedo jugar contigo?” Can I play with you?

Escuela Daze

All of us will be in school this year. Victor will study Spanish at the Venezuela-North American Cultural Center. The University School, CEAPULA, will have two new students as Anson enters 5th grade and Risa 1st. I am working at the University of the Andes, where I will start to co-teach a course on gender and human rights in October and other duties as assigned, dividing time between the school of Juridical and Political Science and the School Of Humanities And Education. All of this has become possible from the generous commitment of time from the director of CEVAM and my university liaison.

I am proud of Risa and Anson for tackling school in Spanish. The first month will be a struggle. The kids will start school knowing numbers in Spanish up to 1000, the letters of the alphabet, greeting questions, the basic school vocabulary (they’ll know when to get their cuadernos out, por lo menos.), and Anson will be able to read. But that's it. I pass on to them the wisdom of another Fulbright mama: by Christmas, they'll be dreaming in Spanish. This will be the end of the primary reason Victor and I have used Spanish in the home to this point: to talk about the kids so they can't understand what we're saying.

The kids both look forward to wearing a school uniform, but for different reasons. Risa appreciates that the clothing requirement involves new shoes, while Anson looks forward to the streamlined elegance and egalitarianism of a single daily uniform. School starts for them - we think - on Risa's birthday.