The Rhythm of Learning
There’s a rhythm to learning a language in a place where most people don’t speak your native tongue. In brief, it goes like this: hard work, progress, a good conversation, recognition of how far you’ve come, followed by pride and self-satisfaction, which sets you up for a miserable failure in some interaction, followed by dejection, and a recognition of how much work there is yet to be done.
Yesterday I was on the up curve of this rhythm–myself and the other David (David de ingleterra) had a moderately successful excursion to the community center on Via Santa Elena–we actually held the kids’ attention for one hour and ten minutes. We talked to the pastor for a while afterward, and learned how precarious the kids’ lives are–literally: they live in shacks built on the side of a cliff prone to landslides. While the conversation was somber, the very fact that we had it was, in a way, exhilarating. There I was: having an important conversation, ¡en español! Of course, it helped that the other David is more fluent than I am, and he was the kept the conversation going. But I understood everything, and I really felt I was making progress, both in the Spanish language and dealing with the life of this city.
Today was the down curve. Our teacher is pushing us in class, asking us to have intelligent conversations about topics like the economic crisis in Spain and global warming (using subjunctive tenses correctly), and sometimes I feel lost. Afterwards I went to El Centro, to see if a neighborhood that on Sunday had seemed kind of pleasant (in a 1970s New York kind of way), was still tolerable on a weekday. Well it was, and it wasn’t. It still had bookstores and little theatres, and the bums weren’t too aggressive, but it was sunny, which in Medellin means hot, and the only way I knew how to get there was to walk from the crazy part of El Centro. And then back through the craziness. I stopped in Parque Berrio and listened for a while to some beautiful music by four guitarists, and I was going to see the Museum of Contemporary Art, but I wasn’t sure which way it was, and I didn’t want to take out the map and look more like a gringo tourist than I already do–this is a place where people in the know wear their backpacks on the front, to give the thieves a less attractive target–and then somebody called me a gringo anyway, in the nicest possible way, of course, and I suddenly felt that I had no clue. No clue about the language, no clue about the local culture, no clue about the city. I made my way back to El Poblado–up the hill, it was noticeably less warm and less polluted–and took a nap.