Mental Gymnastics

A couple of weeks ago PUC hosted a big Latin American Studies conference that drew participants from across the Americas and Europe. I volunteered as a monitor for the event, and spent my time answering people's questions. There was no single lingua franca for the event. The organization is American, so the materials were printed in English, and while the Americans were bilingual in Spanish and/or Portuguese (primarily Spanish), native Spanish and Portuguese speakers often did not speak English. There isn't a huge amount of exchange between Brazil and the rest of South America, so even though they're neighbors, many Spanish-speakers do not speak Portuguese and vice versa. When papers were presented, sometimes a poll would be taken of the people in the room to find out which language the most people spoke, in which the panel would then be conducted. It was a wonderful trilingual conglomeration of a wide variety of people.

Even though the conference was hosted in Brazil, Portuguese seemed to be the language spoken by the fewest number of people. That meant that, more often than not, the questions people asked me were in Spanish. It was a great opportunity to get in some practice. While I was in Argentina and Uruguay, I was a little shy about speaking Spanish because I knew I'd make mistakes. Here, though, I didn't care. These visitors were in "my" country (since as a volunteer I was theoretically Brazilian), but they weren't speaking "my" language, so I was more than happy to try to help them in their own language without worrying about how terrible they found my Spanish. It was certainly a case of mental gymnastics: I never knew in what language a question would be asked (occasionally they'd be asked in English, as well). That meant my brain had to constantly be switching among languages, which, as I've mentioned before, is no small feat. Especially in the beginning, most of what came out of my mouth was a mixture of two. Whenever I tried to speak Spanish, I got Portañol, but then sometimes when I was talking to Brazilians, I'd accidentally throw in Spanish. Once I even started answering an English question in English and ended in Portuguese. Though most people could understand the Portañol well enough, by the end I think I managed to answer questions in at least 95% Spanish, about which I was pretty excited.

It was fun being able to acquaint people with PUC, and all of a sudden my imperfect Portuguese started looking not so bad. As I watched the visitors struggle with simple tasks like ordering food, I was reminded of how hard things had been when I first arrived, and how much easier they seem now. I was so caught up in the Portuguese and Spanish of the event that occasionally I almost forgot I spoke English. Once I was in the school store and an American woman was trying to ask the cashier for ibuprofen. She wasn't getting anywhere, but for a little while I just watched, waiting for my turn to check out. Then I remembered, "Oh wait - I speak English!" "I don't think they carry that here...you'd be better off at a drugstore." For the first time, my flawed Portuguese was a valuable and useful skill instead of just a hindrance. It was nice to be the one able to offer help here for once, instead of always being the one to ask for it.