Clase de Ingles

Every Wednesday night Whitworth invites ladies and their children from the town to attend English class for two hours at our campus. Almost all of the gringo undergrad students assisted in classes. Two elementary and middle school aged children broke off and did English class with our political science professor, Patrick, and the 4 ladies stayed in class with 7 of us gringos.

We started with a name game so everyone would know who was in the class. And then we started reviewing verbs. We went over what a verb is and the general rule that it always follows the subject. All of us gringos exchanged a look when we started conjugating verbs in the present tense. IT’S SO EASY IN ENGLISH!!!! I run, You run, He/she runs, We run, You all run, they run. IT’S THE SAME WORD EVERY TIME EXCEPT YOU ADD AN “S” IN THE HE/SHE FORM!!!! In Spanish every verb in every tense has 6 distinct conjugations for all three persons. In some tenses I and he/she are the same. Regardless at the beginning of class we were joking around and being slightly envious of English verb learners.

Then we dove into practice activities with the ladies. Olivia and I were with a young 22 year old woman. She spoke English as well as we speak Spanish, in fact probably better, and she’d only been studying for 2 years. I’d like to think we’ve already became friends. We talked about exercise and decided we’d love to do some Insanity workouts together. The older women didn’t have quite the knack for it that she did but all of their attitudes were inspiring.

English class wasn’t about English to me. It was about the fact that despite coming from completely different cultures and linguistic backgrounds, we could spend an evening making jokes while conjugating verbs. And we could laugh while pushing people around in a game while attempting to stay out of the center of the circle. Maybe, in the grand scheme of things, this wasn’t really that enchanting of an experience. But it was the first time that I made friends with people using a different language and that my minority status wasn’t an inconvenience. I guess I’ve been so worried about the judgment that might befall this 6 foot tall, green eyed Gringa, that being welcomed with right cheek kisses seemed an extraordinary measure of the similarities we all share.