Babel

A community shares many things like history, values, customs, and language; most people take all these things for granted. Being part of a group is an important and defining quality; it makes sense for social beings to feel the need to be a part of something larger. Sometimes circumstances change one of those things and it can make people feel disconnected from the group like an outsider, or worse yet like a pariah. Alienation is the feeling of estrangement or isolation from a group one must or feels should belong to. It can be a very hard for a person to overcome, it can be even more difficult for a child. Alienation can come from something as simple not sharing a language with the rest of your community. Such was the case for me.

I grew up in Ecuador, a small country in South America. Ecuador is a diverse country with beaches, mountains, and jungles all which can be visited in the span of less than twenty four hours. My mother’s family moved down there from California in the nineteen seventies. My grandfather had gotten a job with a local oil company and moved the whole family. The family at that time included him, my grandmother, and five kids with ages varying from sixteen to six, with one more still on the way. My mother was one of the older children, she was twelve when they moved down to Ecuador. She always said it was not an easy move for her, she lost many friends, and came to an alien environment where people where so different from her and her family. That made them into a much close bunch, and by being their own group of people they were able to make their transition smoother. The family settled in the city of Guayaquil, a port city with a strong foreign influence. And yet even with a community that was welcoming for foreign people, it was not an easy move. But they made things work. Skipping a few years ahead, my parents met, got engaged, broke off their engagement, married, and I was born. My parents were very young when they got married and my father worked full time while also going to college to get his degree in civil engineering. Since he worked so hard most of my early education fell on my mother's lap. So she did what was natural, she raised me the same way she had been raised. That not only included customs and values, but also her language. That made me very different from other people in Ecuador.

My mother’s family was also tight knitted. We spent a lot of time with them while I was growing up. For me that meant I was constantly observing and imitating people speaking in English. So I never really learned to speak in Spanish well. It was always difficult for me to get people to understand me, because I knew so little words and did not know how to pronounce them well. One instance in which this was especially difficult for me growing up was communicating with my father. Like I mentioned before he both worked and studied when I was a baby, so I only really saw him on the weekends. He was born in a small countryside town and was literally raised on a farm, so he never needed or bothered to learn English. My mother had to serve as an interpreter between both. She would have to tell me whatever my father wanted me to do or know. I guess in a way that affected our relationship, and we have never been able to communicate easily. Though we still continue to have some uneasiness communicating, things have gotten better between both of us; because in many ways I am a lot like my father. Also age has made me understand that he had to do so much, sacrifice a lot to give us the life he wanted us to enjoy, and not being able to communicate easily just made all that harder for him.

But not everything was difficulties growing up and speaking a different language than everyone else. A funny story from my childhood happened when my mother took me to play with the son of a friend of hers. This boy was about a year older than me and looking back he might not have been terribly bright. Which is not a fair judgment for me to give of him. Going back to the story, we had been set up for a play date so my mother took me to her friend’s house. One important detail that should be added is that my mother was extremely overprotective of me as a child. She never wanted me to stray too far from her sight. So she would always be calling me back by saying, “Joey come here”. She had done so many times in front of her friend and her son. So that day we went to her friend’s house, her son asked, “Can joey come here play with me?” Of course this might sound funnier in Spanish.

While that story might not make everyone laugh, language did present a barrier for me in trying to integrate. Things did not get easier for me when I started school. I was sent to a private bilingual school, yet that did not make the transition any smoother. Children can be especially cruel to those who are different, even if the difference might not seem so big. Though I was lucky to be able to make friends who helped me overcome my language barrier, still some kids teased me for my terrible Spanish and made fun of my accent. It did not help matters that I was always a more introspective person, and I would say athletically challenged to be generous about it. Truth is I still am terrible at sports, but while it rarely matters now, back then it was something else that made me different. To be the new kid in school is not something that could be especially difficult, but to be that weird kid who cannot speak Spanish and was also not good at sports was a complex combo. Friends can be so important in moments like these. I still have extremely close friendships from the time I started school, it helped that I went to the same school from kindergarten to high school. Some of my friends and I were together for fourteen years. That makes for some pretty strong bonds. We shared things like weddings, funerals, and everything else in between. I even served as the best man for friend that I have known for more than twenty years now. I have had girlfriends that were born after I met these friends. They still make fun of my old accent from time to time, but I can laugh comfortably about it now.

But sometimes it is not only kids that can make things difficult in school. One other story from my first few school years involved my accent while speaking Spanish. While this is an issue I worked hard at to improve, back then I had a very thick accent. It was very hard for me to pronounce some sounds used in the Spanish language that have no equivalent in English. Sounds like "RR" pronounced "erre" to give just one example, were a huge challenges for me. One teacher even though I had a learning disability because of my strange pronunciation. My mother was called to meet her and the principal to discuss my disability, and maybe find a way to help me overcome it. That is until they met my mother and heard her speak. At that moment it became obvious to the principal that I was just speaking the same way my family did. While it does end up being a funny story, at the time it was just another example for me of how different I was from the rest of my classmates. Of how even teachers could mark me as an outsider.

But on the other hand, what made me so different in my home country and made me feel cut off sometimes has made it so much easier to fit in once I came to Wichita. While being able to speak the language is an obvious advantage, there are other things that have made it much easier for me to relate to my American classmates more so than my foreign ones. Customs and values are two very important things that I share with most of my Wichita classmates, and those I learned from my mother's family. Another one is the atmosphere of American colleges, how people treat each other, has made it easier for me to feel a part of this community. So while sometimes being an outsider can be the result of even slight difference, it can also be just as easy to fit in when the conditions are just right.