nicaragua-adventures

[nicaragua-adventures]

Not in Kansas Anymore

Nothing prepares you for the shock of being alone in another country whose language you don’t speak. (And no, Duolingo, I am not in fact 50% fluent. Thanks for lying to me.) When I got on the plane at LAX on Friday, I was feeling pretty good. The plan was to become fluent in the other 50% in the four weeks I’d be in Nicaragua.

I labored under this delusion for all of about six hours, until I boarded my connecting flight in San Salvador. As I entered the plane, a flight attendant fired off a question at me in full-speed Spanish and my mind went completely blank. You know the scenes in medical dramas where the patient is in bed and the heart monitor is beeping, and suddenly the patient’s heart stops and the beep turns into a long tone that doesn’t stop? That’s exactly what happened in my brain at that exact moment. And that’s when I realized I was in way over my head.

When I arrived in Managua, the owner of the hostel I was staying at met me in the airport and started speaking English to me. I had originally planned to use nothing but Spanish from the moment I touched down on Nicaraguan soil, but I was already so relieved to be able to communicate that I didn’t stop him. The last time I got to use English was yesterday morning, when another traveler at the hostel struck up a conversation. Then, my ride from Managua to San Juan del Sur arrived. If he spoke English he didn’t let on, and the three-hour drive passed largely in silence, with the occasional attempt from one or the other of us at conversation. Turns out structured language programs don’t really prepare you well to interact with people in everyday conversation. Maybe the expensive ones that you pay for do, but not so much with Duolingo. To be fair, I have a fair working knowledge of basic conjugations and sentence structures, but I can see I’ve only just scratched the surface. 

My host family is super nice, but my communication with them is just as limited. I’m hopelessly lost when it comes to following their conversations with each other. Before I left the States, I’d been watching a telenovela called Destinos that’s designed to teach Spanish, and it definitely lulled me into a false sense of security. You hear a lot of conversational Spanish in it, and I was feeling pretty good that I was able to follow most of it. I realize now that I could only follow what they said because they speak slowly and clearly and use context clues all over the place to help you understand what’s happening. That’s a whole lot different than a family kicking it on their front porch chatting about who knows what. I have no context to help me, and I only catch the odd word here and there.

Being alone and unable to speak the language has left me with a feeling of isolation I’ve never experienced before. I thrive on social interaction, but how do you interact when you can barely communicate? How do you get to know people whom you can hardly understand? How do you as a tourist make friends with locals, many of whom resent you for what you are? (I saw that resentment firsthand yesterday when a group of locals playing volleyball snubbed a couple of tourist guys that wanted to join them.)

This month is going to be a lot harder than I thought.

#original