Lessons in Humility

Ask any of my friends or extended family members to describe me and they will probably tell you that I’m sweet and easygoing and I have school smarts but no street smarts. Ask my mom to describe me and she would probably agree with all these assessments but then she would say, “Try living with her—she’s no walk in the park.”

My mom sees my defensive side, my impatient side and the side of me that needs to be right all the time. She observes, “You used to be so sweet and have such a sense of humor about yourself. What happened?” Well, I can’t answer that, but I think my experiences here may help me get back to the “old Carmen.”

My Spanish ability is intermediate at best. I’ve been here for a month and although I am getting better at understanding Spanish day by day, I stammer and doubt myself every time I try to speak Spanish. Sometimes people are really patient with my painfully slow and incorrect Spanish, but the kids I work with are less tolerant. They don’t want to have to repeat themselves, talk slower, or wait around for me to get out a sentence. So because the kids are nonplussed by my lack of Spanish-speaking ability and because I don’t really feel comfortable chiming in on conversations with adults who are speaking very fast Chilean Spanish, I tend to do a lot of listening. I also tend to ask a lot of questions, because it is way easier for me to carry on a conversation with a Spanish-speaker if they do all the talking. So being a foreigner in a strange country has made me open my ears and really listen to what people are saying, rather than always trying to think of what I’m going to say next or how I can prove my worth to them. I am thirsty to learn what others know rather than prove what I know because I want gain a rich understanding of their culture.

The other thing that being bad at Spanish has taught me is that I make mistakes all the time. Usually mistakes are a four-letter word in my book. I don’t like being wrong and I definitely don’t like making mistakes—I’m a perfectionist. Being bad at Spanish shows me every day that I have volumes to learn.

My point is that I am doing a lot of learning, making a lot of mistakes and I am not being particularly good at anything. I am out of my comfort zone, but I hope that whatever zone I settle into, I take my lessons in humility with me.