April 24, 2014
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Marilyn, in a great post about “Places as possessions,” raised the following questions: “I think a lot of this is about finding our niche. How does our past fit with our present? How can we take the places we’ve loved and the experiences we’ve had and use them in our current reality?”
Finding a niche is tough. Most of the jobs I’ve had (professor of Spanish/English/linguistics; bilingual admin assistant; refugee worker; translator) are a direct outcome of my bilingual/bicultural upbringing. A few of them provided some satisfaction of my desire for meaningful work, but there has always been a longing for more fulfillment. As a professor, I was dissatisfied with my curriculum, my performance, my students’ progress. When I belonged to a Bible translation organization, I worked in training rather than on the front lines, and wondered whether my work made any real difference. Refugee work turned out to include a vast amount of politics, not just helping people who needed help. Working as a translator is frequently tedious and boring.
The most satisfying jobs I have had were in construction. There is nothing quite like framing. You arrive at work in the morning to a bare slab or a raised wood floor. Within a few hours, there are walls standing. Within a few days or weeks (depending on the crew), the entire house is framed, all the way to the rafters! Then begins the fascinating process of sheathing, siding, roofing, wiring, plumbing, a/c, insulation, wallboard, flooring, texturing, painting, trim… When your work is done, you have created a place where a family will live its life.
Interestingly, construction is the one job I’ve had (besides working for a moving company) that doesn’t build on my multicultural background.
Why can’t more jobs be like construction?
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Last week I had the pleasure of meeting a TCK with an unusual profile. Alicia has a cousin in Costa Rica who has a veterinary supply company. Her husband is a most interesting character; his father is a Spaniard, so the family spoke Catalán at home, but were prohibited from speaking it outside the house. In public they spoke Costa Rican Spanish. He studied in Chile and lived there a number of years before returning to Costa Rica.
When he visited Barcelona, his cousins laughed at the quaint, archaic Catalán dialect he had learned from his father, who was raised in a remote village. I suspect that this was one of the more frustrating experiences in his life, because according to his own admission, he grew up obsessed with fitting in. In Costa Rica he passed as a Tico; in Chile he passed as a Chilean. But in Spain he sounded like a hick.
As we compared stories and worldviews, he grew more and more animated. He talked excitedly about how I could see the world as he did, the flexibility a multicultural upbringing creates and requires, his passion for fitting in.
In listening to him, it struck me that fitting in was never in the realm of possibility for me. I was always bigger, whiter, more blue-eyed than others around me in Colombia. Besides that, I was an introvert by nature. I’ve never fully fit in anywhere.
But I did make sure my Spanish was as good as it could be. My family set a high value on language skills. We spoke better Spanish than most of our fellow missionaries and MKs, and picked up the paisa accent used in Medellín.
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When I got to college (University of Kansas), my Spanish profs had trouble understanding my thick regional accent, so I switched to more neutral pronunciation. In grad school, I went home for six months to work on my thesis, and quickly adopted the paisa accent even stronger than before. But when my tourist visa expired after three months, I made a trip to Pasto (to cross the border into Ecuador), and was startled to hear myself talking like a pastuso after just one day. Maybe it’s because that’s where I first learned to talk.
I spent a year in the mid-80s working with refugees in Honduras, and learned to say cipote (‘kid’) and vaya pues (‘okay’). The next year I got married and moved to Miami, and worked with Cubans for a couple of years. In the early 90s I moved my family to Costa Rica, where we lived for four years. When I made a trip to Medellín, my old friend Oscar said, “Where have you been living? Your Spanish sounds so ugly!”
In 1998 I got a job in Dallas as a translator. The vast majority of the work involved Mexican Spanish. It was a steep learning curve, but within a few years I picked it up, to the point that when I visited Cartagena (Colombia) in 2008, a taxi driver said I was obviously from Mexico.
Then in 2010 I met Alicia and my life changed forever. I’m back to speaking Colombian Spanish, with a far better vocabulary than I ever had before. In Tampa we interact with Colombians, Venezuelans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans… even a few Mexicans.
My exposure to so many different accents and dialects has been very helpful in my job. But I identify most with Colombian Spanish, especially the paisa accent.
Interestingly, my English doesn’t change much at all, no matter where I live. I wonder why that is.
Comments (6)
This is very interesting. I don’t feel like I ever really fit in either (except now with my family, and they’re stuck with me.) I was so bashful when I was little, and immature as a teenager. Of course the others were too, only in different ways. Then we went to Africa, and then we had 7 children when everyone else in America was only having 2, and none in their 40′s as we did. The good part about being older is……I really don’t care anymore. I am who I am.
My Chinese son-in-law is a pastor. He used to be an auto body man, and he was a good one. It’s easier to see that you’re doing a good job fixing cars than trying to fix people.
At this point the thought of trying to fix people is mind-boggling to me. I can’t believe there was a time when I half-seriously considered applying to become IVCF staff. Thank God that never happened!
My wife, however, wants to study psychology. She has no problem with telling people what she thinks they ought to do.
My English accent has changed over the years. I grew up in northern Connecticut, so we were not quite Boston and not quite New York, both of which have definitive accents. I moved down to Florida many years ago and have picked up a bit of southern to my speech, but usually people still say I talk too fast. I also had a boyfriend for a few years who came from just outside of London, and even years after we were no longer an official couple, I would talk to him a time or two every week on the phone. I have picked up a bit of that type of English accent, which has blended into my own now as well. I guess I am just a mutt of American English with a twinge of British English.
Great post, Tim. Awesome recount of part of your life’s adventures.
You are very very talented in languages.
When I come to Tampa in June, WE MUST MEET UP! My best friend, Zory Favata, is “graduating” to retirement. Lucky girl! She is from Puerto Rico but her dad was military so she is at least tri-lingual! They were based in Germany for years….I am so jealous of your bi-lingual abilities but now my class is mostly from an Arabic upbringing from the three most obvious places: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and UAE.
Yeah, let me know when you come. Are you on Facebook? I spend a lot more time there than here on Xanga. I can’t log in to Xanga from my work computer, so Xanga’s not a very reliable means of contact.