I was expecting one Mexican lady named Beatriz, and there she was, smiling expectantly at me. So were eight other Mexican ladies that I had not been expecting. ‘Don’t show fear’ I thought to myself as I plastered an even bigger smile on my face, cleared my throat and began. “Buenas Tardes. Come está usted?” I had just used pretty much the sum of my Spanish vocabulary and had accomplished nothing.
They smiled politely and there were various responses of “Bien, Gracias”. My smile was starting to hurt my face and the thought flashed through my head that I am an idiot and had no business thinking I could teach English conversation to these women. But then I remembered that Carol Delaney didn’t raise a quitter, so I squared my shoulders and pushed on.
With a lot of giggling on their part at my pronunciation, we were able to establish that all nine of the ladies wanted to join the class, that I would come back on Monday at 7:00 and we would go from there.
Back in my vehicle, I took an enormous deep breath and then began thinking about how I was going to do this as I drove home.
It all started when I was doing a tax return for someone when I was still in public accounting. The client had included a number of charitable donation slips and I was going through them to make sure there were no duplicates and that they were in fact all registered charity receipts. I came across one for something called the CFUW. I had never heard of it, so I quickly googled it to see if I could use it.
It stands for Canadian Federation of University Women. I read enough to determine it was not a charitable receipt, but I was intrigued. When I got home, I googled it again and read more. I was impressed with their mandate and the various good works that they did. I had some ideas myself for things I would like to do that would be a lot easier to accomplish in a group like that, so I joined. From that group was born the Social Action Niagara Committee – a group of three women with good intentions who just needed a plan. After the first meeting I came home almost walking on air, buoyed by all the wonderful things we were going to do! When I told my husband we had just formed a Social Action committee, he looked up from the tv and informed me that if I got arrested, he was not bailing me out! The group got off to a bit of a rocky start, but eventually we came up with not one, but three plans and realized we needed more members. I was able to recruit three of my friends and then we were six.
Living as we do in an agricultural area with a lot of Migrant Workers, one of the items on our agenda was to see what we could do for them. After all, they make up a vital part of our community for several months of the year. English conversation lessons was the first plan to be implemented.
I had been to see the ESL teacher at my daughter’s school for some ideas on how to begin, and she was very helpful. I also bought a CD set called “Learn Spanish while you drive” so I could, well, learn Spanish while I drive. I made up a flyer offering English Conversation lessons and we distributed them to some of the Growers in the area. Before we knew it, we were getting calls.
Being a bit of a sink or swim personality, I decided that we had had enough meetings about doing this, and we just needed to do it! And so here I found myself, on Monday night at 7pm once again facing 9 eager faces. Thank goodness I’d brought cookies! Between that, and having everyone write their name on a sticky name tag and slap it on their chest, I had a couple of minutes to take deep cleansing breaths and say a little prayer! Thankfully, I was not alone in this. One of our group Mary, had come with me, and she had brought an acquaintance who mercifully spoke Spanish fluently! Gloria was a Godsend.
Gloria was able to communicate what I hoped to do over the next few weeks and to get the ladies feedback. I was impressed that I understood as much of their conversation as I did, but I still have a long way to go. I explained to them that while I would be teaching them English, they would be teaching me Spanish! They loved this idea.
Before I knew it, an hour and half had gone by. As we took our leave, they asked me for homework. Since we had gone over the parts of the body that night, I told them for homework they had to practice that and be able to recite them in English next week. Then they assigned me homework – I had to be able to recite them in Spanish!
I left that night feeling on top of the world and eagerly looking forward to the next class.
Buenas Noches
No comments:
Post a Comment