Me Speaky English

The other day I was waiting for my friend Karim and her son on the Plaza San Francisco, a beautiful colonial church set smack in front of the busiest, most congested area of the Prado. As I was sitting on the front steps watching the foreigners, the traffic, the shoeshine boys carrying their black boxes and wearing their black face-masks, I noticed a group of 4 teenagers approaching me. I was pretty convinced that they were going to try to rob me, and as they asked me, hesitantly, if I spoke English, I instinctively clutched my bag closer to my body and gave a noncommittal reply and tried to look away like I do when street vendors ask me to buy candy or fruit. But as soon as they heard me speak English, they excitedly huddled in a circle around me, whipped out a tape recorder, and asked me if they could do an interview for a school project. I was still thinking “huh?”, but as soon as I saw them reading off of questions they had scribbled onto a notebook, I started to relax a little bit. It turns out they needed to interview people so that their teacher could analyze it, and I ended up talking with them for about 20 minutes, on the steps of the Plaza, as everyone else looked on curiously and eavesdropped. .

Them: “Which is your fav-or-ite city?”
Me: “Here, in Bolivia?”
Them: “Yes.”
Me: “Well, La Paz”
Them: “Ohhhh!!! …why?”
Me: “Um…I guess I like the Andes?”

And I conveniently left out that I hadn’t really visited any other place in Bolivia…yet. They really seemed fascinated when I started to talk (slowly) about the differences between La Paz and Chicago. One girl, clearly very bright, kept trying to ask me extra questions that she didn’t quite know how to formulate, so with a combination of English and Spanish I was able understand what she wanted me to say.

At the end of my “interview”, I asked them if they’d had a lot of trouble finding other people to talk with – turns out they had only successfully found one other person who spoke English and German, and no Spanish – which makes a lot of sense to me because, as I tried to explain to them, most people were probably suspicious of a group of four kids wandering around and asking questions like that. It’s really heartbreaking to me that my first impulse when I saw these kids was to protect my belongings and hope that I didn’t get robbed. I felt sort of horrible afterwards, because they were friendly and so clearly trying hard to make a connection with foreigners, which is actually quite rare here. I find myself behaving with such a delicate balance of respectful appreciation (and distance) and also wariness, and I hate that more often than not the distrust takes over