Just when I think my life is hard...
Today I met Fernando. I was sitting at the bus stop, waiting to catch the bus home, and I'd already missed the one at 11:12, so I was waiting for the 12:02, reading the
Daily Tar Heel. A man sits down next to me. I keep reading, until he asks me, in heavily accented English, if I am a student. I tell him that I am. He smiles, and tells me that he needs to learn English. Something in me tells me to go ahead and talk to this guy, despite my feeling weird. I ask him if he is taking any classes in English - they're offered free of charge all over the place here. He says that he has just come from his class at a local church.
He asks me my name, my age, and if I am married. I felt a little weird about the last one, but then it occurred to me that he was practicing. These are standard sentences that they've learned in his ESL class. It reminds me of when I was learning French and we had to interview each other like we were shopping in a department store or ordering in a restaurant.
We continue to talk, and I learn a little about Fernando. He is 27 years old. He moved here in November from Mexico. I was guessing that he'd been here much longer, given how well he was speaking and comparing that to my experience with students at the middle school who take ESL every day. He had never seen snow before in his life, and he thinks it is beautiful. He hails from Veracruz, which is near the ocean. He tells me that I should visit Mexico if I get the chance, because it is a lovely place. He loves learning English and he loves America. He wants to learn the names of all of his groceries in English so he can talk to the checkout clerk. He wishes that more people at his job would speak English so he could practice.
Fernando asks me about every few words whether his pronunciation is corrent. He struggles with the word "thirty" more than any other word so far, he says. Then we start to go back and forth, saying words in both languages, with his knowledge of English and my knowledge of Spanish being about equal. He thinks it's funny that we don't pronounce the "L" in "walk" and "talk". I remember trying to get used to saying that I
had 26 years rather than that I
am 26 years old. I don't know the Spanish word for peaches, and he doesn't know what
unas (there's an accent over the n) translates to. It's fingernails.
Fernando asks me what I'm studying, and I tell him
Library Science. He smiles, and tells me that in Mexico, he was preparing to be an engineer. Then he tells me that here in America he works in housekeeping, where he makes approximately 150% of what he made as a professional in Veracruz. It makes me want to cry. All of the assumptions I could have made about this man were incorrect and perhaps even ignorant. When the bus comes to his stop, Fernando turns to me and says, "adios!" I say that it was nice to meet him. I hope that I run into Fernando on the bus again someday. I really admire his courage. I take so many things for granted.
Today's Weather: 80 degrees. I'm not kidding. I sat out in the sun between class and work.
