Laura Harley

I’ve been working on my Spanish skills a lot lately. I took Spanish in high school and got pretty darn good at it, but then had a long time away from it. I’ve been listening to some Spanish CDs and it is so fun to refresh my memory and rediscover this beautiful language. I’m refreshing my Spanish for a few reasons, but one of the most important is to be able to connect with more people.

I’m working with some friends on a service project to offer children’s virtues classes and ESL-type classes to women and their families here that only speak Spanish. Today my task was to call some of the women and invite them to the first classes. They were very patient with me and I stumbled through enough Spanish to communicate the necessary information. It surprised me how nervous I got to call people I’d never met before who speak a different language. I was like, “oh no what if I freeze and don’t know what to say or they tell me my Spanish is terrible and hang up on me??” But I decided I was being silly, so I worked up the courage and dialed. They were very kind. I’m excited to meet them in person this weekend.

Speaking Spanish feels very musical to me—-when I speak it I need to slur my words together more than I do when speaking English and the slurring, rhythm, and feel of the words reminds me of singing. What a beautiful language! I’m looking forward to speaking it more and getting better at it. It feels a lot like taking voice lessons and playing shows—the learning and practicing of each word, the courage it takes to speak or sing in front of others, and the vulnerability that it takes to do that. Both experiences are challenging and rewarding. Cool!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 12:41 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.