Even the Birds Sound Different

During my first year of teaching English and Spanish full time, I had the chance to work with a number of students studying abroad at our small university campus in the Midwest .  One Thursday afternoon in March of that year I passed a group of exchange students gathered outside the computer lab, speaking rapidly in their native language. I curbed the initial feeling of being an outsider. Instead, I felt disappointment that these students, whose English was already quite good, were losing an opportunity to enhance their oral skills. They’ll never improve their English that way!  I paused to tease them–especially since I knew three of them from English Composition classes–for being lazy. They chuckled and smiled, we said a few words in English, but as I walked away they returned once again to the more familiar language. What a waste of their time in America.

What a difference one experience can make. Today, if I pass a group of exchange students speaking in Russian, German, or Japanese, I understand their reasons for doing so in a way I could not before my own experience abroad.  Before then, I had heard others speak of culture shock and read books and articles about adjusting to life abroad, but nothing had prepared me for the realities of my month in Costa Rica .

As I finished that first year of full-time teaching, I was ready to get away.  I looked forward to the opportunity my university offered me to immerse myself in the culture of a Spanish-speaking country through a brief study abroad program of my own.  I decided on a program in Costa Rica because of the lure of its exotic, yet politically and economically stable, atmosphere.

It was my first time traveling to a foreign country, so Costa Rica was the first stamp in my brand new passport. It was my first time traveling this far away from my own home. In fact, it was my first time ever on a plane. Because it was so new to me, everything about the trip seemed extremely important to me. Weeks before I had begun setting aside supplies to take and getting advice from friends who had traveled more extensively than I had. When the moment arrived, I felt excitement, anticipation, and nervousness, but not fear.

After all, on every possible level, I was prepared for this trip. I had prepaid all my bills for the month, arranged for my mail to be held, said my goodbyes to family and friends, cleaned my apartment, and left no dirty dishes in the sink. I had packed and re-packed, planned, asked all the right questions about what to take and what was unnecessary, and prepared for every contingency. Except one. I had not prepared myself for the soundtrack of life and nature to change. I wasn’t ready for the scenery, for the backdrop of my life, to shift completely. I didn’t know that even the birds would sound different.

The sounds surrounding me have changed significantly over my lifetime as I moved from smaller to larger cities and back again.  Despite these changes, everywhere I went–no matter how large or small the city–there was a certain constancy. There were always sparrows, mourning doves, and crows, their sounds providing a familiar chorus in the background of my daily routine.  They were not meant to be replaced by the strange songs of tropical birds I had only seen in books.  In mid-July, the sun wasn’t supposed to set at 6:00 every night and ESPN was supposed to have more to say about baseball than soccer–I mean fútbol.

The trees outside my house were supposed to be maple, birch, pine, and maybe a couple of weeping willows, not palm trees, fruit trees, and some strange looking sort of bamboo trees.

There weren’t supposed to be mountains surrounding me.

There wasn’t supposed to be a volcano just miles–or rather kilometers–away from me.

But once I landed in Costa Rica , the world stopped operating as I’d come to expect. The scenery had changed and I experienced an unanticipated sense of instability. I was as surprised by what I missed as by the fact that I missed anything at all. I had expected the excitement of all the new adventures, coupled with my sense of independence, to stave off any homesickness.  But on some of the stressful days during that month, I needed something familiar, something I could latch on to.

That’s when I learned one of the most valuable lessons of my month in Costa Rica . I learned one of the reasons why those who study abroad may turn to each other, sometimes even unconscious of why, to speak in their native language. It’s not really about the language. It’s not about communicating in those words rather than in English. They can handle the English, just as I could handle the Spanish.  I turned to others throughout the day to speak English because of the sounds.

I understood in those moments what Richard Rodriguez meant in Hunger of Memory when he wrote about the sounds of English and Spanish moving him in different directions as a child, and how the sounds of Spanish for so long meant comfort and home to him. Although I’d studied language, literature, and writing all my life, I had never before understood our primal need for the sounds of our first language. I didn’t need to hear the words in English, but I needed to hear it. Something had to drown out those strange-sounding birds every morning.

Ironically, by the time my plane touched back down in Minneapolis , I had become accustomed to the sounds and rhythms of that language after a month spent almost constantly surrounded by the sounds of Spanish.  Back home, I found myself overhearing a conversation in Spanish and feeling both happy and sad. While hearing the language brought back wonderful memories, it was also a painful reminder that I was no longer in that beautiful place. It felt strange at first to see the sun just beginning to set at 8:00, no longer to see fruit trees everywhere, and to turn on an American television show that wasn’t dubbed or subtitled in Spanish. I missed waking up to mountains and hearing the gentle sounds of Spanish from my host family as I drifted off to sleep at night.

My month in Costa Rica empowered me as a Spanish speaker, reminding me of many words I had forgotten, and reassuring me I could survive in any situation–in taxis driven by unsavory characters, in downtown San José lost in an area of drug dealers and addicts, in family discussions of politics or culture, in class debates of literary works, in situations filled with pain, in times filled with laughter, and in idle conversations with strangers on a bus.  But my month in Costa Rica also humbled me. Perhaps even more important than the cultural experiences I had there or the affirmation of my Spanish abilities, the month taught me even greater respect for the exchange students I teach.

Many international students leave home for a year. I was away for a month and experienced several periods of longing for home. How much more intense and varied must be the emotional upheavals during an entire year spent away from all that is familiar? Looking back, I’m grateful that I didn’t have the opportunity to study abroad when I was in college. I am fairly certain I was not then ready to learn this particular lesson from the experience, and it was a lesson I needed to learn in order to be a better teacher.