I have often said that if someone wants to learn to speak a foreign language (especially an obscure one, like Swahili or Mam or Cambodian), the best way I can imagine is through the Peace Corps. During training, you get three months of intense, 6-hours-a-day instruction with a professional tutor in a classroom of 4 students or less, and you spend three whole months living in total immersion with a native family. And it’s all paid for by Uncle Sam!

Despite this, three months (or two years, for that matter) really isn’t enough time for total mastery. Luckily, the Peace Corps has a pretty comprehensive ongoing education program. We are STILL studying the Mayan dialect Q’anjob’al a few days a week, and will do so for most of the rest of our service. But we need to speak Spanish as well, to deal with government officials and anyone that lives outside of our relatively small ethnic group. For Emily, it’s pretty easy, since she majored in Spanish Literature in college and lived in Spain. For me, the struggle continues.

In the Spanish language, there is a final hurdle you have to clear before you can speak well: the subjunctive. It’s a special conjugation you use for verbs when you’re talking about something indefinite, subjective, possible, or theoretical. Subjunctive has largely died out of the English language, but still appears occasionally (and some of you might not even think these sound funny):

Correct: “I wish John were here to see this”

Incorrect: “I wish John was here to see this”

Correct: “If it were not for my teacher, I wouldn’t be able to speak Spanish.”

Incorrect: “If it was not for my teacher, I wouldn’t be able to speak Spanish.”

You don’t use it much in “survival Spanish,” when asking for things like a hotel room with HOT water, or a cup of milk for your coffee. But if you’re going to plead with the mayor about possibly financing a new well for the farmers, subjuctive is all over the place. Therefore, I have to learn it to help with my job, as well as satisfy my perfectionist leanings. After a year of getting confident with the rest of Spanish, it’s finally time. This is where Spanish Week comes in.

During our service, those of us with less-than-stellar Spanish can request a week of one-on-one remedial Spanish tutoring. That is what I spent this last week doing, instead of posting on the blog. I made the long trip to the PC Headquarters outside of Antigua to meet my professor for the week, Felipe. There are about a dozen language tutors on staff at Peace Corps Guatemala, and I’d not worked with him before. He is one of two that are also fluent in a Mayan language (Kaqchikel, in his case), and we got along great. My week of lessons would be pretty stale reading for you all and I will spare you the gory details, but I want to share two interesting anecdotes.

Felipe and I discussed a great many things as we struggled through Subjunctive, and at one point we were speaking of the civil war and some of the hard things that the Mayans suffered during those dark times. The indigenous Mayans saw a lot of violence, and more than once he was going about his business and came across still-smoking remains of a massacred village. During the early 80s, at the height of the war, he attended a high school that was across the street from a hospital. The doctors used the students as a sortof living blood bank, and one day while Felipe was playing soccer during recess, a doctor came over, had a few words with the teacher, and Felipe and a few of his buddies were sent across the street. He was taken to a room with a young boy who had been shot once in the arm and once in the shoulder, and was near death. The doctor asked Felipe to lie on an elevated table, stuck a needled tube in his arm, then stuck the other end into the boy (this was before the AIDS threat!). After a few minutes of direct blood transfusion, the boy regained consciousness, and they ended up transferring a full liter of blood before they sent Felipe home. The boy lived, and Felipe says that was one of that happiest things that happened to him in those years.

I also learned that subjunctive can be a very powerful, subtle tool when used carefully. Take the following phrases:

Raras veces indigenas estudian en la universidad. (It’s infrequent/rare that natives study in the university)

Es raro que indigenas estudien en la universidad. (It’s strange that natives would study in the university)

The English translations aren’t exact, and lose a very important connotation. The first sentence does not use subjunctive, and simply states fact: that there are only one or two natives for every hundred ladinos in the university. The second sentence is trickier. The use of subjunctive implies a value judgement, it sortof says, “man, it sure is weird to see one of those natives in the university. What is HE doing here?” It hints at racism and other nastiness, subtleties that would be totally missed by a less-than-proficient speaker.

Anyways, my week was well-spent and informative, from both a cultural and linguistic standpoint. And I made a new friend. Now I can say tricky things like “If I would have studied more, I could have spoken better” and have a 20% chance of getting it right, instead of a 0% chance.

Si hubiera estudiado más, podria hablar mejor. Or something like that.