This was originally posted on Stephanie Cruz’s blog last year, and is reproduced with permission. Stephanie is one of @JosePopoff‘s students in Honduras.
Hey! So this week we had a Skype session with a Texas school. This teacher’s students wanted to practice their Spanish with us, they wanted to have an experience in which they would actually be talking with native Spanish speaking teenage students (wow, that’s long, sounded shorter in my head). Anyhow, they started talking to us and we did not feel offended, but it was a bit awkward.
We were excited about the session, but once they started asking, everything turned out to be disappointing One of the questions asked, was “do you guys use cellphones ” And the other one was, “how does your house looks like?”. It felt like if our balloon was just pinched.
One of the things I learned was never to feel above others, or beneath others.
We should think twice before we speak, we should consider whom are we talking to or talking with. There are many countries, not just the one we live on. This means that when we are talking with someone we must at least try to use a global vocabulary. Not our daily words, but words that are understandable to others that do not live in the same country as we do. For instance, “I live in Lima”. From this phrase one can understand that I live in Lima, Peru, and this is not the case. Specify from were are we natives from. “I was born in Tegucigalpa, Honduras”.
I just wanted to share this because whether we are aware of or not, we are all going global somehow.
The world is advancing, technology is getting even better. There is a word we Hondurans say when someone is uncivilized “montunos”. So, as my teacher once said, we must take off that “montunation” we have.
Start getting global, speak the global language, and get it started!
