Monday 11:30pm July 11, 2011
I decide that I’m going to keep a separate list of what I do all day every day, so that these full blog entries can be more profound and interesting and less of “I did this. I did that.”
In the last two or so days, the community has really fallen in love with learning to read Hebrew. It’s like a game, a puzzle that they need to decipher. Shanti has told me that when he reads the Hebrew words from our learning material, he feels a connection with something greater, more so than when he reads the Hebrew words written in Spanish transliteration. The plasticity of the brain changes in regard to learning languages at ~13 years of age. I can really see this in terms of how the community learns; the two children, Rolo and Derek, are able to read at a more advanced level than the older people.
I have a few fascinating comments about the way that this community specifically, though I can generalize to most Latin American Jewish communities, learns Hebrew. In Spanish, there isn’t much of a difference in pronunciation between the letters b and v. The consonants in the words beber and vivir are more or less the same for native Spanish speakers. Perhaps the b is more stressed than the v, but they still sound the same. This poses a problem when teaching Hebrew, because in Hebrew there is a clear distinction between a bet and a vet, in addition to the vav (“U’vnei Yerushalayim” versus “B’nai Yisrael”, and then “V’ahavta”). Here in Huánuco, they are pronounced U’bnei Yerushalayim, B’nai Yisrael, and then B’ahabta. Another subtlety is the difficulty for Latin Americans not to be able to pronounce certain sounds involving the gimel. In Spanish, the g can be pronounced as both the “g” in “dog” or like the “ch” in “Bach” in certain contexts. For example, after an o, u, or a, the g is pronounced like the g in dog (ego, iglesia), whereas before an e or i (gemelos, girar), it changes to the “ch” sound in Bach. In the case of one of the men in Huánuco, I spent 5 minutes attempting to show him that the word spelled daled (with a patach beneath) then gimel is not pronounced Dach, but rather d ah g. But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t because those sounds just can’t go together in Spanish, and therefore his mouth can’t make those sounds. The z sound of the zayin also poses an issue because Spanish doesn’t have a z sound like we do in Hebrew and English. Thus, in Huánuco, they pronounce the z like an s (zahav as sahab.)
Another interesting experience takes place when I try to go out to find a place with internet-access in the center of town after dusk. I finally succeed, and it costs me 50 Peruvian cents (aka 18 USA cents) for half an hour. But by no means is that the interesting part. My current house is a 15-minute walk from the center of town, and in a dirtier and more rural area of the city. The people living around me (sans the family with whom I live) are seemingly poorer and less well educated. As I walk to town at night, I pass several groups of teenagers who, at the sight of a white person, actually start laughing. I can’t help but smile, because it’s awkward otherwise. One group of teenagers screamed “Tiburón!” (shark) and “Gringo!” (white person) at me. I want to add the fact that I am actually the only white person in the city of Huánuco. I’m not joking; I haven’t seen another white person in the first 4 days of walking around. It’s the weirdest feeling to know that many of the people in the city you live in are making fun of you for being different and having white skin. I can’t help but think about the American South before the 1970s and how Blacks felt when they were called names and discriminated against by Whites. Here in Huánuco, I’m told that stores will often try to charge me more because I am white. So whenever I go to buy something, I am accompanied either by my host family or a member of the Jewish community (who look no different than other Peruvians) or I ask an impartial viewer if the price seems fair.
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