Teaching English as a foreign language

After class yesterday I met up with my friend Murilo and his friend Dalmo for veggie food and after that, walked to the bay, but not before getting caught in the rain. It was so pretty and I haven´t experienced rain in so long in draught-prone California that I didn´t mind that I got soaked.

But the funniest part about yesterday was teaching my Brazilian friends new English words. I was trying to explain my job and what I do and what Section 8 is and what our tenants are like and the word "ghetto" slipped out of my mouth. But much to my dismay, nobody knew what "ghetto" meant. So I had to consult my inner dictionary to try to define the word ghetto. I was pretty much stumped. How DO you descibe what ghetto means? I came up with words like "loud, obnoxious, cheap, too many kids, ignant" amongst others, but my meaning just wasn´t getting across. I settled by saying "sorry, you just have to see it to understand." Big taste of cultural differences. There are no ghetto people in Brazil. How wonderful, eh?

I also had a bit of a cross cultural language difficulty when later on after eating Brazilian barbeque (I settled for the vast array of side dishes, but the waiters kept coming around the table with every type of dead animal you can think of- it was like eating in a slaughter house) we were hanging out with another group of friends at their house near school watching the Brazil vs. Mexico futból game (Mexico won). My friend Felipé shocked and offended both me and the other 3 of my classmates who went when he called me a skank! When I asked him why he called me that, he called me it again! He didn´t understand why I was getting so offended and it took me a minute to realize what he was trying to say when it dawned on me that he meant to say "skunk". I had to explain to Felipe that he had to be careful with what he said in some cases, because the word "skank" is like a prostitute. He was so upset that he accidentally called me a skank, but excited that he learned a new word! We all had a good laugh out of it.

The language barriers make the adventure all that more fun!