Stahlke Adoption

Shopping for Fruits and Vegetables

This morning I was packing lunches for the family, and made a mental note that we are low on fresh fruit right now. That brought to mind an experience that Jonathan had over a year ago:

We buy a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables, which can get expensive unless one shops carefully. We've discovered that the Mexican grocery stores in the Chicago area have fresh produce at very reasonable prices. Jonathan generally does this shopping about once a week, usually with a few of our kids in tow. Jonathan is completely fluent in Spanish, and it's practically a second mother tongue for him, having grown up as a missionary kid in Guatemala and Mexico. The children know this history, and their Stahlke grandparents even gave us a set of three miniature flags with the three birth countries in our family--Ukraine, the U.S., and Guatemala.

In Chicago, Jonathan doesn't need to use his Spanish very often. Most of the staff at the Mexican grocery stores speak English. He occasionally speaks Spanish with friends of ours from Central or South America.

Jonathan and the two older boys were shopping one Saturday, speaking Ukrainian in the Mexican grocery store. For Jonathan and me, Ukrainian is really hard and we speak it poorly, but we managed to communicate with the children before they could speak English. The problem is that when you are working hard on one language, it fills up the part of your brain that handles foreign languages.

One of the boys needed a bathroom, and Jonathan asked an employee in English where the bathroom was located. This particular worker did not understand English, so Jonathan decided to ask his question in Spanish. He was horrified to find out that he couldn't remember the words--and for such a basic question! Ukrainian had taken over that part of his brain! The boys did not believe at all that he is fluent in Spanish.

A few weeks later, once again with the boys, he ran into a friend with whom he always speaks Spanish. Because he saw the friend at a distance before they began talking, he could mentally shift to Spanish before the conversation started. They talked in Spanish for a short while about several topics, then said goodbye. Bogdan looked at Jonathan in disbelief: "You CAN speak Spanish!"

posted by Stahlkes @ 12:25 PM