Two Months In

We’re getting a taste of Oaxaca weather, cooled down. It almost felt like a Bay Area day yesterday…drizzled all day. We wore long sleeves. Baseball was canceled, which was fine since we squeezed a make-up game in on Tuesday night.

Also, elections have come and gone and there are no protests that we have seen. So…Oaxaca continues to be as traquilo as ever.

We’re passing the 2 month mark today. In the past when we’ve gone overseas in the summers this is as long as we’ve been gone, so I imagine a bit more homesickness will set in this month. The fact that we’re going to Puerto Escondido for a beach excursion on Wednesday will help ease any pain we might be feeling.

The other great occurrence…which is happening right before my eyes, almost like magic…the kids are absorbing Spanish at a much higher rate. For the last month and a half they have been trying to get their minds wrapped around the different structure of the language and now the immersion is paying off. They’re getting it because they keep hearing it again and again and again. It’s like an “on switch” has been pulled now that the framework has been laid. They’re eating up new vocabulary…new words, instead of going in and getting forgotten, fall into the framework, like a piece in a puzzle. Very cool to see. I imagined and hoped it would happen, but still it’s surprising to me, like watching a miracle take place. The brain is an amazing thing…the kid brain, even more wonderful.

Not that it’s been easy. They have had their difficult days and will continue to have them here and there. Tears and frustration (mostly Gabe’s) have marked this early season of their time in Oaxaca, but I hope they will gradually forget the difficult moments. Maybe by the time they’re back in Berkeley, they’ll remember the great things…like little league, their friends, Abby’s very sweet teacher who thinks she is the funniest kid ever (don’t ask me how, but Abby has developed a reputation as the class clown…maybe that’s how she coped with the language issue, pictured above) really delicious tacos, soccer at the neighborhood cement park…and I hope, I hope above all, they’ll remember a lot of Spanish.