Though I have traveled to Spanish speaking countries five times prior to this trip, I’ll admit my Spanish speaking skills are terrible. On previous trips I had never really pushed myself to learn as there had always been a translator on staff. This time I was either going to have to fend for myself or rely on other bilingual travelers to translate for me, and as there were no other travelers at the center when I first arrived it seemed the universe had decided I would be fending for myself.

I had been learning a little bit of Spanish over the past year through an app on my iPhone, which resulted in me having a solid base of Spanish vocabulary but having no idea how to use these words to form sentences. My first few weeks at the center were spent just pointing at things and saying the word if I knew it or “Como se dice?” (how do you say?) if I didn’t know. I managed to get around OK, but if I wanted to have a conversation beyond asking for mas arroz (more rice), I needed to start speaking beyond one or two word sentences. I had always struggled to learn other languages, in Canada it was a requirement to take a year of French and the only reason I got through it with decent grades was that I somehow got a copy of the final exam the day before I had to write it. There was no reason I shouldn’t be able to pick up a second language, I was naturally above average in the intellect department (or so I like to think!) and had no issues memorizing the Latin names of hundreds of plants during my Environmental Science BSc.

Finally one day at the center, after bumbling my way through trying to explain to the assistant shaman that I had a pain in my stomach that was getting worse and was probably from my low-grade infection flaring up again, I realized what was mentally blocking me from learning a second language beyond just knowing a few words. I had no problem learning words of another language as there was a clear right and wrong answer which suited the perfectionist side of me, but when it came to forming sentences I had to realize that there was no one right or wrong way to do it. I was holding myself back from fully trying to converse in Spanish thinking that I would sound stupid, that I had to know exactly what order to put the conjugations and verbs in before I would even attempt to say something. Which was ridiculous when I realized why I was doing it, in the English language I could convey the same idea in about 1000 different ways, it was absurd that I held onto a belief that the Spanish language would only have one proper way to converse.

As soon as I recognized this belief in myself and how silly and detrimental it was, I began to become more open with just trying to speak in sentences (even if I did sound like a two year old) and my learning rate increased two-fold. I knew I was making progress when one day I held a five minute conversation with the assistant shaman at the center. I’m about 70% sure we were talking about the same thing, he seemed to laugh at the correct time when I made an attempted joke. But when I look back I think there’s a chance we could have easily been talking about two completely different things. Day by day I would continue to chat in Spanish to the shamans and the other staff, and my Spanish got better and better. I would be amazed when I could ask something random, like can you show me this tree and they would actually understand and take me to the tree. By a month and a half into my trip, I was actually helping translate (albeit poorly) for other travelers!

Not that my learning curve was a straight upward slope. I remember once one of the kids had brought their pet rabbit out to show us. As I was holding the rabbit, I made an attempt to ask the girl “What does your rabbit eat?” She gave me an odd look, and quickly took the rabbit away from me. I would later realize that instead of asking her “what does your rabbit eat?” I may have actually asked “do you eat your rabbit?”, which made sense of why she had so quickly removed the rabbit from my possession. If the worst thing to come from my failed attempts at speaking Spanish was a child a bit more wary of handing tourists her pets, I figured I was doing alright.

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