Friday, July 25, 2008

Fun and games!!

I remember what I was going to tell you! So the other day we were helping out the fabulous lady named Elia who teaches upwards of a hundred small children in her home so that they don't grow up to be low-life nothings (because school here is expensive, and also because their mothers work and can't look after them). H'anyvays, her son is deaf, and we were all sitting around chatting over lunch and he was telling us all about his life, only he's deaf, so it was all in sign language. None of us speak sign language, so it devolved into a fairly complicated game of charades. I mean, I can finger-spell things, but then there's the whole problem of I DON'T SPEAK SPANISH!! So if I spelled things, they'd be in English, and then he'd spell things back at me in Spanish, and then we'd both shake our heads and he'd try some more obvious signs. He's a surprisingly good communicator, and so he was able to charade things like how Joel was going to go surfing and get eaten by a shark and then I would be all alone and sad because Joel was dead (I know. Kind of all of our conversation was weird like this). It was actually super fun, except that he kept giving me his American Sign Language book and gesturing for me to flip through it. I don't know if he wanted me to learn all sign language immediately, or to just sort of browse through, or if he thought I was looking for something in particular (it wasn't arranged in alphabetical order or anything, so trying to find the sign for one particular word would have been impossible), so I mostly just flipped some pages and then changed the subject. Hilariousment and awkward.

2 comments:

Rebekah said...

The other day Darren and I were at Save-On and while I was waiting for Darren to pay for his groceries I noticed one of those plastic dogs in which you can donate money for the blind, or something to that sort. I always see it there, but today I was bored so I put my sunglasses on the dog. No one was noticing me so I shouted, "Hey Darren! DARRen! Look! It's funny, right?" but the funny part was that I didn't even THINK about how this dog was for BLIND people and here I was, putting some dark glasses on the dog. I am no longer allowed on grocery trips.

Jane said...

I was at Elia's house last summer! Is she not awesome? I've been praying for her all year. Give her a hug from me.

How big is Mexico?
What are the chances that you are in the EXACT same community that I was in 11 months ago?

Have you had taco's at Smokey's road side stand yet?