Lost In Translation

One of the joys of marrying into a family with a different culture, is learning and appreciating a different language. Those of you who know me and my husband know that he is Hispanic and that we are teaching our son Spanish so he can fully embrace that part of his culture. (Don't even get me started on the fact that my parents did not teach me how to speak German or Italian !!)

While living in Florida, we attended a great church that also had a Sunday evening Spanish Service. We quickly became involved and loved attending that service. It started out as a bilingual service which was great for me since my Spanish was not fluent. However, it eventually turned into a total Spanish service so I really had to put my Spanish education to work. I can definitely understand Spanish better than I can speak it. I can speak it... but it just takes me a little while to translate my thoughts into Spanish so it seems.

Usually if a few non-Spanish speaking people would come to the Sunday night services, we would have someone translate the sermon into English for them (they would be wearing a headset to receive the translation). But, if I was the only non-Spanish speaking person there, I would not ask for the translation and just see if I could figure it all out on my own. Steve would often check in with me to make sure I was fully understanding the sermon. I was usually spot-on with the sermon topic and got the gist of what was being said.

One night I was sitting alone for the beginning of the sermon, and to be honest, it just wasn't making much sense to me. As soon as Steve sat next to me, I said, "Honey.. you have to help me out here. Pastor keeps talking about an ugly man and I have no idea what he's talking about. What ugly man?? He keeps saying, "Feo, Feo" (Ugly, Ugly). Steve started cracking up and said, "No, No.. he's saying "Fe, Fe" (Faith, Faith).

I'm blaming it on Pastor's Brooklyn accent. Feo and Fe... you can see how easily an excitable man from Brooklyn could make those two words sound alike.