This blog has always been a place that I see as my electronic scrapbook. And in that manner, I have felt a certain level of freedom to express how I am feeling or what I am processing because just like a scrapbook, moments of growth and change are memorialized. Therefore, these are some of my thoughts, but not a complete picture of what I am thinking about.

In that same vein, I want to remember the details, facts, memories like finding sea glass on the beach. Later, rolling the piece of sea glass around in you hand, you are not only taken back to the moment that you found it and the setting and emotions that were present but also you begin to recognize new divots in the smoothed over glass, begin to make meaning of the cloud shaped form, and begin to connect the experience into the broader scope of life. This is what I aim for this record of my time in Mérida on study abroad to be. A time to savor and remember. I am going to be sharing photos and writing in mostly Spanish with some English sprinkled in. There will be lots of typos as I navigate a new language and different ways of life.

A little background:

The memories that stick out from the two years of Spanish I took in 7th and 8th grade are De’Ana getting a bloody nose during class, having secret eraser wars with our classmates across the room, the time that Señora our teacher fell which is the only time you would have been able to hear a pin drop in our rambunctious class, getting my only detention for uncontrollable laughter, being nervous to sing a song in front of my teacher for my test, and the creative projects we did to memorize body parts and practice telling about our families. Sometimes I question whether or not I learned much but those two years set me up to understand the framework of a rich language.

In my first year of college, I got to study in the town of Shelton in an elementary school which half the subjects are taught in Spanish and half are taught in English. I also got involved in activism against detention centers which are privately owned prisons for people who are seeking asylum, may not have all their documentation for immigration yet (in a complex system that takes a number of years to navigate), or a number of other reasons (I can go more into this later, it’s very complex and I don’t want to name things and not represent all the factors that are in play in the systems and histories). These detention centers commit awful and heartbreaking human rights abuses against people held within them, all which is a system fueled by greed. All that to say, I decided to commit again to learning Spanish. In my quarter long Spanish class I definitely got to learn new vocabulary and have a refresher on the process of conjugating verbs, but I also remember feeling so overwhelmed by the other classes I was taking at the time and couldn’t spend as much time in the language as I wanted to. What I did focus on was really watching my teachers mouth, just like I see babies do, and then coping that formation until I was able to emulate that accent and way the sounds were represented.

My plan going into college was a plan fueled towards how I could be the most money efficient and how I could get to my goal of becoming a teacher in the quickest time possible. But as I was in my 3rd year of college, I knew I could graduate that year (because of AP classes in high school that transferred to college credit and because I for some reason took more that 16 credits quite often in my time in college ~and along with working was constantly overwhelmed haha~) but I decided to take a fourth year, recognizing the opportunity that college is (also big shout out to financial aid – couldn’t have done it without those tax dollars and generosity of scholarship donors) and that I will be more able to provide for my students better with more experience and growth that I go through.

So looking through the catalog for programs at Evergreen State College, I chose the Spanish Speaking World because of my goal to become fluent in Spanish before I enter my classroom (with the idea that I will be able to connect with and provide for students and families who speak languages other than English) and because I am studying to become a middle school history and English teacher, and this program was focusing on the history of Latin and Central America. Also, the profesoras who were listed to teach the program were people I had my eyes on to study under.

I might edit this later to make it more complete of make a different blog post about what has impacted me in this program already but I have to continue to do my homework haha. Get ready for some updates on my time in México.

~peace & joy, breanne~