Communication Anxiety

On Sunday afternoon, I returned from a weekend spent in Las Terrenas, Samaná with other Esperanza Fellows. A wicked sunburn aside (I swear, it couldn't be avoided), it was an incredibly fun weekend and I can't wait to hang out again with the incredibly eclectic and fascinating group of people we have as fellows this summer. Getting back to San Pedro from Las Terrenas was quite a haul but was fairly seamless in that I was able to get from one connection to another with little trouble. Three other fellows and I first rode back to Santo Domingo on a gua-gua, basically a public transit van or small bus. No matter how full they may be, they are always willing to take on more people, a fact my fellow... fellow, Tim, learned the hard way. Tim was sitting in the far back of the bus, already quite cozy with three other guys back there, when another guy got on the bus and made his way to the back, insisting on squeezing in between Tim and another guy by the window.

Anyway, once I got back in San Pedro, I had my worst anxiety attact in recent memory. It started when I decided to go down to the colmado on the bottom floor of my building to buy a botellón, a water jug designed for water coolers. Thus far I had been relying on the family upstairs and the office for drinking water, and now I figured it was time to get my own. I told the guy working there that I wanted to buy a jug water, which were kept in a blue cage near the door, and the response I got confused me. I didn't understand precisely what he was saying to me, all I knew was that I couldn't simply walk in and buy a botellón, there was something else to the process, something else I needed.
I was extremely frustrated, because I needed that water, and for some reason it was being denied to me, and I wasn't understanding why. I grew increasingly anxious, as I kept telling the guy what I wanted, and why I wanted it, telling him I was living upstairs in the same building, and I kept not understanding his replies. The words felt like distant memories--familiar, and yet I could not quite connect them with the real, solid meanings that exist, present but ever-elusive, in the corners of my mind.

Eventually, I got the sense that perhaps I needed to bring in an empty jug in order to get a new one. I told the guy that I had a few empty jugs upstairs, and the response I got indicated to me that that would probably improve our little situation. By this time however, I was barely containing the emotion of the anxiety that had been building throughout the interaction. I got back up to my apartment feeling irrationally terrified to an extent I haven't felt in a long time. I knew that I shouldn't feel that way--I wasn't in any real danger, the man understood that I was struggling with the language, and if I had to I could just buy a water bottle or two to get me buy until I figured out what I needed to do. After taking some deep breaths and pulling myself together, I got one of the empty jugs sitting on my kitchen floor and took it downstairs. No good, the jug's opening was cracked and would leak. So I took it back upstairs and got a different one, which looked a little worn but was still fully intact. I took it downstairs, and the guy got out a new one, opened it, and filled my jug with the water from it. I was a bit disappointed, as I was hoping to get an entirely new jug, and I was a bit concerned that my really old jug might have some grossness inside it and might make my water taste funny or not be entirely safe. But in the end, it only cost 25 pesos (about 70 cents), which made me feel very foolish for bringing only a 1000-peso bill ($27.86) down with me.

I suppose my anxiety may have primarily been due to a boiling over of my frustration at having so much trouble understanding a language I've been studying for years. The problem, as I see it, has several parts. The first is word discernment: my ear is not developed to a point where I can tell which words are being spoken when they are spoken at conversational speed amongst other words, most of which I would probably know if I saw them written but some of which I may not. The second is immediacy of meaning: I hear words and sentences that I understand, but I don't fully grasp their meaning as they are spoken without a bit of time and concentration, replaying the words in my head to be sure I hadn't missed something, by which time the speaker is already saying something else. The third issue is familiarity with syntax: I will frequently hear words that I know, but they will be structured in unfamiliar ways, creating sentences that use familiar words but don't make any grammatical sense if translated literally.

Communication has been a fairly rough area for me thus far. I know I will improve with time, I just have to be patient with myself. Which is hard.