Jordan — TP11

On our way back to her apartment, we realized we were actually quite hungry after talking about all this food. We decided to stop by Pitaria, because she says it's her favorite restaurant, or at least the only one she knows well. We go in and order, then I asked her what parts of English she needs the most help with. She told me that she needs to work on speaking, which can be hard for her because she is very shy, and because her vocabulary is not highly developed. I decided that now would be a great time to work on her speaking, so I asked her about her background. She is from a coastal town in northwest Peru, but she is getting her Masters in Physics at a University in Costa Rica. She is here to become fluent in English, and she has a brother my age, who is also studying political science.

Then we started to talk about the political things she and her brother were interested in. She relayed the heartbreaking stories of South American governments giving concession after concession to the oil companies at the expense of indigenous peoples living in the Amazon. She told me about the water privatization in Bolivia, where collecting rainwater on your roof was illegal and highly punishable. She had difficulty articulating a lot of these ideas in English, so when she would switch to Spanish to help herself, I just told her to work around the words she didn't know. I knew she was talking about concessions when she was talking about the oil companies and governments and the indigenous who were attacked by them. But instead of translating, I had her work through it until she would say something like "when the government gives the land of the native people to the oil people". I wish I could continue to tutor her when I leave, so I could continue to learn about these things from her.