Ja-lene Clark:
Please Don’t Misunderstand Me…

For many years I worked as a general manager for the Black-eyed Pea restaurants in both Texas and Oklahoma. Immigrants that spoke Spanish as their first language were the people who wanted to fill the majority of our kitchen staff positions. When we had a kitchen job opening, filling it was easy! I’d ask my Spanish-speaking staff to tell their friends. Without fail, the next day several people showed up to happily ask for trabajo (work).

I always had great respect for my employees and appreciated their hard work. Our jobs were high-stress, physically demanding positions. To better communicate with my Spanish speaking staff, I learned how to speak a handful of Spanish words so I could help explain practical things like what to fill in on an application, instructions on how much food to cook, or to assign special cleaning tasks. With time, I became pretty adept at speaking a hybrid language we affectionately called Tex-Mex—a blending of words in English and Spanish that helped both cultures understand each other.

Out of necessity, the wait staff also tried to pick up on this hybrid language. The inexperienced ones simply added an “o” or “a” to any English word thinking that it made the word at least sound more Spanish. That did not always work. For example, one night, at our employee appreciation party, I found out just how terrible this method of making words sound more Spanish was. I noticed that one of our wait staff, Terri, was noticeably intoxicated, and she had her arm around one of our cooks, Constancio. Have you noticed that people fall into a few broad categories when they have a bit too much to drink? Some people show no effect, while others might get mean or whinny, and then there are the huggers who tell everyone how much they love them. From her behavior, I could tell that after a few too many cocktails Terri’s tendency was to be overly affectionate.  I heard her say;  “Hey, Constancio, you are mucho COOLO!” Constancio’s eyes got wide and he pulled away from her and said; “Oh Terri, that’s no nice!”  After a little Spanish lesson from him we learned that adding an o to cool (which sounds like “cul”) was a no-no. That one letter turned the word from a complementary American slang term to the derogatory Spanish word for the word butt! No nice, indeed! Terry accidently said that Constancio had a big butt.  

I also witnessed how easy it was for the Spanish staff to confuse English words. Roberto, our dishwasher, had just finished cleaning up the dish area after the lunch shift. (Roberto was, by the way, a neat freak, which I found to be an excellent trait for someone in his position.) All the pots, pans, glasses and plates were clean and put away. The stainless steel table where we slid dishes from the waitperson pass-through to the dishwasher sparkled. Roberto was ready to have his station checked and asked me to check his work so he could go home. While I was approving his work, one of the waitresses, Beth, who had just finished cleaning the last table from her shift, carried one last bus tub and slipped it through the pass-through door and onto Roberto’s now spotless stainless steel table. Roberto quickly opened the door and Beth was still standing there. He had a scowl on his face, held up his right hand balled it into a fist and shook his fist at Beth and then said; “I kiss you ass!” Beth and I could not stop laughing. With his body language we knew Roberto had obviously confused “kiss” with “kick.” Easy to do but isn’t it ironic how one or two letters can completely change the meaning?

In our world today the boundaries that divide cultures are disintegrating. With Facebook we have an easy way to become friends with people from any country that has access to the internet. We know what our friends in other parts of the world do for entertainment, how their family structure interacts, and we can read their own personal views of the world and life. With this one advantage in global communication, as a whole, we can mature and then unify as a global community. Our generation has an unpredicted opportunity to experience peace and I believe that starts with curing our indifferences that oftentimes come from communication glitches. When we say no to Us versus Them thoughts—“They did that so we’ll do this,” we can transform our thoughts to give other people the benefit of the doubt—  "Gosh, I wonder if they really did mean what I think they meant?” That is the moment when we will reach beyond the babble and we can really start something new on the planet!

Genesis 11: 1-9

Now the whole earth had one language and one speech.  And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there. Then they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They had brick for stone, and they had asphalt for mortar. And they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.”

But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. 

And the Lord said, “Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them. Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”  So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city. 

Therefore its name is called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

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