Whether I like yerba mate isn’t really the point. Much like the anise-flavored rakı in Turkey, the allure is the shared experience. For those of you unfamiliar, yerba is a form of tea, the mate is a cup traditionally made from a hard hollowed gourd, and the sharing of “yerba mate” is a pseudo-religious ritual in Argentina. There’s one server in every round who fills the yerba-filled mate to the brim with piping hot water, and when it’s handed to you, your job is to empty the whole thing – to drink until you’re slurping on air. You hand it back to be refilled, and on it goes to the next person, around and around until the thermos is empty.
The taste of yerba is bitter at best. Drinking near-boiling water is always a questionable endeavor. The bombilla, a shared metal straw, is spiced with other peoples’ saliva. But I’ve drunk so much of it in the past three months that it’s been branded into my scent memory. My daily matteine requirements are through the roof, and the heat no longer bothers me. I can drink the brew unsullied by sugar, a move that earns me a few paltry brownie points from locals, although not nearly enough to make up for all those I lose by not understanding Spanish.
It turns out a mate habit is much easier to pick up than a language.
I have yet to meet a single person south of the 45th parallel who is perfectly fluent in English, and so it was that I’ve become an accidental English teacher. I unintentionally impose my odd blend of a Midwestern/Southern accent upon dozens of unsuspecting Argentines. You don’t realize how weird your own accent is until you hear it parroted back at you. It’s wrong somehow, like when you compare a recording of your voice with how it sounds from the inside.
By far my most afflicted letter is o, which comes out as a weird “ah” noise. Dodge becomes Dahdge, conference becomes cahnference, and I internally cringe every time it laces a foreign tongue. It doesn’t help that in normal life I rarely enunciate – for example, I’m going to somehow shortens to Ahma, dripping with a Southern inflection. Multiple people have wanted to learn the word rotten (an odd choice, but useful when working with trees) and it always comes out as rahtn, ending in a weird nasal grunt I think I picked up in Wisconsin. Worse is when my slang is equivalent to a Spanish homonym – shorten okay to kay and it becomes phonetically identical to the Spanish que, meaning “what.”
There is nothing – NOTHING – more infuriating than wanting to communicate with someone and not being able to. Seeing the frustration and confusion that I feel mirrored in someone else’s eyes is a special kind of cruelty, and it’s worsened by the knowledge that I’m the one causing the problem. There’s no fix for it besides learning, but progress comes at a glacial pace no matter how desperate I am. It’s not a problem I can easily escape, either, buried deep in a society well-known for its loquaciousness and community-addicted nature.
I have the oddest sensation of never being fully understood here, and consequently never fully expressed. I generally have to speak slowly, using simple words, with few jokes (because it turns out most of my jokes are idiomatic), to even be half-understood. Sometimes communication sans words is best, and I find myself using gestures and facial expressions and head tilts and even literal clicks and whistles. Conveying my personality without words is an unforeseen challenge, and it kind of feels like I’m diluted.
I’m stuck in an interesting ongoing experiment where I’m testing the veracity of the phrase “actions speak louder than words.” I often have to decide if I like someone based solely on what they do, but then I wonder if I’m even getting a full cross-section of their personality. I wonder if I would still like them as much if I knew what they were saying. When I can’t understand a conversation, my mind tends to think the topics of discussion are wildly interesting. My imagination believes they’re delving deep into age-old philosophical questions, even though they could be discussing the weather or the merits of a certain brand of yerba. FOMO rears its annoying head. Living in a country where I don’t understand the language means I have to constantly accept that I will be left out of most conversations, that I’ll forever be on the edge of the group looking in, that I have to subsist on the conversational scraps that kind-hearted volunteers remember to translate for me. And I have to be okay with that. Alternately I have to make dedicated efforts to ask for translations, a struggle when my Midwestern personality insists that I refrain from burdening others with my shortcomings.
But, I’m learning. Ye olde Duolingo bird sends me threatening notifications if I forget to practice my gustas and entenders every day. I don’t think six months will be long enough for me to do much more than check out at the grocery store, but it’s something more than I had when I started. In the end it’s all about the experience anyways – it was never a question of whether I like it.
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