I slept well enough, I arrived awake, and I stayed awake throughout classes. Speaking of Joshua as my sparring partner gave me an image to imitate today, and so I found myself acting lively with Profesora Julia, responding actively and not passively to her questions and her corrections.
We began with a pronunciation exercise, reading Scripture and reflections from a weekly Catholic bulletin. I protested some of the corrections to my pronunciation, thinking I had delivered what Profesora Julia wanted to hear, when in fact I had not. I knew this inside of me, but I was goading myself to be awake and alert and active, and it worked, so I continued play-acting and sparring in this way. It all went well enough. We continued with vocabulary drilling, which included going frequently off on a tangent for conversation whenever a word prompted some thought in me or the teacher. Doing this makes class time pass surprisingly quickly.
The second hour of class brought more success, in fact probably my best hour going solo thus far. I prepared a ten-minute talk about the parallels between the Jewish Passover and the Christian “Passover” of Easter, starting from an ancient formula of Christian faith handed down by Saint Paul: “Our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7). This went over very well: I had made myself very clear, and my grammar was correct. For the rest of the second hour we found ourselves talking about the Jewish and Christian faiths, and from there branching into other topics, including ecumenism, with a long digression into Jehovah’s Witnesses, its beliefs, and its practices of evangelization. Lo and behold, it was ten o’clock and time for tea before I knew it. This was very good.
The third and fourth hours also passed well with Profesora Karla. She has been substituting since last week for both Profesora Sara, who was ill, and Profesora Vicky, my teacher for the next three weeks, who was on vacation these last two days. I presented a summary of what I learned on the Internet about mate, the popular hot beverage (or sometimes cold) consumed throughout South America. Our vocabulary drill led into numerous digressions. One of them concerned Bolivian politics. No, I do not think it is a good idea for the United States to intervene in the October presidential election and forcibly prevent Evo Morales from seeking another term, though he is in fact constitutionally barred from doing so and he has ignored a national referendum calling for him to honor the Bolivian constitution. This is a situation for Bolivians to resolve themselves, not the United States. We also talked about the surgeries we have had; I had a salivary gland with a calcified duct removed in May 2001.
I write at length about what happened in class, mundane as it seems, because these are things I talked about entirely in Spanish. And it was only the teacher and I. And it was an equal exchange as we shared the conversation in roughly equal parts, not quite fifty-fifty but rather close. It was also an equitable exchange: the teachers, as always, give all they can give, and today I was genuinely giving all I can give. And to my surprise, I kept finding more to give. The conversation kept going, for four 50-minute sessions. That is an accomplishment worth naming and celebrating.
In the same letter, in almost the same breath where he says Christ is the paschal lamb that was sacrificed, Paul tells the Christian church in Corinth to celebrate the Passover feast “with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1 Corinthians 5:8). Thanks be to God, in my efforts at school today I truly kept the Christian Passover well, clearing out the old yeast of my inhibitions and sloth, becoming a fresh batch of dough. I engaged the opportunity before me with effort and enthusiasm.
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