Ano . . . I mean what do you think you're doing! The "I can't speak English today" post

Today, I had trouble speaking English. It was an interesting phenomenon. I suppose it was a somewhat stressful situation and I just couldn't express myself in English!

So one of my jobs is called Science in the Parks. We take cool sciencey stuff to parks in Ogden so kids can play with it and be excited to learn. Today what we took were things you fly. Like paper airplanes, and air rockets, and alka-seltzer in film canisters. I was at the alka-seltzer table. First we were letting the kids put their volatile film canisters on the sidewalk. I ended up being the person keeping people away from the explosion zone. Kids can be brats, you know? you tell them over and over and over "DO NOT get close to the other canisters" but they still do. One way we tried to solve this was by getting a second table, and then they could only put their volatile canisters on the table, and then BACK AWAY. It's quite a job keeping a bunch of kids AWAY from this type of thing. If they're not reaching their arms over and getting their face close to the others already going, they're trying to pick up the pieces from off the table or grab theirs again if it's a dud. There were also countless canisters that went off in kids' hands while they were watching it instead of putting it on the table, but no serious injuries.

I was talking constantly saying most of the same things over and over, "stay back" and "they could explode at any time" and "only adults can take things off the table" and at a couple points my frustration level got pretty high and my English just deteriorated. It doesn't help that most of them know Spanish, and may not be great at English. I knew I needed to communicate in simple English but the words would not string together. A couple times I really did slip and say "ano" or "iyon" which no one would understand but maybe it's good I couldn't say much other than "stay back from the table" and no one was offended. It was a great trial of patience, and I guess I survived :-)

I concluded the day with telling our advisor that we need shirts that say "I survived Science in the Parks." Then he said the bookstore will probably donate shirts to us, so arranging the printing won't be too hard. I'm excited for this. 1 park down (well, tomorrow), 5 more to go. If I really do survive through July I'll let you know.