Hola

Baño

Cuantos años tienes?

I may have just reached (or passed) the extent of your Spanish language ability.  And because of that you may find an excuse to not interact with the family you’re building a house for…except to ask where the bathroom is!

I was recently in Phoenix with Amor Ministries co-founder Scott Congdon, VP of Global Expansion Steve Horrex, and Director of Operations Ryan Perkio.  We drove out there to meet with Arizona Reservation Ministries (ARM), see their work on the San Carlos Apache reservation, and see if we could partner with them to build houses on the reservation.

Click here to see Scott’s post about our future work with ARM.

One of the exciting facets of working on the reservation is that our groups will have a cross-cultural experience without having a language barrier.  As we were  reminded of during our tour of the Heard museum in Phoenix, we have different cultures and ways of seeing the world despite some shared history.

Having dinner with Steve’s sister and her family (who graciously hosted us) we talked about our various travels in Spain and Latin America and discovered we had all had similar experiences in speaking the Spanish language to native speakers: Because we tried to speak the language, no matter how poorly we did it, our hosts graciously accepted our ignorance of language and culture.

Thinking ahead to how we structure the cultural interactions our trips to the San Carlos Apache reservation reminds me to remind you to interact in Mexico, despite your Spanish limitations.  What great respect you can show by learning a few phrases and using a lot of hand gestures!