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Hand Gestures
Two girls sat in the sand. The one was just old enough to be interested in what the other was doing, which was dragging a plastic rake in figure 8′s between them.
I watched the girls while Alleke went up and down and around the slide like it was a merry-go-round. I was curious about the older girl because, while she was old enough to be in school, she hadn’t said a word to the other girl. She was using hand gestures, pointing and tapping the younger girl’s knee to keep her attention, to explain her elaborate plan to build an infrastructure of roads around them using the plastic rake. She hadn’t said a word, but from across the playground, I knew exactly what she was trying to communicate. That’s when I wondered if she was deaf.
Alleke ran over to the swings, and I lost track of the two little girls until I looked at my phone and realized it was time for us to go home. As I lifted Alleke out of the swing and turned to go, the older girl ran past us and out of the playground.
“I can’t take this anymore,” she yelled, in English.
I understood more about her immediately. She spoke English, not Spanish. She didn’t like being misunderstood in her own language, so she used hand gestures instead.
I watched her run across the square and climb into the lap of a woman who must have been her mother and who was sitting at a café having a drink. I couldn’t hear what they were saying to each other from that far away, but the girl was jabbering away, her hands folded quietly in her lap.
MORE ON: kids, park, spanish, third culture kids
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Rebecca said...
You have been tagged…check my blog
July 29, 2008 at 2:21 am