1. Te Amo Por Siempre - I Really Like You Forever
Gabrielle can be 11 years old. She has four and a half ft. Tall and doesn't weigh a lot more than a
couple totes of groceries. The girl black hair stands out in the dim mild of the dingy class as she
nervously twirls it inside the fingers of the girl right hand. The girl eyes are almost black, the whites
bright white; her look , a contagious expensive of fun, breaks like a sunrise coming from flawless
cinnamon pores and skin.
With dogged determination and mixed success she tries to pronounce the word "similar to " using just
one syllable. I suggest she try to use it in a phrase. She gamely demands , "Jew lee-keh choe-koe-
lah-teh?" I answer the girl truthfully, "Yes, i like chocolate." I choose to ignore the confusing
complexity of the verb "to complete."
She and 5 other Costa Rican adolescents arrive voluntarily to study uk three times a week with a little
school in Santa Ana, costa rica. The school is held by a private Costa Rican business. This writer
volunteers as the gringo native speaker. The scholars are beginners so there is plenty of the spanish
language spoken, and lord knows, this gringo viejo needs your practice.
The school is a humble making. There are two single florescent tubes attached crookedly to the
ceiling. One too works, smearing the space with a dim gray light. The floor can be bare concrete.
Your walls show proof of paint applied prolonged , long ago. Four cables coil down your far wall
coming from two cheap fans. Five feet over the floor black tape joins them to a pair of other wires
sticking out from a four-inch hole.
There's a destroy in the back of the room and a bookcase with rows of what look to be new,
untouched books. An old television set mutely occupies the middle shelf. A map associated with
Costa Rica hangs for the wall in the place between the single windowpane and the door. Modern
white-board covers top wall.
There tend to be three boys and also three girls inside the class. The two other girls, Raquella and
also Maria, are a small older than Gabrielle, 18 or 15 probably. Typically attractive young Ticas, they
use tight, revealing clothes with plunging cleavage lines. The three boys, Juan, Simon (pronounced
with the accent on the end ), and Daniel, throughout 14, are more or perhaps less constantly
distracted by the necklines as well as the prodding, squealing and also giggling of the two older girls.
The males don't seem to mind. Infrequent discussion of the uk language barely penetrates the
swirling junk food diet fog.
The Costa Rican teacher speaks excellent English. He teaches eight several hours a day in this
school. These are the last two several hours of his morning. The kids have donned him down and
therefore are in full control. Little if any English is verbal. The students are translating a random
smattering of English words using English/Spanish dictionaries. Raw beginners, i wonder what
employ they will make of words like, skull, the game of golf and proud.
I don't have much to complete. The students listen and also repeat as I articulate the words on the
table. I answer a couple of questions. They go back to fooling around and make halting progress in

2. their translation assignment.
Gabrielle pops up to me during a burglary class. She tells me she has a partner in the United States.
She won't know where the girl girlfriend lives, but thinks it might be in Nueva Jork. She would like to
go america someday she claims.
We're speaking the spanish language. I ask if the girl goes to school. The girl says no. I inquire why.
She claims she can't go to school because she is a Nica. Any Nica is a person from Nicaragua, a
minority here, looked lower upon by several Costa Ricans. She is an illegal immigrant and doesn't
have documents. I think about letting go of Spanish so I will not have to discover items like this.
Last 1 week I read an internet statement that Costa Rica's child protection company was threatening
to take a child away from an american expat family due to the fact , after an intolerably bad
experience in any Costa Rican public school, the expats were schooling their own eight-year-old son
in your house. An offended teacher reported them to the kid Protection police.
It turns out that not permitting your child to be cajolled by his class mates and ignored by simply his
teacher inside a crappy Costa Rican elementary school will be the bureaucratic equivalent of "little
one abuse." Talking to Gabrielle, I was having a remove from the mythology of the splendid success
associated with government schooling in Costa Rica. Child defense bureaucrats were gonna force a
rich international boy to go to any lousy public school while they kept a poor foreign girl coming from
going to any school at all. It struck me that public bureaucracies are the same everywhere, self-
interested, ineffective, defensive, and also vindictive. Education, whether it appears at all with a list of
priorities, is very close to the bottom.
I did not know what to say to Gabrielle. I wanted to figure out some way to get the girl an education. I
wanted to take her home and also teach her to learn myself. But the lower trajectory of an misleading
life didn't problem her. She ended up being much more interested in your romantic poetry associated
with Latin pop music. She wanted to understand how it sounded in uk.
What is the uk for "Eres bonita?" the girl asked.
I reply , "You are beautiful." lovely is a challenging mouthful of vowels for that native speaker
associated with Spanish. She repeated it many times. You're beautiful. You are lovely. You are
beautiful. The girl loved saying it. After a dozen endeavors she was clear , sounding like a pixie
bandida in a pasta western.
She furthermore wanted to know the uk for that timeless touchstone of Latin crooning, "Te amo por
siempre." "How do you say it ?" she asked, wonderfully unselfconscious, as if "Te amo por siempre"
were the a bus end.
"I love you forever," I responded to. She made me do it again it a dozen occasions , imitating me after
each one until the girl thought she been there just about right. And then she ran more than and tried it
out on Daniel. He seemed pleased.
map of Costa Rica