I remember those first weeks sitting around the lunch table with my adopted Cusceñan Peruvian family: José, Emma, and their four daughters. Unfamiliar sounds ricocheted back and forth, blasting holes in my self-confidence and bringing on an existential crisis of epic proportions. If I couldn’t wax lyrical about the state of the world, if I couldn’t tell a joke, if I couldn’t even have a basic conversation about anything, then who was I?
I’d arrived in Peru on a mission to learn Spanish. I’d been teaching English to migrants and refugees, and I imagined that learning a language through cultural immersion would make me a better teacher. I wanted to experience what my students experienced and so I arrived in Peru with only one (not particularly useful) phrase of Spanish, learned while marching the streets of Sydney chanting for El Salvadorean freedom: “The people united, will never be
