Catalina - TP #11

This session started two nights after the barbecue that Tony invited me to on Sunday. I met some of his friends (and they daughters and sons) and had amazing Salvadorian food and a great time. I have to add that, since I started teaching them, both Tony and Emma have been telling me a lot of personal stuff in our traveling to and from my pick up. In a sort of way I am the perfect shoulder to cry on, since I am external to their daily situations and relationships, am non-judgmental, pretty positive about every problem and, after all, I am going to leave pretty soon. Well, ‘perfect shoulder to cry on’ actually became more than an expression when Emma drank a bit too much and let’s just say that a lot of the stuff they had both been telling me about sort of surfaced.

So Tuesday rolls around and Emma comes to pick me up, starting off with apologies that I shrug off... and there we go to class again! I can say our relationship has grown stronger, yet I try to keep myself objective towards everything. They confide in me and have given me, over our sessions, a lot of very personal and maybe dangerous information. I wonder if it affects the classes in anyway and would like to see myself in the first sessions to recognize the differences.

This time for sure we were going to keep the lesson useful and communicative, so I prepared information that you might need for a hotel reservation and/or payments through the phone. Role playing with a phone conversation was how we approached this, but I’m pretty sure stuff like ‘what is your card number?’ or ‘what is your billing address?’ can come in handy at many situations. We went over numbers too, and Tony was happy about it, since it’s very important to write amounts correctly on checks. We started with the basic payment information and then added to actual hotel information towards the end of the lesson. I had printed out many payment form papers, so we role played for a while. When it was my turn to be the client, they both hated it, since they had to ask me several times to spell things out and they are still having problems with the vowels in the alphabet!

What made me feel really good is that, after the lesson ended they actually wanted to go over ‘Hello, Godbye’. They don’t hate the Beatles! They actually have grown to like the song and wanted to sing it! (Well, it’s more like muttering it under their breath, but, heck! It was their idea and that is enough for me!). You say stop, and I say go go go!