Every Tuesday the boys and I volunteer at the church’s clothes closet — really a trailer that is packed floor to ceiling with clothes. We’ve been doing it for about 2 months now and it’s fun to see how the boys have different gifts as we serve together. For example, Carter loves to help people find clothes; he gets right in there and pulls things off the shelves that he thinks they will like. Calvin likes to run “big kid” errands like fetching keys and delivering the men’s clothes to a different area of the church. He also wanted to run the labeler (to label the different shelves of clothes), but I figured out his spelling needs more work after he printed off this label:
boyz sox. Last week when she was visiting, Caleb told Auntie Ginger what his job is: “I just play.” That’s about right.
So today we were working and a mom and young son came in who spoke no English. I thought I might be able to draw on my Spanish skills from 3 years of High School Spanish, but not so much. I was trying to ask the little boy how old he was and I got as far as “Cuanto . . . cuesta?” Which I immediately remembered meant “How much does it cost?” And I couldn’t remember that what I really wanted to say was “Cuanto anos tiene?” until after I was on my way home. Pretty swift recall, huh? Unfortunately, that’s about how fast I am with my Arabic too. If I could have a 15 minute time-out in between sentences, I could communicate pretty well.
After that fail I was afraid to attempt any further Spanish speaking so I just started holding up clothes and asking “yes?” That seemed to work for both of us.