Notizie dal mio Cuore - 47
Ciao Ragazzi!
It’s been awhile since I’ve talked about my language progression, which I was feeling fairly confident about until recently. Until this afternoon actually when the secretary to the Assessore al Turismo (the minister of Tourism) called me to discuss some project they are doing to improve the nights from the excessive drinking problems. We had attended a meeting given by this office back in June. They had several heads of schools for strainieri (foreigners) and the Consul General of the US and of England to discuss this problem that they had to do something about subido (immediately) then presented this idea the Assessore had of “Educazione alle Note” (Education at Night time) where he said he didn’t know what it was but thought this group could act as a task force to figure it out. Of course this group was made mainly of university representatives who are as political as government officials. All they spoke of at that meeting was how to keep the press from writing about the incidents of rape/sexual assault and violence associated with alcohol and often times American college students, or at least to keep them from going to press BEFORE telling the university officials. Anyway, this all happened almost six months ago…. so of course the term subido (immediately) is all held at a relative distance. Until it’s not… until it’s time for the secretary of the Assessore to call me, speak in rapid-fire Italian, get frustrated with me that I couldn’t follow exactly what she wanted (which had something to do with “your students”, this initiative for the evenings and the ragazzi stranieri (young foreigners)). So she wanted to speak to Aaron because “Lei parla bene Italiano” (he speaks Italian well). Which, frankly, really pissed me off. Not because Aaron speaks better then me - obviously he does he’s been here 11 years. But because she treated me with no respect and wouldn’t take the time to allow me to understand what she was actually saying. She was as rude as I’ve ever been treated here.
As I said, I was starting to feel pretty good about where I am with my language skills…..I had just spent an hour and a half with Aaron in a classroom of Italian students introducing FITC and Creative Campus to them - 60 of them give or take - in Italian where Aaron spoke about FITC, I spoke about Creative Campus - and apparently they understood me because 35 of them signed up for our mailing list and 15 of them were at our event Monday night. I was quite proud of myself actually….. I even got them to laugh a few times!
Speaking a new language is not easy. It has been a great joy to me and a great strain. Unlike other stranieri (foreigners) who come here to live “la bella vita” or to marry or follow a love affair, I did neither. I entered almost immediately into meetings with government officials and haven’t stopped since. In the two years I’ve been here it’s been the most frustrating thing to convey my intelligence and passion to those who might be in a position to assist us in moving our vision forward. But I’ve tried. Sometimes I’ve let Aaron do all the talking, but I don’t think that’s the right thing anymore as we are a team and think differently and express ourselves differently. Ironically - even with my basic Italian - I feel I have my own way of speaking which clarifies who I am and what I stand for - in a limited manner.
I said this two years ago to you when I first started learning and I’ll say it again. As the world gets smaller, we will encounter more and more people who are trying to communicate in our mother tongue — and maybe not well. But they are trying. And maybe while they are butchering our language they are actually trying to do something of value for the community.
Monday night we had over 50 people - mostly American and Italian students - attend our first “Art Crawl” which is a vision to use the arts and the energy of the youth in the city to change the evening atmosphere of Florence, give them purpose and connection and allow all to benefit from it. It’s a positive response to the Pub Crawl which is part of the degradation of the evenings of Florence (drink all you can at one pub and then another and if you can stand at the end you get a t-shirt). On Monday we all met for an aperitivo (aperitif) then “crawled” through the city with our cameras led by a colleague of mine at Florence Univeristy of the Arts - Cosimo Bargellini. He talked about how to shoot Florence at night and we walked from Santa Croce, over the Arno River, looking back at the Uffizi and over to my favorite piazza (which turns out is also his) Santo Spirito. It was a wonderful evening and, not ironically, we walked right by the pubs that are the locations used for the Pub Crawl!
50 is a grand number to start with especially when the 15 Italian students who joined us were from that one class where I spoke broken Italian but expressed something anyway that touched and moved them….. that’s 1/4 of their class who came to our event. Obviously, what we are doing is answering a need…..
I just wish Gabriella from the office of the Assessore al Turismo would have taken the time to understand that… that behind my difficulties with her language is a person doing the best they can in this world….
Just keep that in mind?
Baci,
Bari
