Illustration by Jamie Douglas
In this time of the coronavirus, the friends I talk to most often live thousands of miles away — in Mexico and Colombia.
That's true social distancing.
I am learning Spanish, and through the miracle of Skype, I chat for an hour or so five days a week with Latin American friends who want to learn English. We teach each other our languages.
I've puttered with Spanish for years, my interest born out of frustration at being unable to talk to locals on a trip to Costa Rica. I got serious when my retirement from full-time news reporting nearly five years ago gave me more time to conjugate irregular verbs. Isolation caused by the virus — el virus — propelled my studies even further.
I’m proud to say I now speak enough Spanish to order food, find the bathroom and horribly misspeak with ease.
New Amigos
Through the free website conversationexchange.com, you can find Skype pals, like pen pals of yore, in many languages.
My friends include: Juan, mid-20s, who is in Bogotá, Colombia, and has a degree in anthropology; Edgar, a cartographer in his 50s in Pachuca, Mexico; Angélica, a government worker in her 50s near Mexico City; and Mary, a former social worker in her early 60s from Guatemala who now works at a child care center in Minneapolis.
We talk about the things all friends talk about — news, family, work, popular culture.
Did you know that Wonder Woman in Spanish is Mujer Maravilla (Woman Wonder)? The Fantastic Four are Los Cuatro Fantásticos. But Batman is just Batman.
We also talk about our differences — our countries, our holidays, our histories and language oddities.
All that most people know about Colombia, Juan laments, is crime, Cartagena and coffee. So here's a fun fact: Bogotá, located near the equator, is about 20 degrees cooler than Richmond in summer because its elevation is so high.
The Viral Wedding
Like people here, my friends in Latin America are isolating and distancing to deal with the coronavirus. One nearly missed his wedding.
This fifth friend, Efrain, is an online tutor in Mexico City. I pay him $5 to chat for an hour a week and feel guilty about the low price.
Efrain, 25, planned his April wedding meticulously. He and his fiancée, Brenda, planned to invite nearly 200 people. Then the virus broke out, and suddenly people in his area could not meet in groups of more than 10.
So Efrain and Brenda switched to a Zoom wedding. I was invited to Zoom in with my wife, Kathy, who also speaks a little Spanish.
It went perfectly, and we all cried. Unused to Zoom, I blurted an unrelated obscenity when the mics were unmuted, but it was in English, and I don't think anyone noticed.
The Spanish Zone
Locally, a group of Spanish speakers called Zona Española normally gets together every Friday at 10:30 a.m. in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts' Best Cafe. At this writing, COVID-19 has halted the group.
Our native speakers include a former economist, a retired architect, and several teachers past and present. They are from Mexico, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Venezuela and Spain, among other places.
Then there are the gringos like me, struggling to keep up. One day when everyone was talking fast, a man beside me turned and said in English, "I feel like I'm always a sentence behind.”
Fun With Immigration
Kathy and I are helping a Mexican friend in Chesterfield County get her papers. We have taken her to Norfolk to get fingerprinted, to Arlington County twice for immigration court and to downtown Richmond to get her Social Security card. Could this be any harder?
Our friend is in the immigration pipeline, so her status is legal, for now. She has two U.S.-born, very American children for whom Mexico is a mythical country. The case drags on.
The Night Jesús Came
Before COVID-19, Kathy and I occasionally helped Latinx travelers — and a few worn-out gringos, too — at the Greyhound station by the Diamond. We provided snacks and directions as part of a larger effort.
One morning, we met a Honduran man named Nacer and his snaggle-toothed 5-year-old daughter, Abigail. They had missed two buses and faced a 12-hour wait for the next one, so we took them out. We visited Bryan Park and the James River downtown. At our house, they bathed while we washed their clothes.
Nacer was headed to the Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, home of a relative named Jesús, who called and said forget the bus; he was driving to Richmond.
"Jesús viene," I told Nacer. Jesus is coming. This apparently translated properly, because Nacer began repeating this big joke every few minutes.
We all ate and watched one of the "Madagasgar" movies, with Spanish subtitles. Our visitors fell asleep. Around midnight, Jesús indeed came.
Every once in a while, Nacer calls and puts Abigail on the phone. She sounds happy — the language I enjoy most.
Rex Springston covered environmental issues for more than 20 years for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.