Another meeting with Thania (6th Overall)

           The other day, Thania and I met again for lunch at Market Square. Due to her class schedule and duties at home like taking care of her kids, usually we are only able to meet at 1 o clock at Market Square. This is fine with me considering I have 25 meal swipes left to burn at the Bluu. This time, we began talking about the ESL program at TCU, and Thania actually introduced me to the assistant director, Kristin. Thania, having lived in the US for over 15 years, has gone through several intensive English language programs in California and Nevada. The one at TCU is by far her favorite. She is always raving about the teachers and how intelligent they really are. Right now she is about to graduate from level 5 in speaking, but she's still working on level 3 and 4 in writing and reading. She believes she still has a few quarters left in the program before graduating completely. Writing appears to be her most difficult subject because she has trouble focusing on one idea and instead tends to circle around various information. This was easy for me to relate to because writing tends to be one of my weaker subjects. However, she still wants my help, and she plans on bringing in a few of her essays next time we meet to see if I can proofread them for her. I'm looking forward to this because I'm interested in what type of essays they assign in her writing class. When speaking to her, it's obvious that she's a fairly advanced in English. I rarely don't understand what she's saying, and when she speaks a little too fast, I try to help her with the pronunciation.

        The next topic of conversation was Thanksgiving. I was intrigued if she celebrated the holiday like most Americans. Thania loves Thanksgiving, but she has yet to master the cooking of a turkey. This wasn't a problem for her because her family and two other Hispanic families met at her neighbor's house for dinner. Luckily, her neighbor took charge of perfecting the turkey. I really enjoyed this conversation because I got to learn about Thania's family. Her husband and Thania have started a small computer science business, and her husband even has his security clearance from the federal government! He often consults at schools like John Hopkins and Columbia. I then asked her about what language is predominantly spoken around the house. Both her children mostly speak English, but she's trying to get them to learn Spanish as well. The daughter is open to that idea and speaks fairly well, but the son doesn't want to learn Spanish as much. Thania says that's because he's so used to speaking English in school.

          We then got onto the topic of her returning to Guatemala twice a year. She hasn't taken her kids back to Guatemala to see the majority of her family due to vaccinations. However, Thania still returns twice a year, and even showed me a "Quetzal," the form of currency in Guatemala. She actually gave me two quetzals, one being a coin and one being a pill. Here's a photo of the bill from google:

I really thought it was cool that she's so enthusiastic about our meetings and gave me the two pieces of Guatemalan culture, even though it's roughly worth 30 American cents!