Conversation 1

A tall and lanky man approaches the table and introduces himself with one of the biggest smiles that I’ve ever seen. Although I had thought of a 1,000 possible ways that this meeting could have gone I never would have expected it to go so well. The time flew by, and there were a lot fewer awkward moments than I had anticipated. (I have a knack for making first encounters excruciatingly awkward.)

Guilherme has an intriguing story and was more than willing to share it with me. There were some times when his excitement would get him talking so fast I could barely keep up, but overall I think that we communicated fairly well and really understood each other. Guilherme has trouble with some of the irregular verb forms and other weird quirks of English, but I could always tell what he was saying.

Being a Speech-Language Pathology major made talking with an individual with such a strong accent an even more interesting experience. In my major classes we have been learning about dialectal differences and sounds that a person learning English as a second language might have difficulty with. I actually picked up on a lot of these things in our conversation. I think that since I have studied these things our conversation benefitted.

Guilherme is from Brazil, just outside of San Paolo and Rio de Janeiro along the coast. He grew up as an only child. We had a goodtime comparing our upbringings (there is quite a bit to contrast considering I grew up one of three daughters.) A big part of our conversation was also about travel and all the places that Guilherme has lived. (This was also easy to contrast to a girl who had never lived anywhere except for one house until she went to college.) This really got me thinking about how neat it is for two people who grew up in their own little worlds and niches to have ended up meeting like this. That may sound a bit cliché…well I guess it kind of is. We talked about New York and Guilherme’s summer visit there to see a friend from Brazil. We finally found some common ground, we both love to travel, have been to a lot of the same places, and share a lukewarm attitude towards New York.

The more questions that I asked Guilherme, the more interesting his story became to me. The IEP program at TCU was something I knew virtually nothing about before this meeting, and I think that it offers students like Guilherme a very cool opportunity. Guilherme is very intelligent-he has a law degree in Brazil. We talked about the book that they are reading in the IEP Literature class, To Kill a Mockingbird. I was truly impressed by this. I remember thinking that my Spanish teacher was insane for trying to make me read children’s level novels in a foreign language, and there Guilherme is reading full novels in English after living in America for practically no time at all.

One of my favorite parts of our conversation was talking about our experiences in being assimilated into the culture of Texas. We both laughed when talking about Rodeo (the IEP class has a field trip next week) and our first experiences with Whataburger.  (Can I just say that I am feeling seriously nostalgic about field trips after learning about the IEP program’s outings?) Guilherme lives with a host family. Their family consists of a mother, a father who works out of town all week, a daughter that attends A&M and a son in high school. His host family isn’t very close-knit, but he likes living with them. Comparing our experiences and talking about things associated with TCU in general made our conversation really flow and allowed us to relate to each other a lot more.

This week we didn’t touch on the subject of humor directly. Upon reflecting, there were many times when we would both giggle or politely laugh at little things that seemed socially acceptable or expected. There were also some awkward laughs. I’m sure this is something that we will be talking about a lot more (and experiencing a lot more) in the future for Guilherme is a wonderful storyteller and conversationalist.