what language am i speaking in now?

"Then you mix it all in the... wait, Jake, how do you say balde in English?" I heard a chuckle and then, "bucket." "Oh ya, bucket!" I laughed and continued my explanation. I was doing a volunteer led training session with the new group of health trainees and as they had only been in country for about 2 weeks, they had not yet adopted the usual set of vocabulary words in Spanish and Guarani that most volunteers end up filtering into their everyday vocabulary. I was having trouble with a few words specifically and sometimes made no distinction between the languages. I thought I was speaking in English, but caught myself several times inserting a Spanish word for an English one. I think the trainees got a kick out of it and found it amusing that I stumbled so much over my words and the trainer too, laughed when he had to translate my mistakes.

Other than the phone calls I get from my mom every other week and the couple that I have gottne from friends, I have not spoken English with anyone who is not Peace Corps related since October when my mom came to visit me. By then it had only been 8 months since I had had a face to face conversation in English with someone who was not in Peace Corps. My mom said she did´t notice it that much, but I felt a huge delay in my English conversations. I found that I made more pauses in the middle of my sentences and had to stop to think of certain words. It was only by the end of the week that I felt like I was speaking English normally again, without pauses and blanks in my thoughts.

I have in the last few months found that Guarani is slowly infiltrating my Spanish the same way that Spanish infiltrated my English. There are certain words and phrases in Guarani that find their way into my mouth fast than Spanish ones. I was speaking to someone in Spanish about buying milk from my neighbors cow and I said, "Pero ella ...okamby muy tarde" (but she milks her cow very late). Then I laughed, "how do you say that in Spanish?"

I remember during training our trainer told us, "I came here speaking one language and I will leave here not being able to speak three." Even if people came here already speaking Spanish, they still had to learn Guarani. When you learn a language, you have to learn to think in that language and I suppose that is why we have adopted the Spanish or Guarani version of many words or phrases. Because the bucket is in Paraguay, it is not a bucket but a balde. In the same way, my school is my escuela, my high school is my colegio, and the field is the chakra. It seems that between volunteers there is a new language created, a strange hybrid mix of an English base, strongly seasoned with Spanish and Guarani. I have even sent and recieved text messages with other volunteers that are half in Spanish and half in English. Apparently, Spanish and Guarani have become such a part of my life that I dont even remember what language I am speaking in anymore.