By Lisa Lankins-Burnett

My first linguistic mishap upon arriving in Maz-atlán a little over a year ago was with the maids at the small hotel I am working at. I knew that cama was bed, so sensibly, camarón must mean bedmaker or maid. After a week of me calling them camarones, one of them finally had enough nerve to tell me that camarones were actually shrimp and the word for maid was camarista. That was the beginning of many new found words and embarrassing moments. I studied Spanish all through high school, and was a Spanish major in college. That was 25 years ago! I have learned, forgotten, and relearned much of my Spanish. The term “use it or loose it” definitely applies to languages. For the last fifteen years before coming to Mexico, I worked in the medical field and helped women throughout pregnancy and childbirth. You become familiar with and fluent with a certain vocabulary when that is all you talk about. I could translate at deliveries and at the clinic with the best of them, but had a hard time remembering the words for knife and fork. I occasionally helped the anesthesiologist translate in pre-surgery. He had a patient and me giggling one day because he had asked that she open her big mouth rather than open her mouth wider. Once the Chief of Police in the small town I lived in asked if I would assist him with translation if he needed it. I said yes, but I would have to bring my dictionary because the vocabulary differences between police work and birth are huge. In fact, the only similarity I could think of was “spread ‘em”. If I didn’t know a word or phrase, I could get