Playing With Dangerous Words

This summer I went on a mission’s trip to Mexico and while I was there, I made a new friend. His name was Tim and before the trip we had only been acquaintances. It was fun goofing around with him, but once we messed around a little too much.

On the missions trip we were building three houses for families in Juarez, Mexico. The first day of work we needed to lay the foundation. The process was easy compared to stories I’ve heard from past trips where the group finds a boulder in the middle of where they were going to lay the cement. Fortunately for us though, the ground was level and we discovered no large obstructions, such as a boulder.

There was a problem, however, when we began to lay the cement. These problems were not inanimate objects, as one might suspect, but little dark skinned curious kids playing in our material piles. The sand pile especially attracted the most attention from the neighborhood kids. It was surprising to us as they played in the sand, because as we looked around the building site we figured they had plenty of sand, which with they could play. Some way some how, our sand was more fun to play with, and it was a bonus because they didn’t need to pile it up before playing in it.

We tried to playfully discourage them, by chasing them away, pretending to be a monster. Occasionally, we would quickly run over there before they noticed and picked them up and carried them far away from the pile. Eventually discovering this plan was as ineffective as eating soup with a knife, we debated on what to do considering those of us at that time were not very good Spanish speakers. We were still joking around when we, Tim and I, remembered the word to kill (matar) in Spanish. In the command form of the verb we ordered someone to kill the children playing in the pile (mátalos), of course jokingly, we then realized of our mistake. We forgot that they could understand, quickly we turned to them to say “Chiste, chiste, chiste,” which is the word for joke. My hope is that they didn’t think that we meant it and forever have this fear of Americans for what we said.