We spent 14 years in the Philippines. In an attempt to immerse ourselves in the culture, we learned the languages of the places we lived. One of those languages was the national language, Bisaya, spoken on the island of Mindanao- the place we called home. It’s a complicated, beautiful, flexible, fun language to speak.
Much of the population of the Philippines speaks English. Because of that, oftentimes foreigners don’t learn the local language. We knew we were going to be there a long time and we wanted to be able to connect with lots of different kinds of people, so we tried to stick to the local language as much as possible. However, when we would run into other foreigners, we would switch to English (and everyone expected a group of westerners to be speaking English).
In one of the places we lived, Davao, God had given me some fantastic art friends. One of them was Kuya Alex, who owned an art gallery. In fact, his gallery was the first place I every exhibited a painting!
From time to time my husband and I would stop in to browse the paintings or attend an art reception.
One of those times we met a guy from Germany.
However, we don’t speak German, and he didn’t speak English, but all three of us of spoke Bisaya. So, much to the confusion and delight of the Filipino community attending the art reception, there we stood in the middle of the gallery- three white people speaking broken Bisaya to each other.
I’ve always hated drawing attention to myself in public, but even I had to admit it was a funny moment that had our Filipino friends laughing and had passersby scratching their heads!
