When Vanilo
Antonio walks out the door in the morning, it’s only what he hears that reminds
him of where he is: in America. A native of Luanda, Angola, he has spoken English
for years, but still finds himself doing a mental double-take when the people
going to and from class with him aren’t speaking in Portuguese. “You keep
expecting people to actually speak your native language, [so] from time to time
you stop from the middle of the street and go ‘Where am I? What happened?’”
Vanilo said.
The
18 year-old learned to speak English when he was only six, listening to his
older brother when he came back to Angola for visits from his new home in
Texas. Though he has spoken the language for longer than Alvaro Tendula, a 20
year-old Angolan who began learning English in primary school around eight
years ago, he still finds it strange to be completely surrounded by it. “[We
have] about 18 languages… People don’t just speak in Portuguese, even on the
street,” Vanilo said. A.T. reported a similar experience of not always knowing
where he was when he walked out the door, and being thrown off by only hearing
one language around him; especially when that language isn’t Portuguese. After
becoming a Portuguese colony in 15751, the language of Angola was
switched from the varieties of tribal languages that separated the country to
one introduced language that unified it. That did not eliminate the use of
these tribal languages, though, and overheard speech is much more diverse on
the streets of Luanda than in Colorado. “While you’re walking around you might
hear, I don’t know, maybe two to three different languages depending on where
you’re at,” Vanilo said.
Not
only are none of the people on the streets of Colorado speaking Portuguese,
there are also a significantly smaller number of them than on the streets of
Luanda. “It’s always loud there. I keep expecting to get out of the house and hear
a lot of noise; so traffic, people talking really loudly, the ladies selling on
the street,” Vanilo said. He got used to always listening to his music at full
volume just so he could hear it over the sounds of Luanda. “I still do it, even…
before I go out the house I put my earphones on and I put the music on the
highest volume I’ve got. [Here] when I leave I only hear music, but back home
it was like, I leave my house, I put my foot out the door, [and] I can still
hear what’s happening outside. [The quiet is] my reminder that I’m not back
home,” he said. The crowds that stay on
the sidewalks in the States take to the streets in Angola and biking and
walking is common, as cars are less than practical during Luanda’s rush hour. The
morning work traffic often gets so bad that people even leave their cars and
walk to work in order to be on time, according to A.T. “You see people just leave
their cars right there in the middle of the road, and they call somebody from
their house to go and pick up the car later after they leave. You just see an
army of people in suits going out on the streets,” Vanilo said. Even the idle
hours in Luanda are loud compared Colorado, and unless one is listening between
the hours of 3 and 5 in the morning, there is no quiet to be heard.
Other
than the sound shock, the culture in America didn’t take much getting used to
for either A.T. or Vanilo. Instead, they found issue with a non-human element
of the state: the climate. The air in Angola is much wetter, and the
temperature never drops below a comfortable warmth except during the rainy
season. When they first got to Colorado, A.T. and Vanilo would play basketball
outside, but found the game much more difficult than it was back home. “It was
hard to breathe. You would really feel like your throat was completely dried
out because of the altitude, and we still weren’t pretty used to drinking water
all the time. We would only be able to play for tops twenty minutes,” Vanilo
said. Besides being a much drier climate, Colorado also has a fair amount of
altitude that is foreign to those from Angola. The capital is on the coast,
putting the boys’ home roughly a mile below their current location. The
altitude adjustment is one that is common for almost all newcomers to Colorado,
whether from Angola, Africa, or Virginia, USA.
Another
struggle that Vanilo and A.T. share with many other college students is the
distance from their family. Unlike American students, though, they are
separated from their loved ones by an ocean, not just a long drive. Family life
in Angola is also much more tightly knit than in America, with weekends commonly
being spent with visits to or from extended family. “We would always get together...
[spend] the day together, if possible spend the whole weekend, if not just one
day, maybe Saturday or Sunday. We would be pretty close, always together if
possible,” Vanilo said.
Despite
the distance, they still find a way to stay connected with their families. “You
miss them all the time. You’re always trying to call them, whenever possible of
course. You’re always trying to keep in touch, to know if something’s
happening, if everything’s good. I actually talked to my father this morning,”
Vanilo said. International cell phone plans, Skype calls, and internet
communication make it easier to keep in touch across the Atlantic.
Moving
always presents obstacles that require adjustment, no matter where a person is
coming from or what their final destination is. The similarities of culture
between Angola and Colorado certainly made it easier on both A.T. and Vanilo,
and the amenities of modern technology are helping to ease the distance of the move. Like many other college students, they are
experiencing the degrees of separation that come from being apart from family
and friends, with two additional hefty obstacles: the English language and the
Atlantic Ocean.
1 Historical
information from www.angola.org
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