The Dry Run: Nicaragua Part III
The family called me "Teo". "Dale" is a bit hard to pronounce with the long "a" and it helps no one to look at it since sounding it out you would get something more like "dah lay". "Da le" or "dah lay" apparently actually has meaning and they say it all the time. So they called me Teo. When they got particularly good at saying my name, it would sound almost exactly like "day-o". And every time they would say it like that I'd find myself humming Harry Belafonte's Banana Boat Song. Which I'm sure you remember from that scene in the movie Beetlejuice . Eventually they caught me singing it. And so I taught the first few lines to the children. And a couple of the adults. And we sang it. I have a Nicaraguan theme song. There was more fun with singing. I ran into a brief impasse with the children trying to teach them some English words. They didn't really get that our alphabet was pronoun...