by Ryan Weber

Created on: September 08, 2008   Last Updated: September 13, 2008

At the age of 16, I decided to get a job. Applied at a fast-food restaurant in which all the workers were Hispanic. I had been learning Spanish in school since the seventh grade, but I still felt as if I knew nothing. So I decided that this would be the perfect opportunity to improve my language skills through real conversation.

The choice turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life. For the first few months I was too shy to speak to anyone in Spanish but I listened intently. I could pick out a few words I recognized but they were speaking too fast for me to understand the full sentences, much less follow a conversation.

One day, I was standing at the cash register when I overheard the shift leader telling someone to take out the trash in Spanish. I immediately called out to them in English that I had just taken out the trash. Rodolfo, the shift-leader looked at me like I was crazy.

He said, "What are you talking about?"

I responded, "Didn't you just ask him to take out the trash? I just did that."

They looked at each other and back at me, suddenly realizing that I understood Spanish. The next day I worked, there was a message on the white-board waiting for me in Spanish. It begged me not to tell the manager everything they said. Like so many other work environments, the employees spoke about their managers from time to time behind their back; only in this case, they could even talk about them while they were present.

There was cultural barrier between the employees, who spoke Spanish, and the general manager and owner, who were white and didn't understand Spanish. With the revelation that I understood them, I had unknowingly and suddenly crossed the line to their side. One woman who worked there started to affectionately call me the baby of the restaurant since I was so young compared to them. As an accepted part of the "family" my knowledge of Spanish and Latin American culture and values grew by leaps and bounds.

In part because of this experience, I decided that I wanted to work for the UN to help bring peace and understanding to the world. I went to college to study International Relations and began to learn French. My first quarter I took a Intensive French. This class taught me an entire year of French over the summer. After second-year French I was ready to be immersed.

I spent first semester of my senior year in Paris, France studying French language and culture at the Sorbonne. The most important thing I learned was that the US is not the

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