That’s Embarrassing!

I felt like it was time to have a lighthearted blog post… involving something very on brand of me, embarrassing moments. I will tell you a few from the past couple of weeks. 

Day (probably) two of Colombia…. We get in an uber to go to a coffee shop. This nice man picks us up and he is playing some BOPS! (Grammie, bops means good songs!) Anyways, I look at Jessa and say “how do you say I like your music taste?” We are trying to figure it out for a few minutes and she just says “say me gusta la musica.” So I turned to this man and tried my best to say in spanish that I love his music and he turned and looked at me and said “Oh thanks, you like trap?.”……. This man knows fluent english. While we are arguing in the back trying to figure out how to speak to him, he is just listening. That moment really humbled me and made me feel a little tonta…. 

Speaking of ‘tonta’… that leads me to my next embarrassing story. So, on our second day of children’s ministry, we had an english class. I look over and there’s about 4 girls sitting on the stairs not coming to class, so naturally I go over to talk to them and ask them why. As I sat there speaking fluent ‘spanglish’ I asked why they didn’t want to go. They told me it was really hot so they didn’t want to sit in the sun and also they are shy and do not want to participate. I agreed saying it was fine and that I would hang out with them on the stairs and do our own fun english class. I decided it was also a good idea to hype them up a little bit and speak some life and truth over them. I pull out my phone and go on google translate. I am telling them they are beautiful, funny, nice, sweet, silly, ect. Anyways, when I say in spanish to this middle school girl that she is silly they all gasp and look at me confused. I immediately realized that google translate did me dirty. I switch ‘tonta’ over too spanish and back to english and realize that it means stupid/idiot. So I just looked at this sweet little girl and told her she was stupid.  I felt so bad and we all laughed very hard, it for sure broke the ice… but I will never trust google translate again. 

Along with Karina, I have another nickname here in Colombia and that is cinderella. One of the beautiful women living here lives on the third floor and this past week my team and I deep cleaned that floor! A couple of us were scrubbing the grout in between the tiles for a long while, she walked out of her room passing me a couple of times while I was scrubbing the floor and she jokingly called me cinderella. Well I guess it stuck because she still calls me that. The next day I see her in the bakery and she says “look, it’s my princess” and that made me think… if I am a princess, where the heck is my prince. So I look at her and ask her where my prince is and she tells me to go yell out the window for him in spanish, so of course I do. And now it is our running joke that every time I see her I run around and act very dramatic to look for my prince and she thinks it’s pretty funny. Who knew scrubbing the floors could make such a good friendship! 

The women here at Ciudad Refugio have my heart. The sweetest of sweet… but one day during a morning bible study they decided to guess our ages, they went around guessing and I was the last one. They guessed that I was twenty five, when I told them that I was not they were very surprised and proceeded to say that I am “grande y fuerte” aka I am BIG and strong. I looked at her so sad because she just called me large and then they laughed for a long time because that is not how they meant it, they also thought I was married with kids. LOL. I karate chop boys that I like. Nice try tho! 

Lastly, I have two stories that made me cry from laughing. Neither of them happened to me but I simply witnessed it. They both involve poop.

One of my friends Emi and I were in town and this poor girl is running to the car with me and she steps in a BIG pile of human poop on the ground. She gets into the car and the whole thing STINKS up of poop and I am genuinely crying laughing in the front seat and our driver speaks only spanish and nobody knows how to tell him why. 

The next one was the day after when we went paragliding. Disclaimer, that was the coolest experience I have ever had. So we run and jump off the side of the mountain and fly in the air for 10/15 minutes… super fun! Well, when we land there is a little hill that we slide onto with tons of horses on it. My poor leader, Maddie, is coming close to the ground and sees where she is going to land, but on the path there is a huge pile of horse poop. She accepts the placement of landing and just slides into the pile of caca and it goes all the way up the back of her leg. The rest of the day maddie is just walking the streets of Medellin, Colombia with horse poop all over the back of her leg. 

I hope these stories bring you a smile and maybe give you a quick laugh! 

Have the best day! 

Corryn Scharff <3