After the ukulele festival, I took a little walk down to this women’s conference.
Part of the description on the website says, “The day-long conference includes health, leadership, and personal development workshops designed to address challenges of poor working families and single mothers. Workshops are designed to educate women and young girls on preventative health practices.”
So, I figured, great. I’m all about women being empowered and educated. Sounds good.
And I’m sure it was good – probably. I don’t really know because I couldn’t understand the vast majority of what was said. Even though the volunteer listing and the website itself were both in English, the entire event was in Spanish!
The printed programs were in Spanish. The lunch speech and music were in Spanish. The people in charge of the volunteers spoke English, and that was practically it.
By the way, how many times am I going to go to a place in Los Angeles where English is not understood until I truly learn that it is necessary for me to learn Spanish. I’m always saying, “I’ll learn it. I’ll learn it.” Here’s my question (to myself). When?
I don’t know when. But I do know that:
a) I should.
b) as things stand, I do not understand Spanish.
So, I get there. My instructions were to basically kill time ’til it was time to help serve lunch. So, I checked out some booths around. There was a skin care booth there run by Murad. They had this contraption in which you could stick your face, and all the greasy parts would be lit up one color, and damaged/darkening spots would be lit up another.
It was pretty terrifying and somewhat horrible. I was a bit concerned that my under eye area looked so dark. They told me that area looks dark even on elementary schoolers. Aye, aye, aye. There’s no winning. Out skin is gonna be our skin…
Of course, I’m sure the people at Murad would tell you there is some winning with their products. But I’m very stressed in general about my skin – which of course is bad for your skin. So let’s just move off this topic.
At lunch time, I helped prepare plates of food for over a hundred women at the conference. Some speech was given in Spanish. It was kind of funny to hear a crowd of people all laugh together when I had no real idea of when it was coming. It’s interesting to be in a place where you don’t understand anything at all…
After I helped plate all the food, I was done. There wasn’t much more for me to do. There were plenty of volunteers already. Some accompanied groups to the workshops. Of course, I wouldn’t have understood a word of the workshop – or anyone who tried to ask me a question.
But I was able to serve lunch. So, there you have it. Number 30 down!