The Making of the Book Episode 4

What better way to procrastinate on making the book than to blog about the making of the book? Yessss ...

Yesterday, the crew and I went to Santa Ana again for two interviews (I'm logging WAY too many miles, but wow, my navigation skills are getting much better). They were probably my most-anticipated interviews, since they were the hard-to-get, in-home interviews with families. They also happened to be entirely in Spanish.

While I feel much more comfortable speaking Spanish than I did before studying in Costa Rica, it's still difficult. Don't be fooled by the whole Spanish major thing. I was lucky enough to have my partner Karla with me, and she happens to be a native speaker.

The interviews were incredible -- I was pleasantly surprised how forthcoming these families were about their struggles. It was poignant and beautiful when one mom started crying -- she was that proud of her two girls, who had been admitted into private school and were now receiving more college admissions letters in the mailbox than she knew what to do with.

Fortunately, I understood virtually everything during the interview. Unfortunately, I had to concentrate so hard on understanding everything that my other journalistic skills went out the window. There's a lot a journalist has to do while they're interviewing: transcribe it as close to verbatim as possible, reformulate questions so they make sense in the context of the interview, interpret the other person's signals and adjust, synthesize their stories with your previous knowledge, etc. When the monkey wrench of Spanish comes into the picture, it's a lot tougher to think on your feet.

Now, it's time to transcribe the Spanish word-for-word and then write up the story (fortunately for my brain, the book's in English).

Ayayay, it's great practice for my future career in foreign correspondence, but in the words of my Costa Rican host mom, cuesta mucho! (it's a pain :)