Breaking down the language barrier

Although Barbara Zerillo is well-traveled in Nicaragua and Europe,Barbara Zerillo she only knows a few phrases in Mandarin, and is a little nervous about submersing herself in the culture of Taiwan. She will be teaching English at The American International Language Academy in Hsinchu. After a 24-hour flight, she arrived there last Tuesday, Aug. 11.
“When I went to Spain, I had Spanish, but now I only know a few sentences in Mandarin,” said Zerillo. “You hear people speaking in Chinese and you feel at a loss.”
But not for long.
Zerillo will not only be teaching English during her year in Taiwan, but will be taking lessons in Mandarin. Her curiosity for languages and different cultures began at Clark University, when she went to Central America.
“I went to Nicaragua my freshman year in college,” she explained. “Before that I really didn’t have an interest in languages.”
Sustainable agriculture was the focus of that trip, with an organization called Bridges to Community.
“We worked on fences and organizing gardens and farm land, and building compost boxes,” she said. “Some of it was new technology. When the wars happened there, they sent all their younger men off to war, and there was a skip in a generation of farming know-how. But what both sides mostly got out of it was getting to know people of different cultures.”
The next year, she went as a trip organizer and fundraiser, with a little more control over her Spanish.
“I think I got more out of it than they did,” she said of the experience. “I think they had as much to offer me as I did for them.”
A Hillsborough resident and Hillsboro-Deering student until she attended Bishop Brady High School in Concord, Zerillo graduated from Clark University with a major in Psychology and Spanish. She went on to a graduate program in nonprofit management. While still an undergraduate, she spent a year in Europe. Her first semester was in Spain, and the second part of her year was in Scotland. In her free time, she managed to tour through fifteen countries. Her favorite part of the tour was through Eastern Europe, where she found herself in a tight spot that caused her to use all her travel acumen to overcome the language and culture barrier to get help.
“I finished my trip in Austria, where I had trouble,” she pointed out. “I lost my credit card and a woman took me in and fed me and housed me. She saw how upset I was at a bus stop and we could hardly communicate. I hoped we were going to her house, because we stopped at a grocery store and a doctor’s appointment first. I had no control over the situation. She even gave me money to get the bus to the airport. And that was my favorite part of the trip.”
Although someone will be meeting her at the airport in Taiwan, she will have to overcome the culture barrier there as well.
“I don’t know many Asian people. I don’t know much about the country. When I don’t know anything about it, I can get nervous,” she admitted.
But it is just that sort of barrier she is interested in overcoming everywhere she goes. Another goal on her list is to learn some Arabic.
“I would like to continue this sort of work, writing, traveling where the languages could be used,” she said. “If you are a native English speaker, the doors are open to every single country in the world to teach English.”
Zerillo will be maintaining a blog while she is in Taiwan. The link is adventuresofbarbara.blogspot.com