Claim OwnershipBerkshire Eagle: Accents in the Berkshires
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Podcast by The Berkshire Eagle
21 Episodes
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LENOX — Alexandra Tyer’s father did not like dictators. And so they did not like him.
Gustavo Avila got jailed by Cuba’s Fidel Castro when Alexandra was 7 years old. He was released several months later, on the condition that he take his family on the first flight out to Panama.
That country granted the Cuban family asylum because Alexandra’s mother, Alejandra, was Panamanian.
In Panama, Avila, a lawyer who published his anti-government views, ran afoul of Manuel Antonio Noriega. Another monthslong jail term was the result.
The United States invasion of Panama in December 1989 set him free.
“By then he was ready to move us to Venezuela,” his daughter says, laughing.
To read the rest of the story, visit http://tinyurl.com/accentspodcast
GREAT BARRINGTON — Andres Huertas didn’t speak any English when his parents moved from Bogota, Colombia, to the Berkshires. It took a drawing of a soccer ball for him to realize that he might be able to communicate in his new country after all.
Another 10-year old boy at Undermountain School in Sheffield drew that picture and showed it to Andres as an invitation.
“I kind of understood what he was signaling,” Huertas recalls 17 years later, after his midnight shift as a police officer in Great Barrington. “That was one of my happiest memories as a child, because I was able to play soccer again. That’s how we were communicating, through pictures.”
Read the rest at http://tinyurl.com/accentspodcast
PITTSFIELD — Paulino Aguilar survived an encounter with El Salvador’s notorious death squads in the 1980’s. Aguilar taught high school students in gang-ridden San Salvador until he moved to Pittsfield in 2002. He lived on North Street and started work at 3 in the morning at the former Morningside Bakery on Tyler Street.
Read more at http://tinyurl.com/accentspodcast
Tanea Lavalle lives a long way from Moldova. But so do most of her former classmates and friends from this small Eastern European country, landlocked in between Romania and Ukraine.
Lavalle estimates “maybe 80 percent” of her classmates and friends have left this former Soviet republic. The ones left behind might just be biding their time until they can follow.
Read more at: http://berkshireeagle.com/accentspodcast
NORTH ADAMS — Had Paul de Jong’s Holocaust surviving father decided to accept the job offer in New York, this immigrant’s tale would not have been told.
Vrin de Jong, a schoolmate of Anne Frank in Amsterdam, survived the murderous Nazi occupation of The Netherlands, where most Dutch Jews did not. On his first trip to the United States, by boat, in 1951, “He traveled to the promised land,” tells his son in the large North Adams house he and his wife, Carin, are renovating.
“I have the photobooks from my father and he had a fantastic time. He felt welcomed, he felt understood and unjudged as a Jew. As opposed to The Netherlands, where, when he came back from the war, people basically looked at him and said, ‘Well, we didn’t expect to see YOU again.’ ”
Finish the reading the story at: tinyurl.com/accentspodcast
Bintou Kanyi told her family in the West African country of The Gambia that she just had some errands to run at the village market. She did not tell them about the airplane ticket to New York.
“I ran away,” Kanyi says. “Because if I had told them that I was travelling, there were so many things they could do to stop me.”
Kanyi now works as a certified nursing assistant at Berkshire Medical Center. She also studies at Berkshire Community College and next semester will add classes at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts toward degrees in biotechnology and medical technology.
Read the full story at http://tinyurl.com/accentspodcast
PITTSFIELD — Veronica Torres Martin had an accent in her own country before she had one in the United States.
Torres Martin, now 44, is from Chile, but she was born in Germany and lived in Algeria before her parents felt safe enough to return to what was then Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship. She was 7 years old.
“That’s when I got introduced to my own culture, and grandparents and cousins that I had never met,” she says in her office at Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield. She runs Berkshire Health Systems’ Language Services Department, dealing with hundreds of translation issues in dozens of foreign tongues each month.
Read the full story at http://tinyurl.com/accentspodcast
MONTEREY — Sandboarding down the dunes to the pristine beaches, then surfing the ocean waves or fishing or snorkeling in the azure blue waters. Living in Cabo Frio, Brazil, sounds like living in paradise."
Read more at http://berkhshireeagle.com
GREAT BARRINGTON — Growing up in Leningrad had to be pretty bleak, right? Surely, escaping the Soviet Union for America must have been most Russians’ dream.
“No,” says Natalia Smirnova, laughing. “Growing up in the Soviet Union was great. We had a very nice childhood. Now, being an adult, I understand the value of the free day care facilities for kids. I remember those days as nothing bad.”
Read more at: http://berkshireeagle.com/stories/accents-podcast-meet-natalia-smirnova,515070
Read the story: http://www.berkshireeagle.com/stories/meet-arsema-abegaz-education-is-a-lifelong-pursuit-for-this-williams-grad,513686
Born in Ethiopia, raised in Botswana and steeped in the very different cultures and languages of those disparate African countries, Arsema Abegaz speaks American English without even a trace of an accent.
“Being young and impressionable, I did not enjoy sticking out like a sore thumb every time I spoke,” Abegaz explains in her Pittsfield apartment. Now 25, she came to the Berkshires in 2010 to study at Williams College.
“And so I found myself putting on an American accent my first year,” she continues. “I do pick up languages and accents pretty quickly. By the time I was a junior, I realized one day that I wasn’t putting it on anymore.”
Abegaz speaks Amharic, the language of her Ethiopian parents. One of the stereotypes people tend to assign to Ethiopia is that the country has produced a lot of champion marathon runners.
“Well …,” she says, with the exact ironic inflection any American-born 20-something would add. “In high school, I ran cross-country.” She was actually good enough to be considered for Botswana’s national team.
“It is a stereotype because to some extent it’s true,” she says. “That is one of the most positive stereotypes that has come out of Ethiopia.”
PITTSFIELD — They fell in love through their letters; old-fashioned, handwritten envelope-with-stamp snail mail letters. But it took 14 years before the internet sealed the deal.
Alan Franco, from Mexico City, and Melissa Schermerhorn, from the Berkshires hilltown of Peru, met in 1994 in the Cozumel tourist resort where he worked. Franco was an entertainment director and dance instructor at the beach hotel.
Read more at http://berkshireeagle.com
PITTSFIELD — Ahmed Ismail’s bride, Michela, had tears in her eyes, but not necessarily because of wedding emotions. Tear gas and worse filled the streets of Cairo when they got married.
Ismail, from Giza, Egypt, and Michela Tagliapietra, from Lenox, met in 2010 when Michela and her mother toured Egypt’s archaeological treasures. Mom and daughter stayed at the hotel where Ismail worked. Ahmed and Michela fell in love and kept the relationship going between the city of the Great Pyramids and the Berkshires.
Read more of his story at BerkshireEagle.com
Her colleagues at Housatonic Curtains stopped sewing when the news broke about the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Gloria Escobar-Huertas could sense her co-workers' fear. But she didn’t understand.
“At that time I didn’t speak English and nobody around me could explain the situation,” Escobar recalls. “So I didn’t know if I had to get out of the building, or what else to do. Only when I came home and could watch the Spanish TV channels I understood how big was the catastrophe.”
Read the whole story and find Gloria's recipe at http://berkshireeagle.com
PITTSFIELD — Paul Saldana would have been a pilot if joining the Ecuadorian Air Force hadn’t been beyond his means.
OK, sure, as a boy in Azogues, Ecuador, young Paul’s real dream was to become a midfield star of his country’s most illustrious soccer team: Barcelona.
But next to the many hours of fútbol practice and pick-up games — “My happiest childhood memories” — he had studied physics and mathematics to be able to qualify for military flight training.
Read more at: http://berkshireeagle.com/stories/accents-podcast-meet-paul-saldana-a-chef-turned-developer-who-found-his-way-from-ecuador-to-the,507973,507973/p/stories/accents-the-voices-of-our-immigrant-neighbors-in-the-berkshires,492728
WEST STOCKBRIDGE — As a child in Indonesia, I’in Purwanti was the ringleader of a band of pint-sized private investigators.
“My childhood was very adventurous,” Purwanti says. “I wanted to be a detective. I read a lot of detective books so I would tell my friends every Sunday, ‘hey we need to go solve a mystery!’
“And then we would go out and find things and get into trouble.”
Read more of her story at: http://berkshireeagle.com/stories/accents-podcast-meet-iin-purwanti,507166?
PITTSFIELD — Baffour Tontoh already has the name, investors and a business plan for the intercity bus company he wants to start back home in Ghana. Roots of that enterprise – Impulse Transportation – will be in Pittsfield, where he has lived for the last six years.
“I came here for a reason,” Tontoh says, “and when that is accomplished I will go back home. Home sweet home.”
After graduating from the University of Ghana, he worked in the financial services industry in his home country and in Manchester, England. The reason he came to the United States was to get a master’s degree in business and to gain business experience.
Read more at http://berkshireeagle.com
WEST STOCKBRIDGE — Talk to Flavio Lichtenthal about his Argentinian childhood and soccer comes up a lot. On the streets of Buenos Aires that’s what boys play.
“I was actually a totally mediocre soccer player but when I came to the States I was one of the stars of my high school team,” Lichtenthal says. “Because I could actually kick the ball and make it go in the intended direction.
Read more of his story at: http://www.berkshireeagle.com/stories/accents-podcast-meet-flavio-lichtenthal,505915
PITTSFIELD — Elegant Stitches, the customized embroidery shop now located at 237 First Street, started in Vivian Enchill’s basement in Pittsfield.
Vivian had left Ghana to join her husband Alfred, who had already made the move to the Berkshires. Designing clothes was both her trade and her passion in her home country. So, setting up shop and marketing her clothes in her new country made sense.
Read the rest of Vivian's story at: http://berkshireeagle.com/stories/accents-podcast-meet-vivian-enchill-a-woman-designing-her-path-in-the-berkshires,505282?
Viktória Seavey used to hide on Easter Monday to avoid getting a bucket of water dumped over her.
OTIS — In their home in Otis, Seavey’s American husband Adam sometimes jokes about restoring the Hungarian Easter tradition of dousing young women.
But for the former Viktória Horváth from the small Hungarian town of Kapuvár, the “watering” of girls and women for Easter is folklore that she gladly left behind when she moved to the United States seven years ago.
Read more at: http://berkshireeagle.com/stories/accents-podcast-meet-viktria-seavey-she-left-hungary-to-live-in-the-forests-of-the-berkshires,504532
German Vargas does not like to hear people say bad things about Colombia.
“No, Colombia is not dangerous at all,” he says emphatically. “Let me tell you, the best answer to get if you want to know if my country is dangerous or not is to see for yourself.”
Vargas moved from Colombia’s capital Bogotá to the Berkshires in 1991. Now 53, he is a barber in Great Barrington and lives in Lee with his wife Betty and their 12-year-old son Renzo.
Read the full article at: www.berkshireeagle.com/stories/accents-podcast-meet-german-vargas-he-went-from-the-bright-lights-of-columbia-to-the-quiet-of-the,503010
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