Berkshire Eagle: Accents in the Berkshires

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

PITTSFIELD — Vishal Biala deals with one similarity between Punjab, his home state in India, and the Berkshires that he rather wouldn’t have to. “It’s a big mess, the drug abuse that’s going on in the northern part of India,” Biala says. “Similar to what we are seeing in the northeastern part of the US, especially the Berkshires.” Biala, 32, is a first-year resident in the psychiatry department of Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield. He came to America two years ago. Both because “this is the place with the most advanced medicine if you talk about mental health sciences,” and because Riya, his wife, was already living in West Virginia. Read the rest at http://berkshireeagle.com/stories/accents-podcast,502400

Getting your throat slashed while doing your job as a bus driver in San Salvador makes you appreciate Pittsfield all the more. Surviving an ambush by the same gang members shooting at you for disobeying their demands makes you sleep really well in your Morningside apartment. “It’s everything about security,” Josue Diaz says in comparing his life now in the Berkshires and previously in El Salvador’s capital city. “In my country, I felt scared going outside, even going to work. Here I can leave my door open all night and nobody is coming in. You can live here safe.” Read the complete story at http://berkshireeagle.com

Jose Villegas came to the Berkshires to heal. Villegas grew up among the millions of people in Caracas, the capital of Venezuela. He studied in Boston and Seattle, returned to his home country to work in its oil industry and then made his career in corporate banking in the United States. “Having come from Caracas, a bustling city, I never thought I would leave the city for anything,” he says. “I knew next to nothing about the Berkshires.” But then, “I suffered a mental health breakdown.” Read more at http://berkshrieeagle.com/stories/accents-podcast-collection,492728

Shari Yamini’s choice was war or marriage. She had finished her medical studies and wanted to practice medicine. But for a woman in Iran after the ayatollahs took power that meant either the frontlines in the war with Iraq or finding a husband. “I didn’t know which one was better,” Dr. Yamini says and bursts out laughing. So she made a different choice altogether. She left Iran for the United States, arriving on May 28, 1982. Ten years later she moved to the Berkshires. She is a child psychiatrist and lives in Stockbridge. Read the rest of the story at

This is the story of one of our Berkshires neighbors brave enough to admit that James Taylor is “really not my bag at all”. Also: Marmite is an ingredient in today’s Accents recipe and the legal drinking of beer by school kids as young as 16 will come up. In other words, “Just a very, very different environment,” says Chris Post, comparing life in the English countryside to living in America.

That thing about Chinese students being pushed by their parents to study really, really hard? “Yeah, it’s true,” says Fei Wen Gang. “Chinese parents really focus on their kids’ education. There is a huge population, so there is a lot of competition,” he says. “Schooldays starts at 7.30 in the morning and often you have classes into the evening.” Six years ago, Fei, now 32, quit his job at China Unicom — “like a Verizon or AT&T” — and moved from the city of Luzhou to “the Mountain,” the northern Berkshire hilltown of Florida where the parents of his wife Ashley live. Their son Lucas was 9 months old.

Cecilia Del Cid experienced Berkshire Community College as a version of the United Nations, not least because Pittsfield offered her a smorgasbord of international cooking. Twenty years ago, a scholarship brought her from Guatemala to BCC’s Pittsfield campus. Her roommate here in Pittsfield was Bulgarian; classmates were from Finland, Germany and Japan. “I had to get out of Latin America to get to know other people from Latin America, people from Colombia and Ecuador and other countries,” she says. “The first time I ate arepas was here in Pittsfield.” The first time she had Vietnamese food and many other foreign dishes was here as well. “Not so much in restaurants, but in people’s homes,” Del Cid explains. “Because I was in the ESL class” – English as a second language – “everybody was from a different country. At the end of the year, they would all contribute something to a potluck from their home countries.

Samniang Geller has her mom in Thailand and her “American mom” in Dalton. Her “mom” in the Berkshires, Marilyn Desoe, started out helping her learn English. “We became good friends,” Samniang says. “She understands me really well. She has a huge heart to be able to not only teach me English but guide me with so many things in life that sometimes I’m sort of naïve about or don’t know. “She’s like my American mom instead of my English tutor.” Now a massage therapist at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Stockbridge, 40-year-old Samniang first came to the Berkshires in 2000 with her then-husband. She lived here on and off until she decided to return permanently in 2011: “Life in Thailand was difficult, not the same quality of life as here.”

Albania’s communist regime was so strict that, looking back, Aleks Gole compares the country of his birth to North Korea. But, he says: “I was a child. I couldn’t understand the system was so bad. I have very good memories. It was very poor and very simple. Everybody was at the same level. Everybody shared. I enjoyed it and I was happy.” Now a 35-year-old resident of Great Barrington, he grew up in the village of Saraqinisht: “55 houses, maybe 350 people.” Greece was close. Macedonia, Kosovo and Montenegro were other neighbors with strife and civil war in the 1990s after communism collapsed in Eastern Europe. Albania’s international isolation ended in 1991 when the “socialist people’s republic” became a democracy and ultimately even a NATO-member and American ally, and a candidate member of the European Union. But as in so many countries in that region, it was not a smooth transition. “In 1997, it was a very chaotic situation,” Gole says.

It took a lot of bubble wrap to get Jorge Aguilar’s statue of the “Virgen del Cisne” afely to Pittsfield. The four-foot tall statue was built for him in a workshop in Ecuador, his home country. Aguilar left his hometown of Girón for the United States when he was 16. Now 30 and a proud homeowner and landlord in Pittsfield, he still very much misses his family back in his South American country. “I have my faith in this Virgin,” he says in his Taylor Street living room where a votive candle burns as part of a shrine. “This is another thing that makes me feel at home.” In his window, leggy seedlings grow toward winter light that’s not really adequate. “It’s too early,” Aguilar agrees. But he is a farmer’s son and says that his love for gardening – “for growing things” – connects him to his native land as well. He shows off an Ecuadorian variety of beans he can’t wait to plant again and shows pictures of a zambo squash you won’t find in your local supermarket. “I like it here,” he says about Pittsfield. “The peace I have in my hometown is the peace I have in this town.”

Her children are grown up now, but Estervina Davis is still not sure about the American custom of sleepovers. “In my country, you don’t do that,” she says. “Everybody sleeps in their own house. I would have never even asked my parents if I could because I knew they would say ‘no’.” That was an unsettling cultural difference she had to adapt to when she moved from the Dominican Republic to the Berkshires in 2004. Music Credit: "Quasi Motion" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Maybe it was an honest mistake, maybe not. But either way, it was the moment that Maribel Teyssier passed her English exam. “I went to the supermarket and I pay my groceries with a bill of 50 bucks,” she says. “He gave me change for just 20. I got kind of angry because maybe he noticed that I didn’t know good English.” She pointed out the mistake. The cashier apologized and gave her the right change. Her eyes twinkle when she recalls, “That was my first experience forcing me to speak up in English." Music credit: "No Frills Cumbia" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

The Brazilian community in the Berkshires used to be larger. Thiago Oliveira recalls 75 or 80 worshippers at Sunday services in the Assembly of God Brazilian church in Pittsfield. The 2008 financial crisis caused many of them to leave. Oliveira says, “They returned to Brazil or moved to larger cities in the United States.” Oliveira became pastor of the congregation when church founders Marcelo de Santiago and his wife, Albertina, moved back to Sao Paulo. Mornings, he opens up Guido’s Fresh Marketplace on South Street and works there in the produce department. But in the large storefront space at 55 McKay St. that houses his church, it becomes clear quickly that he sees his ministry as his most important job. “I don’t do it for money,” he says about his pastoring. “It’s a very emotional thing, just to try to help anybody that I can help. I am very honored that God gave me this opportunity to do what I love.”

Dr. Tony Makdisi, a hospitalist at Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield, was inspired to come to the United States by “wanted to be just like” the American doctors who trained him at Damascus University in Syria. He holds on to the hope that Syria can find peace again.

Octavio Hernandez was born, raised and educated in Mexico City. He earned law degree there and for years practiced corporate law in the banking sector in Mexico and abroad: “I managed assets, worked with financial instruments. That sounds a bit dry, but at the time it was very exciting.” Now 58, he came to the Berkshires 15 years ago.

For Klara Sotonova’s parents in the Czech Republic, 20,000 koruna was a lot of money. The equivalent of about $800, they had saved that sum for when their daughter would get married. And at 19, a wedding was more or less what was expected of her. Preferably soon. Instead, Klara asked for that money to buy a plane ticket to America. It was 10 years after the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the events that ended communism in what was then still Czechoslovakia. Many young people were leaving.

Getting threats on your life from more or less anonymous sources is one thing. Having guys with guns show up at your house to kidnap you and your family is something else. “We weren’t actually at the house, we were two miles down the road going into town,” recalls Camilo Manrique. “We got a phone call from the caretaker telling us to get out of there because they were coming to get us. “So we booked a flight the next day and we came to the Berkshires.”

Goundo Behanzin doesn’t want to name the bank that turned down his business loan application. He laughs about it now, proud of his Berkshire International Market on Pittsfield’s North Street. But some resentment lingers when he concludes about the bank: “They were wrong. I am an accountant teacher, but they couldn’t see it.” Behanzin, 56, taught accounting in Abidjan, the largest city in French-speaking Ivory Coast, for nine years. Abidjan is to West Africa what New York is to the world, Behanzin explains: Both cities are a mix of cultures, crowded, a magnet for people from all over. “I am actually from two countries,” Behanzin says. “My father was from Benin. He met my mother in Ivory Coast, that’s where I was born. Then we moved to Benin where I went to my first schools."

The Eagle introduces a new feature called “Accents” to, one by one, tell the unique stories of our many immigrant neighbors living and working here in the Berkshires. Reinout van Wagtendonk, a Dutch-born journalist and longtime resident of Lee, is the host and producer of Accents, which consists of a beautifully produced podcast interview you can listen to online at BerkshireEagle.com, along with this story and even a special recipe provided by the guest that's representative of his or her native country. Van Wagtendonk debuts Accents today with an interview of Elisa Fuller, a resident of Pittsfield who hails from Ecuador. Music: "Sardana", "Sancho Panza Gets a Latte" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/