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An Americorp ACCESS member through the Center for New North Carolinians, Katrina Siladi is assigned to work at the Greensboro Children’s Museum.

“Part of my job is to make the museum more accessible for immigrants and refugee families,” the 21-year-old Guilford College senior said.

In an effort to better do her job and increase and improve her Spanish conversation skills, Siladi recently joined FaithAction International House’s new Language Exchange.

Formed in 2008, the program pairs English speakers with speakers of foreign languages. The pairs meet weekly in a neutral location and spend half of their time conversing in English and the other half conversing in the foreign language.

“The program is ideal for those who have the basics of the other language and wish to improve their conversational skills,” said Ryan Nilsen, language program coordinator at FaithAction International House.

For Siladi, that’s one of her main goals.

Her partner is a Spanish-speaking mother with two children.

“It’s helped me in my work by giving me much more confidence speaking with Spanish-speaking visitors when they come into the museum,” Siladi said. “Every time I speak Spanish, I realize how much more I’ve learned from her.”

Siladi and her partner meet for two hours each Thursday, and then the partner comes to the museum to help Siladi with translations on Fridays.

“I’ve made a friend for life, and she gets to bring her kids to the museum to play and become more comfortable speaking English,” Siladi said.

“I think this is a unique opportunity for a one-on-one cultural and language exchange where you are both giving each other all that you can.”

The language exchange has more than 30 participants doing exchanges in English, Spanish, French, Korean and Farsi, and others have expressed an interest and are looking for partners.

“Because all participants are both offering someone else the opportunity to practice and develop their language skills and also benefiting from that same type of opportunity that their partner is offering them, everyone who participates is at once a volunteer teacher and a student, in a sense,” Nilsen said. “We’re seeking to help set up relationships of mutual reciprocity.”

To participate in the program, individuals must attend an orientation session at FaithAction International House.

Mark Sills, executive director of FaithAction, recently began an exchange with a young Spanish-speaking working man with a family.

“He works as a painter and is super-smart and well-informed,” Sills said.
“His English is better than my Spanish, but he feels the need to polish his grammar and expand his vocabulary, and I feel certain these conversations will help him do that.”

For Sills, who admits he’s functional but not always comfortable speaking Spanish, the exchange has been personally beneficial, too.

“I may know words I need to use, but I feel awkward and shy,” he said. “That awkwardness goes away the more you use the language in a more comfortable way.”

Nilson’s current goal is to continue networking participants and building the program.

“Through these partnerships, participants are given the opportunity to spend a substantial amount of time simply sitting and talking and working together with people from other cultural traditions, typically born in very different parts of the world but who may live right down the street from each other,” he said. “It is important for these people to meet and learn one another’s languages, to be in a relationship with one another and especially in a relationship like this in which both participants serve as students and teachers, each with something valuable to offer one another.”

Sills agreed.

“The more people are able to learn from each other and share, the stronger our community will be,” he said.

Contact Jennifer Atkins Brown at 574-5582 or jennifer.brown@ news-record.com.