Berkshire Eagle: Accents in the Berkshires

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

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.