Our pet peeve…opossum ≠ fox

Our night watchman, Lauro, was able to kill an opossum during the night. When we have chickens, they will eat the chickens. Some grow to be quite large. They have a horrible stench.

Well, a pet peeve of ours is that the girls keep referring to this animal as a zorro which means “fox”. Opossum says zarigüeya in our dictionary, and besides there are no foxes in the jungle. We kept trying to correct the girls, explaining what a fox was and that they are much more beautiful than opossums. They insisted that this was a type of “fox”. We were getting frustrated, feeling that it was such a disgrace to the fox species, being grouped with a stinky opossum. The girls were frustrated because we are the ignorant gringos that don’t know their language as well as they do. Oh, to all the foxes out there, we are sorry. It is a hopeless case…just like a previous case we had last year trying to convince them that iceberg lettuce was lettuce and not cabbage. Oh man, that is a different story, but replace fox/opossum with lettuce/cabbage and you know exactly how that conversation went as well.