<HTML><FONT FACE=arial,helvetica><FONT SIZE=3>As a young woman getting a BFA at the University of Georgia I took the three courses in Latin that were part of the curriculum. Later, while getting a graduate degree at Smith College and a postgraduate degree at Columbia University I never took a foreign language course, and used the Latin that I had learned only sporadically to recognize an esoteric term here and there.<BR>
Traveling around the world I was always in the company of a polyglot person or two and never felt the need, or the desire, really, to know another language.<BR>
And then, in 2000, I made my first Camino pilgrimage, alone, by bicycle, all the way from St. Jean's and learned, to my everlasting surprise, the full and limiting extent of my language poverty. I got by with the help of some Italian, German and Dutch pilgrims who spoke some English and quite a bit of Spanish.<BR>
For the past three years I have made a concerned effort to learn Spanish, and although I am quite far from achieving fluency, what I have learned has shown me how very much of the Camino I missed during that first pilgrimage, and the second, by not knowing Spanish.<BR>
Ancient Chinese philosophers said that "one has as many lives as languages one speaks". Indeed, it is so, and then some.<BR>
In the midst of my third pilgrimage the Camino has now acquired new dimensions, new hues, new meanings and new feelings by virtue of being able to understand something of what is said, written, and sung all through the 500 miles in Northern Spain. Not least, the friendliness and openness of the local folk has multiplied ten fold following my attempts to communicate in their language.<BR>
I do not know whether it was the times, or the social pressures of being a young Southern woman, or the defined career paths, that kept me from understanding, as a student, that knowing a language other than one's own opens a magnificent and enriching window on the world. Neither I nor my college peers were encouraged to take courses in foreign languages other than the then required Latin. I now know that such lack of encouragement is a serious educational shortcoming, and not only culturally.<BR>
Greetings from O Cebreiro where the fog in the early morning forms a beauty that must come from another world. Or does it?<BR>
Liz <BR>
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