In April, five Trinity parishioners, Rev AJ Heine, Rebecca Greeley, Kathleen Garcia, Kay Buchanan and Stephanie Otteni, became pilgrims of the Camino de Santiago in Portugal and Spain. The Camino de Santiago culminates in the burial site of St. James.
Back home in Staunton, Stephanie reflected on her journey:
Rebecca, Kathleen, Kay and I mostly stuck together, but I wandered off on my own some, too. Although a lot of people I interacted with spoke English, language barriers were a frustrating issue and I found myself wishing constantly that I was bilingual. I longed for easy fluency and imagined how much simpler my daily transactions would be if I only had the right words.
The last day of my trip I walked with a Texan who was fluent in Spanish. We stopped at a cafe for a coffee and ran into a Japanese couple in their late 70s. I recognized them from the trail and said hello. They spoke very little English and no Spanish at all, but they explained that their pack transfer service had not picked up their bags that morning and they were having trouble carrying their heavy bags as far as they needed to go that day.
The Texan launched into action. He and the bartender talked back and forth in Spanish, and it turned out that another customer in the cafe was a taxi driver and he was willing to drive the couple to the next town where they could find a hotel and stop for the night. But the couple was reluctant to go, and the Texan was impatient, having decided that he’d solved the problem and was ready to get back on the trail. He was talking too fast and loudly for them to understand, and they were speaking too slowly and softly for him to listen. Neither party could understand the other and I found myself sitting in the middle, translating this conversation back and forth (even though it was all in English) realizing that communication sometimes has very little to do with language.
Left to right: Kay Buchanan, Rebecca Greeley, Rev. AJ Heine, Stephanie Otteni and Kathleen Garcia.
