Olga Spanish Teacher

When I was eight years old, I ventured into the library we had at home for the first time. Actually, it was not a big deal: it was just a metal furniture with several shelves on which rested, in a disorderly manner, a score of books of different sizes and qualities. Not all were beautiful, but they were all quite interesting. My father had among his books, besides a big bible, in hard cover and golden border, some lives of saints. For me it was a pleasure to go through those truculent narrations of martyrdoms and unlimited dangers, of incredible fanaticism, of self mutilations and certain portents, perhaps, or invented. The photographs of the Holy Land that were in some of them made me anxious to travel. The books of my sisters, those who they had to read for a homework, to fulfill tasks that in those days could not be found on the Internet, they discovered other realities. Of all those foreign books, the one I remember most fondly is one that was already very deteriorated, w...

Doris is an Austrian who has decided to spend a year in Colombia. For a happy circumstance we met and I started teaching her Spanish. Her case has helped me determine how someone can make the most of that immersion experience in a new language and culture.   Of course, as a Spanish teacher I have had the opportunity to meet many students who come to "submerge", but Doris's case is different, because she has done the real process, I mean, she is actually forced to use Spanish language daily, unlike other people who come to do immersion but live in an area full of bilingual places, t hey eat at Archie's, meet other foreigners and, therefore, speak in their native language or in English almost all the time . Doris lives in a neighborhood where 99% of the people are locals who barely know a few words of English and zero German. As she is a religious person (a strange thing these days) she does an educational work that involves all the inhabitants of her area,...