I took French in middle school and high school and learned enough to be able to get around Paris with Suzanne, Mary Kitazono, and Dan Zook during a trip we took our junior year at Princeton. Then, I moved to Los Angeles for medical school and figured out that French wasn’t going to do me a lot of good taking care of the patients at the LA County hospital.
I decided to go to Guatemala for three weeks in 2003 during my last summer break to learn Spanish. I managed to learn the basics at the Spanish school where we studied for five hours a day and then went on field trips out into the countryside to practice speaking with the locals. This is a picture of us going on one of these trips–that’s me in the middle of the huddled mass, bracing myself for another adventure in our luxurious means of transportation:
We went out to remote villages where the kids had never seen cameras or Americans before.
Since then, I’ve traveled extensively through Mexico (picture below) and have been speaking Spanish everyday in the hospital in LA and now in Dallas. I’m so glad I learned both languages.
- Julie Enright Furlan, friend from Princeton