So I just decided that I am way more Basque than I had previously thought. Basque people are very cold when you first meet them. They don´t smile at you on the street. They don´t usually return a "Hello" when you get on the bus. It takes a long time to get to know them. It might take months for them to open up and tell you a small detail about their life.
I have always been quite the private person. I would rather hear people talk than engage in conversation. I usually have a million questions for people when I first meet them but freeze up if they turn the tables and start asking questions about my life. Truth of the matter is, is that I have given too much information in the past and it has come back to haunt me later in life. I guess it is just easier to take in details of another´s life than to give out your own.
I just had a moment of self-discovery in my last class. I have had this class now for over 3 months and it is quite a small class (only 6, or sometimes 7, students). They are all females and the ambience in the class is really comfortable so we get to talk about a lot of personal things. Or maybe I should say,
they get to talk about a lot of personal things. I feel like I know quite alot about their lives. Some are married. One is divorced. One is a doctor. They have traveled all over the world. A few have children. Over all, they are just really great students and I hope, one day, even better friends.
So today we were talking about blogs and keeping journals or diaries and if any of them did anything like this. One student did have a blog-type web-site that she used to post photos and write about her life. I had been playing with the idea of telling them about my blog all day and wondering if it would be worth it. Do I really want my students knowing about my personal life and reading about the things I write there? More importantly, Do I want them to know more about me than the small bit of information I give them in class? I just didn´t know if it would be worth it. This would mean openly inviting others to know more about me and and ask questions...something I am most of the time terrified of.
At the last minute I decided to tell them about my blog and proceded to lead them downstairs to the library so they could all check out my blog on the computer. After we arrived in the library and they got logged-on to the Internet, they started reading. And then they started asking questions. You have sisters? What are their names? How old are they? This is your newphew? Where are you from again? What do your parents do? Why did you come to the Basque Country? Have you already finished with the university? Who are these people?
I started to realize that I knew quite a bit about them but that they knew hardly anything about me. And then I realized that even though I had been very sparse with the details of my life, I had felt like I had already told them too much. How could they still have questions?
And that is when I connected the dots and realized that I am much more like a Basque person than I had thought. These Vascos don´t usually freely give out much information and it can take years and years to move past aquaintance status with someone here. I suppose I am not as different as I had previously believed. Maybe I really do have some sangre vasca (basque blood) in me...it seems a lot of people here wish I did.
And as I´m sitting here writing all of this I´m thinking that maybe not just me and the Vascos, but people all around the world, have more in common than we like to believe. I mean, we all have secrets. We all have a past. We all have events in our life that we are proud of and other moments that make us cringe. We want love in our life and acceptance from others. Maybe, instead of focusing on the differences, we should concentrate on the similarities.
Maybe we all are really Basque.
I think they would agree.
