Girls, girls, girls (actually, women, women, women)

So, suddenly in the last few days I´m meeting all these women traveling alone. This did not happen earlier on the Camino. Yesterday I mentioned but didn´t name a young British woman I met. We had been walking along together in the rain for awhile, when I decided to stop and put on my rain gear. I was content to let her go on, but then I learned that her name was Naomi. When I stopped she asked if I wanted her to wait, and I said, yes, actually, yes, I did.

She was a tall, slightly gangly woman, twenty-five, tan, with a toothy and compelling smile, glasses, and brown hair carefully pinned up; she had started walking in France, a month and 900 kilometers back. She told me that the past year had been "difficult." I learned that she had been a PhD student at Cambridge, in medical engineering, but was no longer in the program since her stroke--the source of difficulty. She had been bedridden for six months, unable to read or listen to books or watch tv, as her brain could not manage such tasks. Luckily her friends had visited her everyday, which she said had been "lovely." She still was mostly unable to read, and was not allowed to return to her studies, now or probably ever. But apparently she was well enough to cross France and Spain on foot. We walked together through most of the morning, talking as we climbed further up into the mountains. We came to La Faba at noon, in a downpour; she decided to go on, while I stopped for the albergue run by the German couple. Lately it seems I am often losing people I do not want to see go. When I´d heard her name I´d immediately felt a connection, and talking to her that sense had become stronger.

In the albergue I almost immediately took up with yet another interesting and attractive woman. After my shower, I was sitting in the public room writing when Samila, a Canadian woman I´d met briefly the night before, appeared. We launched into a conversation that lasted much of the afternoon and evening. Like nearly everyone, Samila had her own fascinating story. Her father is Indian (from Africa), her mother Australian. She had grown up in Australia but immigrated to Canada at sevnteen, because her father believed that she and her two sisters would have a better chance of marrying in their faith in Vancouver. They practiced Ismili (which is no doubt misspelled), an offshoot of Islam (?). None of the three sisters had, as it turns out, followed the father´s plan (and he himself had taken up Eastern spiritualities and vegetarianism). Samila had gone to University, then law school in Calgary, then she´d worked for the last two years at a law firm in the same city. But she had quit and come on the Camino, in part to figure out her next move.

She was a small, slender woman who liked to talk, leaving no detail or digression untold. This worked somehow. We decided to have dinner together in the small vilage´s only resturant, but first we took a short walk. At the top of the village an ancient woman in a headscarf stopped us. She asked where we were from, and then told us that a family had long ago left the village for Connecticut to make money, and now their nietos (grandchilden) sometimes returned to visit the family left behind. She pointed out their house. We learned that she had always lived in the village, that her husband had been a farmer but he was dead. She spoke of the people passing through on the Camino, from all over the world. She said that the Celts had once lived in these mountains, and that the Romans had passed through; she talked about the Spansih Civil War, about all the death and blood. Two of her brothers had fought for Franco. She shook her head and said, "la vida es un gran misteriosa... un gran misteriosa." Before we left she gave us walnuts, showing us how to crack them by squeezing two together in her palm.

After dinner Salima and I went to the small church by the albergue, where a literary event of sorts was taking place. The German woman at the albergue, Anita, had asked everyone on arrival if they would be willing to sing a song or read a poem later at a gathering in the church. I´´d agreed and she wrote down my name. We entered the church a few minutes late, and pair of Frenchman were singing a song. Then one of them read a poem, then a Spanish woman read a prayer. Anita called my name and I went to the front of the congregation. First she asked me to tell something about myself and why I was walking the Camino; she translated my answers into German. Then I recited Bruce´s "Reason to Believe. I should have gone ahead and just sung, but I didn´t. When I had finished Anita stood up and with watery eyes said, "that was so moving." Then she kissed me on both cheeks. George, her husband, stood and did my cheeks too. Then Anita gave me a prayer handwritten in Engish and asked me to read it which I did.

Salima got up and recited a Rumi poem, "The Guesthouse." Her cheeks were bussed too.

At the end Anita asked us all to come to the front, and we stood in a circle around the altar holding hands and people recited the Lord´s Prayer in their own language. Finally Anita had us raise our clasped hands over our heads and then she said "buen Camino!"

We unclasped hands and Anita said we could stay in the church and sit quietly if we liked. She put on a cd of appropriate music. I did sit for a time, and watched George and Anita from behind, sitting close together with their shoulders touching, and I thought about how they take care of pergrinos day after day high up in the mountains in the tiny village, and how each night they get the pilgrims to sing and pray together in the little church.