Ym Mhatagonia
In 1865, a group of Welsh emigrants left their homeland for the new world. They wanted to go to a place where life was better, and also where there were no laws prohibiting them the speaking of their Language, Cymraeg, Welsh, and the free exercise of their Nonconformist faith. They lighted on far-away Argentina, and founded a colony in Patagonia: Y Wladfa, as it is known to this day still to Welsh speakers.
On the outskirts
of the small town of Gaiman big hoardings advertise Welsh tea shops: Ty Nain
and Ty Tê Cymraeg and Ty Gwyn.
Then a wide, empty main road,
crossed by narrower side streets. Lots of pickup trucks; everything dry, dusty.
Most of the houses are nondescript, although some are beautiful, startlingly white
or elaborately built of red brick.
The whole town - village, really - looks empty; there's the odd car on the
road and the occasional person, and dogs sleeping in the shade, but those few
figures are swallowed up by the vast land and sky. Behind the houses, where
the side streets end, I can see dusty whitish hillocks. The land feels enormous,
even here in the middle of Gaiman. There is so much sky! Most of the houses
have only one, at most two storeys and the road looks much too wide for the
few cars in it.
The footpath - beaten, dry earth - is completely overgrown with dry bushes which
an elderly man and a youth are about to clear. The school is built of red brick
and has sash windows - very unusual in Argentina. Two cypress trees and a thorny
shrub grow outside, and there is a - slightly rusty - sign: Primera escuela
secundaria de la Patagonia, fundada en 1906. (The first secondary school in
Patagonia, founded 1906.) A plaque at the side of the building says Nid Byd,
Byd heb Wybodiaeth in Welsh: The World could not exist without Knowledge.
And in Spanish: La Educación es el Pan del Alma. Education is Food for
the Soul. I find these two quotes strangely moving, and catch myself thinking:
You wouldn't find that in England, not in the South-East, anyway.
Gabro is the Welsh teacher. He is from Gaiman, but it turns out that he, too,
learnt most of his Welsh at the Wlpan course in Lampeter, albeit a few years after I was there. He tells me this as I burst into his Welsh lesson for grade nine. Miguel and I have a brief chat in Welsh, then I sit quietly in a corner for the rest of the lesson. Afterwards, he tells me more in the playground outside.
'Welsh has been part of the curriculum in Coleg Camwy since 1996,' he tells me.
(Dyffryn Camwy is the Welsh name of the valley of the River Chubut). 'We got the
official OK from the province's education authority, and now the Coleg is the
only secondary school in all of Argentina where Welsh is officially part of the
curriculum. In the eighth grade the pupils choose whether they want to learn French
or Welsh as their first foreign language - last year, out of thirty-five, thirty-one
wanted to do Welsh!' He laughs. 'I teach twenty of them now - I didn't want to
be responsible for the poor French teacher losing her job!'
Some - but by no means all - of the Welsh learners have a Welsh speaker in the
family, a grandparent, usually. Others just learn Welsh because it's fun and they
enjoy the classes. A group of them are hanging around us now, listening. Visitors
from Europe occur reasonably often, but still seem to be exciting.
'It is a bit mad, isn't it?' I say heretically. 'Learning Welsh in Argentina?'
Some of the pupils laugh and agree. Others point to the history of the Chubut
Valley and the language of their foremothers and fathers.
'Every language is important!' Miguel says. 'You know, some people in Wales insist
that you only speak Welsh, not a word of English! But I think you have to communicate
as best you can when you're talking to someone - be that with your hands or your
eyes or whatever language you have! Communication is so important. We should really
be teaching a little bit of German as well here in Coleg Camwy, and French and
Arabic... - everything!'
The bell goes - break is over.
* * * In the middle of nowhere I am on board the long-distance coach
that goes from the Atlantic east coast to Esquél and the Andes mountain range.
The coach - el colectivo - leaves Gaiman at 1pm and reaches Esquél at nine.
In-between lie eight hours of pretty much nothing. That is to say, the pampas.
Later, hours later, strange rock
formations appear on the horizon: Los Altares, Yr Allorau - The Altars. That's
what the group of Welsh settlers called them who travelled from Gaiman into
the unknown a hundred years ago. They are two, three columns of rock, striped
grey and brown as though somebody had taken the trouble to paint them.
I wish the bus didn't move so fast.
I wish I had time to get out, to walk for a few hours in the clear blue air,
in the cool whistling wind and the hot sunshine, the unbroken silence. I wish
I could make this journey by car so that I could set my own pace; better still,
on horseback, at the same pace of those first European travellers, so that I
could see the land as they did, moving through it slowly, slowly, slowly, week
after week until I would be filled with silence, with the blue and gold and
browns of the days, the absolute, star-encrusted blackness of the nights.
The coach moves on through the long
hot afternoon. It is almost dusk, the shadows are
long and the light has turned from gold to purple, when we stop in the middle
of nowhere. Three people stand by the roadside, and a horse. (c) Imogen Rhia Herrad
It is hard to believe that
I am in Argentina.
