by Michael Xiarhos

I had read about the Camino de Santiago in a few different places.  Paulo Coelho sets his Pilgrimage along this ancient road, and I had been exposed to Camino history a few different times in some of my assigned reading in college; but it was still an abstract, still a place which existed only on paper.  It was without emotion, without substance, a subject to study but not to experience.  It was not until I watch a film written, directed, and starring Emilo Estavez that the Camino became an object of desire, bordering on obsession for me.  The film, The Way, changed my life more than I ever imagined a movie could, and because of that movie I ventured on my own Camino and it fundamentally changed who I                                                                    am and how I view the world.

First and foremost the Camino is a sacred journey, a pilgrimage to the mythic burial site of the Apostle St. James, Santiago en Español.  The road runs from St. Jean in Southern France to the Northwest corner of Spain to the cathedral in which St. James rests.  This 500 mile route is one of the oldest active pilgrimage trails in the world as Pilgrims have been making this journey for over a thousand years.  But one must not be Catholic to experience the power of this road, nor even Christian, nor even religious. 

The power of this road transcends the strict confines of dogmatic faith.  There is a power along the road that religion cannot explain.  During my own Camino I met Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Atheists.  Buddhist take this road, Hindus, and Agnostics.  This is the road of all of humanity.  On this road one learns to live communally, learns to trust in others, learns to give freely and love more completely.  It teaches one to judge less and experience more.  It humbles the strong and empowers the weak.  It inspires poetry, song, and film while having an expressionless reality which cannot be confined by simple words.

My own Camino took place over two different summers.  The first did not end how I wanted as open blisters in my feet became infected and I was unable to continue.  I was heartbroken.  It was all I could do to hold back the tears as I limped out of Villafranca, only 8 or 9 days away from Santiago.  I vowed to return, and return I did.

I made my way back the following Summer, this time with a friend to share in the experience.  We arrived at the airport in Madrid and barely made the bus to Villafranca.  The six hour bus trip allowed us time to plan and think about the journey ahead.  I was so anxious to get going that I felt I was in danger of missing out on the journey in favor of the destination.  The Camino is about the journey, not the city of Santiago. 

And so began our walk.  At times we spoke, other times we walked in silence.  Sometimes we walked together, other times we were more solitary.  We ate, drank, and slept in communal settings.  The food was shared with other peregrinos all sharing in this experience, all walking the same road, yet all having very personal moments unlike any other pilgrim on the road.  We attended Pilgrim masses, we tried new foods, and learned to speak better Spanish and we met amazing people.

Our joy entering the city of Santiago was dulled when we learned of the tragic train accident which took the lives of 79 people making their way to the city to celebrate the feast day of St. James on July 25.  Arriving in the city, I had such a range of emotions.  For me this was the culmination of two years of fascination and obsession with the Camino.  It was a tragedy for so many other people in and around the city.  Many in the city had lost brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters in the train accident and were now looking to the Cathedral and the relics of St. James for comfort rather than for praise at having finished their long journey.

My pilgrimage along the Camino may have come to an end, but what it taught me was that the Camino never ends.  Life is our ultimate Camino.  I've tried to live my life according to what I learned while on Camino.  I’ve tried to trust more fully, love more completely, give more freely, and treat each day as an element of the sacred mystery of our shared human experience.

Buen Camino! 


Michael is a History teacher at Pilgrim High School in Warwick, RI.  

by Courtney DeSousa 

Growing up I came from a family which never really left New England. When I graduated high school, my friends and I organized a trip to Colorado. It was my first big trip, even though it was still in the USA. I had never had any desire to go elsewhere until I enrolled in my Spanish classes in college and I was surrounded by primarily native Spanish speakers. I thought to myself, "how am I ever going to speak Spanish like them?!"

Then, a professor of mine gave me the golden solution! She said, "You have to study abroad in Mexico! But, you can't live with American students, you'll have to live with a Mexican host family!"

I was so scared! All of the stories I had hear about Mexico on the news flashed through my head. I would be away from my family and friends, my comfort zone, my culture, my language.

But something inside me made me just do it and take that chance…thank goodness I did!!

It changed everything for me. Since Mexico, I have been back 9 times. I have studied in Spain and Italy. I have seen so many more countries than I had ever thought I would see; all because I was bitten by the travel bug in Mexico. (No that's not like a Mexican insect or something..lol) 

My host family and friends in Mexico were the nicest, warmest, funniest people I had ever met. They treated me like family. I learned to speak better Spanish in literally one month’s time versus 4-5 years of study before that. I learned new perspectives through first-hand experience, not through a text book, or a news program. I made lifelong friends and memories. I fell in love with travel. 

I have climbed the Eiffel Tower, several ancient Mexican pyramids, visited Buckingham Palace, lived down the street from historic castles and palaces, entered St. Peter's basilica and the Sistine chapel... I have fed the pigeons in Venice, been inside the Coliseum in Rome, ridden horses in the Dominican Republic, and then camels in Morocco...  

And when I was sitting in class my senior year of high school, I never had the desire to take a journey... I never believed that it would make a difference to me whether or not I stayed in Rhode Island.

I had taken one trip to Mexico that changed me forever. I traveled and learned about their cultures and about myself, and now, I can speak two foreign languages fluently. To think, I did all of this before I even turned 30! And, I'm not done yet. 

Hope you like my story. Get out there and create your own. 


Courtney teaches Spanish and Italian at Pilgrim High School in Warwick, RI.

by Lindsey Lerner

In response to the question, “How was your last semester?”

Last semester, well last semester I was dropped off in an apartment with people’s whose language I didn’t speak and who didn’t know my native tongue.  I spent the first few weeks having conversations with myself through the ears of the dog.  At least her head cocked sideways to the inflictions of my voice in stark contrast to the blank stares from the people I was living with while I stumbled over my words in this unknown language.

My family not only consisted of a host mother, host sister and adorable host dog, but the snails that slowly made their advance into the windows lining the shower.  Coming from North American suburbia where my mother keeps our house cleaner or should I say, more sterile than a hospital environment, at first the new additions to the family were not welcomed.  The shower used to be where I contemplated life and obsessed over my anxieties and the problems of the world.  Now I was worrying how many seconds of hot water I got before the icicles began shooting out of the shower head and how to escape my slimy house mates.  Both options did not help me feel clean or benefit the washing away of my never ending thought processes.

Regardless of the loss of my North American luxuries, South America taught me that at twenty years old, living out of a suit case is the best thing you can do.  Because at twenty years old you don’t need anything more than yourself and whatever can be maneuvered into the overhead compartment of an airplane or bus. 

Meeting strangers has always been a passion.  It’s interesting to converse with someone you’ve never interacted with and be able to walk away feeling like it was the best conversation you’ve ever had.  But sometimes this mind set gets flipped upside down and you realize that you’re sitting with someone you’ve known for less than an hour and she hopped the fence into your backyard and is now swimming in the pool that is your psyche. 

It baffles me that I was traveling with a friend and the past I never told her; this new girl dug it out with a spoon.  No effort, no shovel, no equipment was needed.  She read my mind as if it were her own.  I didn’t know how to respond when she brought up my depressive thoughts, so I looked at her, smiled - teeth bearing like a growl, but rosy cheeks like I had been sitting in the sunshine.  She had known she was right and left it alone as I wish others had.  When I met her I wasn’t even sure she spoke English and now I find myself here.  In a country where I know the language but not the accent and soon I will be back home thousands of miles away while she’s across the world deciding whether or not education by institution is for her. 

Until then I will continue exploring my perspectives on life by traveling through my mind via South American roads.

I also met someone.  Not in that romantic heart throbbing soul crushing way, but I met someone who gives me the self-confidence I falsely project on a day to day basis.  I had thought the art of listening had been lost, but you have ultimately proved me wrong.  Your voice has the calming power like the ocean waves rolling on the shore.  Although others may view this relationship in a romantic light, there is nothing romantic about it.  If only they could hear the conversations regarding our extremely differing points of view on love.  Gasoline had been poured on me, match lit and thrown like a grenade as they walked away, watching me go up in flames.  You, on the other hand, are happy surrounded in the world you have created with one another.  My trust issues won’t allow for what you to have and as much as that scares me I would rather stay in the confines of my sandbox where I’m supplied with the illusion that second time around heartbreak is impossible. 

Overall I think the most important perspective I’ve learned through South America is that no matter how far away I go whether it is outside of my front door or to the literal end of the world in Tierra del Fuego is that family and friends that turned into family are the only constants.  Even from over 5,000 miles away with the assistance of Skype it’s as if I never left.  My little cousin thinks I live in the computer and sometimes I wish I did.  If I could travel as fast as the Internet I could learn another language, communicate with more people, help more people, but always return to my family with the click of a button.   

Before I even left my small house in the smallest state everyone acted as if nothing was going to be different.  I was simply going on a vacation for a little over four months, according to my grandmother 141 days.  I think that C.S Lewis said it best, “Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back everything is different?”  This one line is a complete synopsis of my entire time getting lost in Latin America. 

I had no idea that anything was changing, but then I found myself having conversations with people at home, people that I used to agree with and realizing that we were now at two completely different ends of the spectrum.  My perspectives altered drastically to the point where I hadn’t written my own story, my experiences were writing me and installing them subconsciously in my mind.  It’s gotten to the point where now I’m just saying things aloud to see how the ideas fit; it’s like going clothing shopping for my mind – what looks good today? 

Through this I realized that there is a consistent game of cat and mouse going on in my mind.  The cat is always extremely proud after the mouse is caught, but soon realizes that the thrill is gone.  Understanding something so well to the point of confusion is what people have become, regardless of never ending language barriers.  They’re no longer just human beings, but human understandings whose thought processes are understood through the crevices of caves on their faces that reveal stories of generations.

I admit at least one of the places I’ve traveled to started out as a way of collecting another stamp on my passport, but it ended up motivating me further to achieve global citizenship in the harbor of those passport page creases because travel never ceases to amaze me.  None of what I’ve learned from traveling could have been taught to me or learned within the confined and constricting walls of a classroom.  This wasn’t some sort of vacation, but rather a vacating of my life in the northern border. 

Most importantly what I’ve learned is that if you don’t know where you’re going, you can never be lost and if you do ever find yourself “lost” it’s really just an adventure.  I used to think that I was a traveler and not a tourist, but now I’ve realized that I’m an explorer carrying out the act of carefully executed participant observation in the name of photography and anthropology.  South America made me it’s patient of patience and I believe I’ve successfully learned their methods through living out of a suitcase that was dragged continuously buses, trains, planes, cars, walking, running, stairs, elevators, all just different modes of transportation waiting to bring me to a new state of mind.  


Lindsey is a Global Studies major at Bryant University.

by Jacob Marrocco

It was a dreary summer day when we arrived in France. The breeze kissed our cheeks as it blew by and the smell of rain lingered in the air. We were waiting on the sidewalk outside the airport. I remember pacing down the pavement, walking by the chaperones and my fellow travelers. We wondered what was taking so long for us to begin our adventures throughout Europe. Was the bus stalled somewhere far down the road? Did the traffic flow hinder its ability to reach us? Was there a Speed-like situation in which we would witness Sandra Bullock drive the cumbersome bus by us with Keanu Reeves guiding her and the driver and passengers horrified in the backseat? No. Oh, no. We were anxiously awaiting the arrival of our tour guide, Tony.

Except he was different. He did not resemble a Tony whatsoever. His hair was salt-and-pepper with a little too much of the latter. He looked around aimlessly, aloof to the fact that the group he was supposed to be leading was a mere five feet away from him. I observed him and wondered many things:  Would this man lose us in France? Would this man lose us in England? Would he lose us in Ireland? Would he lose us in Wales? Where was he from? What accent did he have? Was he interesting? I had the answer to none of these questions, but of one thing I was positively sure:  this man did not look like a Tony. No, my friends, he looked like a Gary.

It is truly amazing how much he resembled a Gary. I have never revealed why I believed this to be true, but one of the main reasons was the fact that Gary is an anagram for “gray,” and his hair was just about this color. Also, gray would describe my feelings about this man leading us around four foreign countries when the farthest I had been from my home in Warwick, R.I., previously was Houston, Texas. I was in that gray area. Sure, he had been in this profession for quite some time. However, when we asked him where we were on occasion and he looked up, furrowed his brow and said a location with uncertainty, my group and I would be a bit frightened. For these reasons and many intangible factors as well, he was thus deemed Gary.

No one believed me, except for my first followers: Shannon Fitz-Simon, Chelsea Carney and Lauren McDonnell. They agreed that this individual resembled a Gary and at first the chaperones would correct us when we referred to him as Gary. Oh, how their views would change over the next 10 days. Slowly but surely, my fellow Rhode Island travelers began to see it from my perspective. This man was undoubtedly a Gary, and I was out to ensure everyone knew it. After we left Wales en route to Ireland, all of the Pilgrim students and recent alumni were calling him Gary.

To be honest, I don’t believe I ever referred to him as Tony after our first day at the airport. I would either say “Hey” or wait for someone else to get his attention. It got to the point where my friends and I were unable to approach him without catching ourselves first so that we did not call him Gary and reveal the joke...although he may have known. The only people who did not catch Gary Fever were the Idahoans.

Oh, the Idahoans. They were a nice people, but ones who were a little too attached to Gary. Oh, sure, I dropped hints to them on occasion that they should hop on the Gary train. These efforts were fruitless. They preferred Tony, and I could not stop them.

My final subjects to coerce were our chaperones:  X, Kelly and DeSousa. DeSousa was indifferent, so convincing her was easy. She was the first domino to fall, and the others went down as well. Kelly was next. She was much tougher to work on. Eventually our conversations were saturated with enough “Gary”s that she caught on, too. X, though, was an entirely different beast.

X was like the dad from Footloose. He was not hearing any of my new-fangled naming schemes. He wanted to stick to his conventional name. Tony was so boring. He needed to get with the Gary. Interestingly enough, it was after the trip when X first admitted that the lines had been blurred between Tony and Gary. In casual conversation to this day he occasionally forgets Gary’s real name. I asked him what shifted his view and his was a similar case to Kelly’s. He heard Gary so many times that it eventually slipped into his subconscious like a tiny mouse through a crack in the wall. I consider convincing X to call our tour guide Gary one of my greatest accomplishments in recent years.

Our adventures in Europe were certainly memorable ones. We visited the Eiffel Tour, saw the Mona Lisa, rode the Metro countless times, stared in awe at the Ring of Kerry and much more. However, we will never forget the guy who (sort of) led us around and (seldom) told us interesting facts about the places we visited. He left an indelible mark on us; from his cheerful demeanor, to his accent that we will always remember when we are going to the ‘otel or when we are going to get some tay or coff-ay. Wherever you are Gary, just know that you were the face that launched a thousand memories…for better or for worse.


Jake is a journalism and history major at the University of Rhode Island.

by Caren Welker


As a graduate of Pilgrim High School, I am very proud to see the extracurricular clubs growing and having so much success in teaching students with creativity and multidisciplinary activities. I absolutely believe in the power of experiential learning and that travel can teach people to grow in so many unimaginable ways.

While studying abroad in Madagascar for a semester in college, I had such an experience of my own. While the entire four months were spent in a fairly middle-class location with a host family (which was still quite third-world culture), our group spent one week in a rural village. Dreading this week with absolutely no electricity, no access to the outside world, no source of food or water other than what we were able to bring with us and what was grown nearby… I was pretty surprised to realize it was actually one of the best weeks of my life. We spent our days farming, then walked two miles to the beach for a swim, took an afternoon nap under a small tree, prepared meals over burning grasses, ate fresh picked cactus fruit, and sang and danced with everyone in the village. Every day we asked if this was what life was always like for them. They said “Yes, pretty much… unless there is a storm or a drought and it is more difficult to get food and water.  Sometimes people get sick or even die but we just have hope and keep living.”

The matter-of-fact way they stated their loved ones’ health as something so easily lost struck a chord, but what was more surprising was their positivity. That day I learned that you can find peace and happiness anywhere, no matter what you have or don’t have. Whenever I get stressed out over the fact that my hot water runs out in my apartment, or I can’t afford to get that pricey meal and have to settle for something else, or get sick of sitting at a computer for hours… I try to remember that I was once extremely happy for a whole week, without a shower, without any choice in what I could eat, without any electricity to be seen. This is something that can’t just be taught, it has to be understood. This kind of understanding can really only come from experience.



Caren is a graduate of both Pilgrim High School and the University of Rhode Island.