Many lives in one

Writing a letter of recommendation for someone applying for associate membership of the CFUW this week, I've had to ask for some details of her history, and have been really impressed and humbled by the answer. As she says, she has a "rich and diverse background." Growing up in Brazil, where her German parents spoke German, her other first language was Portuguese (many years later she also spent four years in Portugal), but having met and married someone who worked for the Canadian foreign service, she has also become fluent in English, French and Spanish, not to mention the Asian languages she needed to master while living in Indonesia, Thailand and India. She tells me she always "sought to understand the culture of her host countries", joining Jakarta's Ganesha Society where she became very knowledgeable about ceramics, or joining an opera appreciation group in Berlin. She worked as a bilingual secretary, a mother, an Ambassador's Wife and an administrative assistant at the Foreign Affairs office in Canada. Now that she and her husband have retired from all those other lives, she's tackling her garden and getting to know people like me.

I'm diversified too, having lived in six different countries with no fixed identity and no actual career. I bet, like me, this lady has often perplexed herself with the questions: what's (been) my role in life? where do I belong? who am I?