
Caminoheads 2019 Veranda.
Hola a todos! Yes, that is surely the righest way to start!
Followed by: bear with my English, Spanish is my first language!
You may know me already, as The Boss, aka, Phil/Felipe, has talked about me a couple times,… but anyway: I am Cris, I am from & live in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I was invested with “SACBC” South America Caminoheads Bureau Chief, which I accept very humbly and live with high responsibility as it includes the Spanish and Portuguese speaker communities from Colombia to Antartica (as I write this, I wonder if I take care of Central America too??? but that is for a private email to the boss… and a different number in the check!) When not busy in affairs that the SACBC role implies, I have a busy job in the “corporate world” of Clinical Research, working on the development of treatments through clinical trials.
But if you ask me who I am, I am a Pilgrim. Even when my days go by commutting into the city, and sitting in an office with my computer and phone, I am a Pilgrim. Clinical Research is just what I do for a living.
I had that sense of having become a Pilgrim when I came back from the Camino in 2011 (after walking from Leon to Santiago). But it was difficult to feel I was living up to my Pilgrim identity dressed in business clothes, taking trains and subways, and walking only from the elevator to my office… but the connection I kept to the other pilgrims, my Camino family, was what made me persevere in being in the world who I was: a Pilgrim.
Fast forward January 2017, I came across the trailer of Phil’s Camino in the Facebook, I visited Caminoheads, left a comment, and the next thing was an email from Phil inviting me to a Skype call… and the Magic started… My Pilgrim and human identity are reinforced through the daily interactions with Phil and the Caminoheads. Since then too, I not only have a Camino Family, but also a Camino Neighborhood. And in this neighborhood, the neighbors like to invite each other to the living room of their homes (although we are posh and use the word “salon”, as the French do!) and we have amazing conversations about books, life, death, blessings, suffering, love… Very often we sit outside in the Tapas Table and we drink wine, break bread, and share our gifts. Most of all, we walk together and encourage each other, sadly, we haven’t lost weight, but it is all muscles of generosity and beauty…we have grown a lot…
How do we do all of this living 6800 miles away? Well, we have “figured that out”, that is what Pilgrims do. Believe me, I also wondered if “all of that is true”, and then we had the Veranda 2019 and now there is no doubt…
New neighbors, new family members and new homes that opened their doors to me Loves,
Cris