Dia duit from Gleann Cholm Cille, Ireland! These past two weeks have gone by so quickly already, but I have been more immersed in the Irish language than I’ve ever been before. One of the aspects of the Oideas Gael program that I love is that language immersion comes in many forms, not just in the classroom setting. Each night, there is some sort of activity during which we are able to practice our Irish–poetry, dance, song, and even walking. One activity that I participated in was the annual pilgrimage to honor St. Columba, for whom the town is named after (it is said that he lived here for a few years).
The pilgrimage started at midnight on the feast day of St. Columba, and my housemate and I were one of 13 people participating. Over the course of four hours, we followed a local man through the dark wilderness surrounding the town in order to find 15 turas, or standing stones, around which we prayed and performed certain actions. The experience was unlike any other. There I was, walking through the bogs and forest and climbing up the side of the mountain with almost complete strangers and yet I felt I had a connection with them. What made it even more amazing was that the prayers were said in Irish, and everyone around me knew them. It meant so much to me to be a part of such an intimate, spiritual, historical, and deeply Irish experience within the first week of coming to the country. It proved to me that this immersion program is not just about the contact with the language that I will get in the classroom setting–it is not solely about grammar and perfecting my sentences. It’s also about the history of the language, the way it’s still used today (even though so few people can speak it). It’s about the way it connects strangers, and the way it can communicate so much more than meaning. Even after just two weeks here, I have already felt the way Gaeilge can impart the deepest love, friendship, and joy.
Here are a few pictures of a beach near the town, a sheep posing on the trail up to one of the turas, and a turas that I took a picture of during the day
