Dear Nehemías,

I hope you are doing well! I thought I would tell you about something fun that happened at the college where I teach. Last Saturday, we hosted a linguistics conference. Students and professors from lots of colleges came to talk about their research. They study how people speak Spanish. In every country and region, the people have unique ways of saying things. It’s fun to hear about all of this, even though I don’t speak Spanish. I took a picture of everyone at the conference.

One student and his professor talked about how Spanish is like Hindi. To say that “Maria baked a cake for Margarita”, you add extra little words so that it doesn’t sound like “Maria baked Margarita”! Spanish and Hindi express that in almost the same way. That is a surprise because Hindi is a language from India, far away from Spain and America. Even very different languages have something in common.

This reminds me of the story of the Tower of Babel. God thought humans were too proud of the big tower they built. So he gave everyone a different language. Now we have to overcome our differences to work together. When we do, we find out that we have more in common than we realized.

Your friend,
Garrett Mitchener