Very often when I attend Esperanto events, people ask me why I speak Esperanto. Lots of people that I know have very good answers to that question. They are very interested in linguistic matters, they want to travel to different countries cheaply, the believe that linguistic equality is very important… All very good reasons, but for me none of those are valid.

If any of you become my friends on Facebook, you will notice that in the box under my profile picture where you are allowed to write a few words about yourself, I have written, “I never intended to speak Esperanto”. In fact I remember one day, it was probably in 2004, when I was sitting on a bus in Birmingham and speaking to a friend of mine on my mobile. In the middle of the conversation I got a little bit angry and I remember quite well that I suddenly cried out, very loudly, “I am never going to learn Esperanto!”. What, then, happened between then and now so that I not only started learning the language but have since even become a member of the managing committee of the national association. It’s a good question, and to answer it it is necessary to go back a few years in the past and explain the way in which I learnt about Esperanto.

When I was still at school, so seven years ago, I decided that I wanted to learn the German language. In my school at that time it was only possible to learn French, so I wasn’t able to attend any lessons. Instead, I bought a teach-yourself book and starting to learn on my own in my free time. At first that worked well enough, but after a certain amount of time I decided that I needed to practise and thus I started looking for a penfriend on the internet.

Lots of people responded to my advert there, but lots of them were lunatics and there was only one person who I liked and with whom I corresponded for more than a few weeks. His name was Stephan, he lived in Heidelberg in southern Germany, and happily he had been learning English for 12 years, so spoke it much better than I spoke German.

People who know me know that I really like to write and I’m not capable of saying something briefly when it’s possible to use two pages for the same comment. My letters and emails to my German friend thus soon became very long. We corresponded in total for more than four years and during that time I think that the longest letter which I ever wrote to him had 40 sides of paper. Luckily my friend is fond of writing too, and he always responded in the same manner.

It is a bit difficult to describe the matter but we quickly became very good friends. We were both quite lonely in our own countries and we aren’t very confident people, so for us it was easier to write our problems in a long letter to an unknown person than to speak to a real friend in our own countries. I don’t know, perhaps it is always easier to be honest with people you don’t have to meet in your everyday life. We actually really wanted to meet each other but for various reasons – mainly lack of money and strict parents – that wasn’t immediately possible.

Well, we were both very interested in books, in history, in languages… and because of that we not only discussed private affairs in our letters but also more general themes. And so it was that one day, I received a letter from my friend in which he spoke about the language Esperanto.

In fact he assumed that I already knew what Esperanto was, but I unfortunately had no idea and had to ask him to explain. He did so, and afterwards I visited the website of EAB to find more information. My first impression was that it was a really beautiful idea – an international language which is simple enough for everybody to be able to learn it – and I was very enthusiastic. I didn’t have a lot of money at that time but I saved the money which my mother gave to me for school dinners and went to my local bookshop, where I bought a copy of “Teach Yourself Esperanto”. As soon as I returned home I started to learn. I liked the beauty and simplicity of the language but I knew nothing about the Esperanto movement. My friend wasn’t terribly interested in that either. He was progressing well with his studies and had even met some local Esperantists but afterwards he wrote to me “Esperantists are all very strange. I don’t want to learn Esperanto any more!”. I myself stopped learning after the fourth chapter of my book. After a couple of months I went to university and my life changed so much that I completely forgot about Esperanto.

Meanwhile two important things had happened. Firstly my German penfriend and I had become sufficiently brave to admit to each other than we were in love. Secondly my friend’s Dad had died, very suddenly, and the effect on him was understandably profound. He wasn’t able to talk about what had happened, not even to me, and he was looking for something which would help him to forget about his unhappiness. For him that thing became Esperanto. It was really strange for me because one day he was saying “I don’t want to learn Esperanto any more” and then Esperanto nevertheless became pretty much his entire life.

To say that he was enthusiastic about the language would not be a strong enough expression. Suddenly he no longer wanted to read books in English or in German, he only wanted to read in Esperanto. He said that he wasn’t interested in normal holidays anymore – he intended to spend all his holidays at Esperanto events. It seemed to me that in every letter he spoke about Esperanto and only about Esperanto, and the more he spoke about Esperanto the more bored I become. For him Esperanto was no longer just a beautiful language, it became his way of life, almost his religion. I thought he had gone completely crazy and I was almost worried about his mental health. He said so many strange things, for example “All Esperantists love all other Esperantists simply because they all speak Esperanto”, and when I tried to object to that, he informed me that I couldn’t understand because I had never been to an Esperanto event and experienced the special atmosphere. I started to fear that Esperanto was some sort of strange religious sect, and when I spoke to my parents about it they were a bit concerned too. “Normal people don’t speak Esperanto”, said my mother, and she was very probably correct!

Bit by bit the situation became even worse. My friend not only wrote to me about Esperanto, but started to write to me in Esperanto too, despite the fact that he well knew that I wouldn’t be able to understand. More and more often he tried to convince me that I should learn the language and the more he convinced, the more I refused. One day he sent me a letter in which he said that he didn’t want a girlfriend who couldn’t speak Esperanto. That understandably hurt me a lot. I answered him with the question whether he still loved me. For more than three weeks I waited for the answer to that question… so you can imagine how angry I was when the answer finally arrived…and I couldn’t understand it because it was written neither in English nor in German… but in Esperanto!

“A long time ago I fell in love with a beautiful girl from Britain” – that was the reply but to me with my four chapters of Teach Yourself Esperanto it may as well have been Volapuek!

Nevertheless, the meaning of the words was very important for me. I didn’t own an Esperanto dictionary so I searched on the internet and found the then discussion group of EAB, Esperbrit. I asked the Esperantists there whether they could translate the meaning of the sentence for me. It seemed like a good idea of mine but it soon became clear that it wasn’t.

Several people did respond to me politely and helpfully translated but the others responded in a completely crazy manner. One person, whose name I will not mention, criticised me because that which I had written was not a real sentence, and complained because I wrote the Esperanto accents via the x-method. Other people became angry and a long and tedious dispute ensued about what is a sentence and the best way of typing accents. I was astonished by the reaction which my simple question had started and I left the group with a very bad impression of Esperantists. Seemingly they were not just lunatics, but worse, rude lunatics.

After that I lost all my patience relating to Esperanto. My German friend and I had a serious argument and eventually I found an English boyfriend (not Tim) and I wrote to Stephan to explain that I was no longer interested in our relationship. We continued to correspond for a couple of years but the letters were not as frequent or as lengthy as before. During the following two years, I strongly ignored Esperanto.

One day during summer 2004 I was talking to my German friend on the phone and he was telling me about his recent holiday in Italy. There he had been participating in the IJF, an event for young people which happens in that country every Easter. He was talking about the normal boring Esperanto things and I was answering “yes”, “no”, “really?” without really listening properly. But suddenly he said something which caught my interest and I had to ask him to repeat it.

“I’ve found a new girlfriend”, he repeated. “She is called Yulia and she lives in Transdniester, which is an independent republic inside Moldova. She is very beautiful and intelligent and I have completely fallen in love with her”.

For the first time in my life I experienced that very strange feeling which people call jealousy. It was a completely illogical feeling because I myself had had my own boyfriend for more than a year… but nevertheless I was scared that this news could destroy the close friendship with I still enjoyed with Stephan. Because of that I instantly had lots of questions about his new girlfriend… secretly I wondered how beautiful and intelligent she was, more than me?… and after a few minutes my friend lost his patience and suggested that if I wanted that many details, I should ask her myself.

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll do that! Give me her email address and I’ll write to her!” Actually I was joking and I totally didn’t expect him to give me the address. I forgot that he was a German, and Germans don’t joke very often. After two days, he sent me a message in which he said that he really wanted me to make friends with her and here was the address. “But,” he added mischievously,”you might have a problem. She speaks neither English nor German. If you want to get to know her, you’ll have to learn either Russian or Esperanto”.

Damn it! Because of my previous bad experiences I didn’t want to learn Esperanto so strongly that I immediately went to the university bookshop and bought a copy of Russian for Beginners. I studied it for approximately 4 days before I decided that I will never be intelligent enough to learn Russian. Hmmm. There was an internal battle between my curious side and the part of me which hated Esperanto. On the one hand, there was nothing in the world which I wanted to do less than learn that strange, crazy language. On the other hand, I am a woman and I didn’t want to lose the chance to get to know the new girlfriend of a very good friend of mine. Eventually the nosy side of me won. I went home, looked for my Esperanto book in a dusty drawer and reread the first four chapters. The following day I wrote a very short message in which I said that my name was Clare and I lived in Britain. I needed two hours to write that and I wasn’t expecting to receive a reply.

Nevertheless I did receive a reply – a polite and warmhearted reply in fact – and I was brave enough to reply again and again and again. I never got very far with the book, in fact even today I still haven’t read all the chapters, but I used the word list at the end and because the language was so simple, I was able to copy the sentences and grammar of my new friend and pretend to her that I understood Esperanto much better than I actually did.

The biggest surprise for me was, however, not the simplicity of Esperanto, but the fact that by means of it Yulia and I really became friends. If I’m honest, at the beginning I totally intended to hate her, but after I got to know her that really wasn’t possible. Yes, I soon learned that she was more beautiful and intelligent than me, but at the same time she was so honest and charming that it soon no longer mattered. For more than a year I corresponded with her and I learned a lot. Not just about Esperanto, but also about her country and way of life. Until today she remains a person who I greatly admire. So that was my first positive experience of Esperanto and the friendship which you can find through it.

Unfortunately after a certain amount of time there was an argument between her and my German friend. They weren’t talking to each other any more and he asked me not to correspond with her. Eventually I stopped corresponding with him too and I no longer had a reason to use Esperanto. I was admittedly a member of the internet discussion group of Junularo Esperantista Brita (Young British Esperantists), I even tried talking to some of the members (to Rolf in fact, although he probably doesn’t remember that!) but I was a very timid person and I believed (incorrectly) that JEB was a group of good friend who didn’t want beginners to join. Moreover some of the members really intimidated me. There was one guy who wrote messages under the name of Tim, and he seemed a very angry sort of person. Soon I simply deleted every Esperanto message which arrived in my inbox.

Some time passed. 2006 wasn’t a good year for me. I had left university, started a job which I didn’t like and decided that I didn’t have a future with my long-term boyfriend. I felt lonely and friendless and I was looking for new interests. During April 2006 I quite randomly received a message from Daniel White, who many of you here probably know. He explained that he was setting up a new group for young Esperantists in Britain – Novajeb – and he wanted people to join. I wrote to him for some time and eventually agreed to sign up. I still wasn’t really interested in Esperanto but I admired his enthusiasm and after my own bad experiences in 2004 I completely understood his criticisms of the official associations.

He invited me to attend the coming British Esperanto Congress in Scarborough but because of a lack of money and courage I didn’t go. However I chatted to him online afterwards and he informed me that JEB now had an internet forum where beginners were welcome. After a bit of hesitation I joined. I hardly remembered the Esperanto which I had learnt two years ago and my German friend had always given me the impression that Esperantists can be very angry if you address them in English. I was especially scared of the reaction of that frightening man Tim, who seemed to be the most frequent visitor to the forums. I had already read a couple of disputes which had happened between him and Daniel, and in general his behaviour didn’t appeal to me. Perhaps Tim remembers better, but I think that the first contribution I ever made to the affairs of JEB was to say that he nauseated me!

Nevertheless, the forum did contain a thread for beginners and I eventually found enough courage to write a message. Despite my fears, Tim responded to me more or less politely and an interesting conversation followed. The most remarkable thing for me as the fact that he didn’t complain about my disinclination to speak Esperanto nor try to force me to do that. We almost always chatted in English and quickly became friends. Publicly we joked (and according to the complaints of other JEB members, flirted without shame), privately we corresponded about more important matters and he gave me very good advice at a time in my life when I really needed it. It soon became clear that I had completely misjudged him at the start and after a bit more time I had the thought that perhaps I had misjudged not just him but Esperantists more generally.

During the following months I got to know lots of members of JEB and instead of the rude fanatics who I had expected, I found more or less normal young people who did love Esperanto, but in a healthy, sensible way; people who were prepared to inform me about the language without demanding that I wear green clothes, kiss the flag or sell my soul to Zamenhof; people who didn’t get angry when I spoke in English; people who didn’t force me to speak their language.

It was strange, but the more we didn’t speak in or about Esperanto, the more I became interested in the language. I learnt that it is indeed possible to use, love, even promote Esperanto without becoming a fanatic… and suddenly I wanted to learn this beautiful, interesting language which was spoken by these kind and friendly people. Meanwhile Tim and I met up in Leicester… he was more charming and better looking than I expected and after that I was so enthusiastic about Esperanto that I completed the free EAB postal course, also the course Gerda Malaperis and even several chapters of Pasxoj al Plena Posedo. With the help of Tim I read my first book in Esperanto and wrote an article in Esperanto for Saluton, the then newsletter of JEB.

Until January 2007, Esperanto remained as only a written language as far as I was concerned. Then Tim suggested that I go with him to Barlaston to take part in Ni Festivalu. Whether I agreed with him because I wanted to improve my vocabulary or because I had already fallen for him I wouldn’t like to say, but perhaps it doesn’t matter because I went in any case and enjoyed the opportunity to listen to and speak Esperanto for the first time. In fact I nearly died of fright because Tim had lied to me beforehand, saying that there would be lots of other beginners there, and instead of that I arrived and found myself in a room with some of the most fluent speakers in the whole country, who all expected that I was suddenly going to start playacting in a language which I had never before spoken out loud. Despite that, I survived the weekend, even enjoyed it, and after that experience I was suddenly able to think of Esperanto as a living language and not just as an interesting theory. I was especially surprised by how nice all the members of EAB who I met were. They were very patient, spoke slowly when I didn’t understand and generally were very kind. I was very grateful that they bore no resemblance to those people who had reacted so strangely and rudely when I asked for help translating Esperanto at Esperbrit some years previously. At Barlaston I got my first taste of that special Esperanto atmosphere which my German friend had always talked about and I began to understand that perhaps he wasn’t totally wrong, just always exaggerated a little. My entire viewpoint on Esperanto was changing.

Now, more than two years later, of course quite a lot of things in my life have changed. Tim and I have got engaged and I no longer need.. or want.. to flirt with him in Esperanto forums. I have got to know lots of other people through Esperanto – some of whom I really liked, and some of whom I have to pretend I like because they are friends of Tim. As you already know, I am now the secretary of JEB. Recently I volunteered to also be responsible for Africans who are learning Esperanto via the postal course of EAB, and during this year’s British Congress in Salisbury I even became a member of Mancom. If someone had said to me four years ago that one day Esperanto would be a big part of my life I would certainly have laughed. Nevertheless it is a big part of my current life – without Esperanto I would probably be single, and have a lot more free time!

What do I like about Esperanto now? Mainly the chance which it gives me to do things which I wouldn’t normally be able to do. Last summer, for example, I participated in my first international Esperanto meeting, the IJK, which took place in Hungary. Hungary has always been on my list of countries which I would like to visit, but without Esperanto I might never have found the courage to take a holiday there because of my lack of knowledge of the Hungarian language. Esperanto gives me the chance to write articles for publications like La Brita Esperantisto, which I really enjoy doing. I can read books originally written in languages which I never intend to learn. During this year’s IS, Rolf and Tim gave me the opportunity to work as a barmaid, something which I never hoped to do, or possibly hoped never to do… There was one more memorable moment during that IS when I was sitting in a cafe in Marburg with a girl from Kazakhstan and a man from Brazil, translating the German menu into Esperanto for them. We had all just had a lovely day together, exploring the town and chatting incessantly about our different countries, and I thought to myself how unusual the situation was, how it would be completely impossible without Esperanto, and how without such situations my life would certainly be a lot poorer. Esperanto even helps me to do things which I would normally avoid doing. For example I totally hate speaking in front of groups of people but somehow I am here today and haven’t died up until now.

To return to the start, the title of this speech was about experiences and hopes. I think that I’ve said enough about experiences now, but I still haven’t said anything about hopes. As you have already heard, my first experiences of Esperanto were not good, in fact they were very bad, and because of that I almost didn’t learn the language. My biggest hope then is that other people won’t have the same experiences. I hope that if people are interested in the language, we will welcome them and answer their questions without lying and pretending that Esperanto will solve all their problems. I hope that we will be patient and not complain of beginners make silly mistakes or address us in English. I hope that we can inform people about Esperanto without telling them that they ought to learn it. People do have the right to make their own choices.

Esperanto has already given me a lot, and I hope that in the future I will continue to have as many good experiences as I have had during the last two years. But above all I hope that in the future there will be less disputes in our movement. That really shocked me when I arrived. Discussions can be good but it seems to me that all too often, Esperantists disagree about petty things. People say that Esperanto is the language of peace, but how can it be successful if the relatively few speaks can’t even agree about the best method of typing accented characters?! So yes, above all I hope that I will never again meet an Esperantist-fanatic who will attack me because of my use of accents.

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