The Volunteer

Alba had always wanted to spend a summer abroad, but she had never dared to do it. She was twenty, she was studying to be a vet in Leon, and she had passed all her English exams with good marks. Speaking was a different matter. Whenever she had to say something in English, her heart started beating fast and her mind went blank. So when she saw an advert for volunteers at an animal shelter in County Kerry, in the southwest of Ireland, she almost decided not to apply. In the end, her mother persuaded her to try.

The shelter was on a small farm near the sea, a few kilometers from the nearest village. It was run by a woman called Bridget and her son Declan, and it looked after about sixty animals: dogs, cats, goats, hens, two ponies and a very old donkey called Seamus. On the first day, Bridget showed Alba around and explained her jobs: feeding the animals, cleaning the stables, walking the dogs and helping the vet when he came on Thursdays.

During the first week, Alba avoided talking to anyone. When Bridget asked her a question, she answered with one word, and she spent her lunch breaks alone. The English in Kerry was nothing like the English in her textbooks. People spoke fast, used words she didn't know and finished their sentences with "so it is." Every evening, she practiced sentences in her room before going to sleep, and every morning she forgot them.

The only one she felt comfortable with was Seamus. He was thirty-two years old, almost blind in one eye and very slow, and he refused to walk anywhere unless somebody walked next to him. Alba began spending her breaks in his field. She brushed him, checked his feet and talked to him, first in Spanish and then, without really noticing, in English. Seamus never corrected her grammar. He just leaned against her and closed his eyes.

One afternoon, Declan found her in the field telling Seamus about her day. She went red and stopped talking. "Don't stop," Declan said, laughing. "Nobody has ever told him so much. Your English is grand, you know." Alba didn't know what "grand" meant, so she asked. It meant "fine" or "great." It was the first time she had asked anyone to explain a word, and she realized that it wasn't embarrassing at all. People seemed happy to help.

After that, things got easier. She stopped worrying about making mistakes and started asking questions. She learned to understand the vet's strong accent, and she even managed to tell a joke in the village pub, although nobody was completely sure that it was a joke. When a new dog arrived, thin and frightened, Bridget let her look after it on her own. Alba called him Valiente, and she had a lot of fun teaching the locals how to pronounce it.

On her last day, at the end of August, she went to say goodbye to Seamus. He put his head on her shoulder, and she cried a little. "You'll come back next summer, won't you?" Bridget asked. "I'd love to," Alba said, and this time she didn't need to think about the words first.