What Marian Knows

The first answer to that implicit question should probably be: "Not much, but I'm still working on it."

Because of my leave last spring, there was no 2005 TLExpress. Instead I spent some time doing research in the Bibliothéque nationale de France, living in Paris, visiting friends (some of them former TLEs) in France and Germany, giving a paper in England, and writing, writing, writing. The book should be out this fall. An article too. This Spring I once again asked the former TLEs whose current e-mail I still have please to bring me up to date on their lives. Their responses are the source of most of the information that follows here, arranged in alphabetical order of last names when you were TLEs. I decided to do it this way so you can find the people you are interested in quickly, but I hope you'll read through and see all the interesting situations in which our former TLE are to be found.

My files no longer have valid e-mails for the some people. Please help me update my list if you can. The following are among the missing: Bjorn Freitag, Jens Galla , Karin Hoffmann, Isabelle Maupai, Mina Mochizuki Gibbons , Mayumi Nakazato , Paul Pogorzalek , Paul Szkoc.

You can also read more about the current TLEs and their experiences.

Last March (2005) repairs began on the road that leads to Carthage. They were finally completed in June of 2006. The finished road will be much safer because it has places for cars intending to turn and a traffic light near the north entrance where the truck route comes down the hill to join Alford Drive-not to mention no potholes. The north entrance to the campus has been moved a little so that it lines up with the truck route as a part of this project.

This summer will see the last of the three little houses on campus that hold so many memories for numbers of you. As the college student population has grown from 1200 to 2200, so has the number of cars that need to find a parking place. The little houses will be sacrificed to this need, squashed flat, paved over. TLEs starting in the summer of 2006 will live just north of campus, in a series of houses on 17 Street.

801 17th Place

805 17th Place

809 17th Place

Greg Baer has been granted a full year's leave of absence from Carthage during which he will live in Berlin and work on a book about novelist Jurek Becker, among other projects. He will be replaced as instructor of ML 420 (Methods) by Beatriz Gomez.

Berliner Dom at night
Berliner Dom

This summer Lynn Loewen will be traveling to Guatemala City and Quezaltenango, in Guatemala, to study Mayan history and culture, in particular the role of the guerrillas in the Guatemalan Civil War. When she gets back to Wisconsin, she will take a course on how to drive a motorcycle, a lifelong desire. "Then," she says, "Watch out!"

Panajachel, Guatemala

Isabel Rivero-Vila, who teaches both French and her native Spanish, has become engaged to be married. All our best wishes. The wedding will most likely take place in the summer of 2007. Isabel has been a major force updating the department web-site and giving it a new 21st century look. The TLExpress has brought you to the website-have a look around.

Bride and Groom

Pascal Rollet will serve a second term as department chair. As chair, Pascal led the department's successful attempt at getting an additional professor of Spanish. In the fall of 2006 we will be joined by Ed Montanaro, who has just finished his PhD in Spanish and is starting his second career with us at Carthage after many years spent working as an economist for the State of Florida. We look forward to working with Ed.

Fatima Baig is finishing her first year in a PH.D program at the University of Iowa in Foreign Languages and English as a second language Education. In her first year in Iowa City, she lived through a tornado that hit the town and the university this spring, fortunately missing Fatima's building. Very exciting, even more scary. She's teaching German while taking courses toward her doctorate and the German department has recognized her skills by making her an assistant course director for next year, to guide and direct new teaching assistants.	Letty Nyamatutu is now the mother of Naisbert Nyamatutu who was born on 12 May 2006. Letty's mother came to visit for the birth. And Letty's sister Bony has graduated from UW-Parkside and will be a teaching assistant and graduate student in music at the University of Arizona in the fall. Letty, Naisbert & Naison
Barbara Boutamine came back to the US (not for the first time since she's left Carthage) last spring-while I was in France! She spent some time with Luz Marina Peñaloza Engles and her husband and two sons, and other friends from her Carthage days still in the area. Back in France she's bought an apartment in Caen, is still using her considerable linguistic skills teaching English, Italian, and French as a foreign language to adults, and also doing some tutoring on the side! Her father had a successful lung transplant last year, and can breathe freely after years of distress. The travel bug is starting to bite again, and Barbara is looking for work teaching languages somewhere else in the world, so who knows where her adventures may take her.	Meanwhile Lina Castellanos is no more but that's OK. She has turned into Mrs. Lina Hermberg, American style, and has a husband, Kevin, a house and a Belgian Malinois dog, Roxanne in Eau Claire where she's teaching Spanish. This summer she will teach at a civilization course at Monterrey Tech in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and in December she will return briefly to Colombia to meet her new nephew/niece due in October.
Luz Marina Peñaloza Engles and her husband Erik are getting ready to leave Racine where they have been living and working for 6 years now for Miami, Florida. Her son Paul is already 6 years old. Little David is 2. Luz Ma has had a visit from former German TLEs Isabelle née Maupai who is working in Mannheim with Karen née Hoffman, another former German TLE. Both are now married and mothers.	Luis Fernando Cisneros is back home in Colombia, teaching English at a private school; it seems to be a good fit. He enjoys going to work without a suit and tie. He's still playing soccer, keeping slim-he says. His wife is expecting a baby girl any day now.
Yovanna & Fatima Yovanna Cifuentes left Carthage for a position at Yale University where Fatima visited her this spring.	Thorsten Einig visits the US frequently now that he is based in Karlsruhe, working "for a big internet/webhosting company (www.1and1.com) as business development manager." He remembers his Carthage days fondly and still, after more than a decade, has maintained some contacts.
	After returning home from Carthage, Lan Jie has been promoted and is now in charge of English Education for her school. Best of luck in your new position!
Paola Galeano is also back in Colombia. Here's what she wrote: "I worked at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana as a Spanish teacher and at the Universidad Pedagogica Nacional until last December, when I was offered a position as an academic coordinator at the Centro Colombo Americano. This is a bi-national cultural/academic center for the teaching of English as a foreign language. I'm learning so much in this new job! I'm also surrounded all day by English speaking people, so I'm constantly practicing my English. I'm about to start a project on Autonomous Learning. I'm also gathering information about the CELTA course (offered by the British Council) and comparing it with programs from ESL/Modern Language departments at several universities (especially Carthage, ISU, UPN and PUJ)." Paola has stayed in touch with friends from Carthage; Cristina Martinez came to Bogotá to visit last fall. And maybe next fall, if everything goes as hoped, Paola will be back in the States studying for her Ph.D.	At least until next summer (2007), Cristina Martinez is living in New York with her Catalan boyfriend Miquel and teaching at the Cervantes Institute and the Queen Sophia Spanish Institute. Last November she visited Paola Galeano in Colombia. New York City is a good spot for visitors: Amina Elkhatbi and Sandra Bouet came last summer. Greg Baer also came. Cristina says: he "stayed in my tiny Manhattan apartment for 2 days. I try to keep in touch with everybody although sometimes it's hard. I'm planning to go to Wisconsin at the end of May..." So we're hoping to see her any day now. Sandra Bouet, Kely Paez, Jessica Ramirez, Bibiana Fuentes & Fatima Baig
Kely & Sachi Sachi Mori is entering the final phase of her doctoral studies at Indiana University. This summer she will be working at Middlebury College in Vermont, one of the best known schools in the US for studying language. And next fall, in addition to having been awarded a prestigious Leo and Jean Fay Fellowship for 2006-07 at Indiana University she will be working as a Lecturer at the University while finishing her studies. In the meantime she has been presenting papers at numerous conferences all over the US, including some which also provided for a reunion with Yukari Nakamura. Here is what Sachi reports about her changing "social languages" as she has moved around the US: When I was at Carthage, my friends were, of course, TLEs from Colombia, Mexico, France, Germany, and Spain. So my social languages were mostly English and little Spanish. After I graduated from Carthage, I went to the University of Oregon to study Japanese Pedagogy in the East Asian Languages and Literatures department. At UO, most of my friends were from Japan or were people who could speak Japanese. My social language was Japanese and little English. After I graduated from the University of Oregon, I came back to the Midwest, to study at Indiana University. Now I am a student in the PhD program in Foreign Language Education. Here, most of my friends (98 %) are Taiwanese. So my social language changed. Everyday I feel like I am in a Taiwanese immersion school. I think by the time I graduate from Indiana University, I may be able to speak Taiwanese. I will share one story about language at IU. The other day, one of my Japanese friends asked me "is anyone sitting here?" wondering if she could sit next to me. Since I forgot the name of the person sitting by me, I said to her, "un, ano oji-san" meaning "yes, that old man". All of the sudden, all my Taiwanese friends (about 10 of them) looked at us and asked us "who did you call 'oji-san'?" Ooops. I found that many Taiwanese know some Japanese. After this incident, the poor old American man is called 'oji-san' by all of us. As my social languages have changed, I have met so many wonderful people from many different countries. I look forward to meeting future friends and finding out what social language I will be using next?	Carthage connections work! Sabine Rutar was aTLE in 1991 (!!) and now that she has finished her doctoral work in history, and is working at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum Institut für soziale Bewegungen, she will be giving a paper in the Washington DC area this fall, and seeing Marleny Perdomo who was a TLE at Carthage at the same time as Sabine and who is now living in the Washington DC area with her family.
	Céline Scipion has found a job in Strasbourg, working for a German company. For the moment, the pressures of working full time have put plans to prepare difficult exams on the back burner where they remain warm.
	On May, 18, 2005 Christina Stingl's daughter Alicia got a brother, Noah. Her two children are the center of Christina's life right now, but she still does occasional translations and teaches English twice a week at the Volkshochschule in Marburg, Germany. And Christina sends us news of the marriage of Jens Galla in May to Tina who was already his girlfriend when he was at Carthage.
	Sun Lin Hui, left Carthage in the summer of 2005, returned to her life in China as an English teacher, a mother, a wife, and in addition, she finished her master's thesis, under the direction of Marilyn Ward and Lynn Loewen and Isabel Rivero-Vila. Congratulations! Amanda, Kely & Sun Lin Hui
Yukari Nakamura is finishing her second Master's degree from the University of Wisconsin, this time in Japanese, and will move on to a job in at the University of Florida in Gainsville this fall, taking with her not only her experiences at Carthage and U-W, but also at the Concordia Language Camps, and at the Defense Language Institute in Monterrey California last summer. We wish her all the best in her new environment.	Hisahiro Yamada, Hiro to his friends, left the snows of Wisconsin behind for a job teaching Japanese in a small university in a small town in southern Thailand. If he was looking for warmth, he got it; Hiro says the weather is sweltering much of the time. The absence of other Japanese people is forcing him to use his English every day and the need to buy groceries encourages him to work on his Thai! There has been some political turmoil in Thailand this year, but not in a way that affects his everyday life. He'll be teaching at the same place next year, hoping to find the secret of making his students take their studies a bit more seriously. Kely & Hiro
As noted above, Sun Lin Hui earned a Carthage Master's degree, finishing her thesis after leaving Carthage. This was an experiment. We were glad to try it. We hoped it would be possible to continue, but it is not. The faculty involved found that long distance thesis advising is difficult; they have many other responsibilities and demands on their time and we have all agreed that future TLEs wishing to complete a master's degree will have to do so while they are in residence at Carthage.	Salome Yélamos has been helping us recruit new TLEs at the University of Málaga where she is finishing her studies. Two years ago, she got married; on May 19, baby Lucía was born. Mother and child are doing well. All our best wishes!!!
	To all those not mentioned: my apologies, my regrets. I only know a little more than what you tell me. Keep in touch with me and even more important, with each other.