ABOUT GADGETS AND WISDOM

It is not very frequent to meet really wise people along the Camino. But when you meet one, you recognize him or her at once. I have been fortunate for meeting Bernard from Belgium. He is one of those wise man in all senses. Some spiritual men miss their ordinary life and practical stuff. Some skilled and crafty people forget their spiritual dimension. But only a very few people get to combine both senses. Our friend Bernard appear in the aubergue late in the evening speaking four languages expect Spanish: French, Duch, German and English. I showed the bedroom and bathroom and so on. I invited him to participate in the evening Queimada. During the celebration I noticed that most of them were foreigners and did not speak or understand Spanish or Galician. So when I asked for a translator he offered in traslating Dutch, German and French. This way I performed the most international Queimada up to now: English, Spanish, Galician and French. After the funny celebration this man asked me to take for him the rest of the lemon of the Queimada. I sayd yes but ... for what? He showed me all his appliances and gadgets for the Camino. I got astonished, really impressed. This man had calculaded the same weight of his two rucksacks to place both one at the front and another one at the back to walk erectedly and compensate the pulls. Apart from that he also filled his belt with two special pieces of cloth to avoid the rubbing of the rucksack belts. His two sticks were made of titanium, extremely light and well fixed to the hands by means of a rubber handset. He showed me another gadget I had seen before on some pilgrims. It was the so called "camel back". This appliance consists on a flexible plastic deposit where people carry some water or other liquids. This is the place where he entered the slices of lemon. He assured that the lemon helped to keep the water cool and provides with some magnesium that the white cortex of the lemon contains. Furthermost, he asked me to place that deposit on the upper part of the fridge to get colder for the next day. I showed him but I noticed a strange iron bar inside the camel back. I asked him about it and he told me that it was another special gadget called "water purifier". It contained a sort of extra-pure water specially treated (???) that enpowers the quality of the water regardless the origins of it. Amazing. Apart from that I observed a sun cellar pan on the top of his rucksack !!! So it was. I asked him and he showed me the electronic gadget he carried. He opened a PDA GPS with advanced software to store and manipulate pictures, card reader, satellite antenna, maps of various European countries and a special spreadsheet. This spreadsheet showed all the kilometers he had done. 1860 kms at an average of 5.6 per hour and 24 the last day... all the data perfectly stored and calculated. Absolutely impressive. Well, after half an hour talking about these gadgets and their uses I decided to go and have dinner with my friends who were anxiously waiting for me. I observed the face of the man and told him -Do you want to have dinner with us? And he said -I am really hungry tonight. And he was. At the beginning he couldn't talk to anyone because none of my friends speaks a word in English. It is a pity. He told me once again the same story: SPANISH PEOPLE DO NOT MANAGE LANGUAGES BUT SPANISH ONLY. And he felt alone in this sense. After a moment I tried to help them all and made him some questions about the way and himself. He showed us how to perform kinesiology and diagnosis on a person with his hands only. He performed on me and I must say that he succeeded in his diagnostic. He said us about his knowledges on Reiky and numerology and Cabala. More and more he impressed all of us with his deep thought on soul and life and spiritual matters. It is too long to talk about it all but..... God Bless him!

Fdo: German Vaquero