I was born in Havana, Cuba and raised bilingually (Spanish/English) in suburban Philadelphia as of Kindergarten. I still remember what it feels like to learn a new language in a new culture. In high school, I lived with two very different French families as an exchange student. Nobody spoke a word of English; these were remote villages in the French Alps. When I went to college, I fell in love with the German language. I spent a year studying and working in the former West German capital city of Bonn. I was able to acquire conversational fluency in German as a student at the University of Bonn and through bilingual (French/German) diplomatic employment at the Embassy of the Ivory Coast.
I recently returned from a sabbatical year in my native Cuba.
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