Call of the Camino

by Suzanne Redfearn

Being Andorran, I was indoctrinated 138into Catholicism from birth. Religion is a cornerstone of life in Dur and dictates just about everything—routines, rituals, celebrations, marriages, morals, and justice—and it wasn’t until I was twelve that I began to question it. It happened by accident. While the nuns had done a good job teaching me French, Portuguese, Spanish, and English, over the four years I’d attended their school in Pau, only one of the sisters spoke German and only at a very rudimentary level. German was essential to my pa’s plans. Many German tourists come to Andorra to ski. So the summer I turned twelve, my pa decided to send me to the Internationale Deutsche Schule in Paris, which specializes in teaching German. On my walk home from the school on a particularly hot day, I had stopped at the Museum of Natural History to get a sip of water. The exhibit that day was on evolution. Bone fragments dating back eight hundred thousand years had recently been discovered in Spain, and it had created quite a stir. A woman handed me a pamphlet and said the exhibit was free. The path around the enormous bottom level led me through prehistoric times to Neanderthals and then to modern humans. It said nothing about Adam and Eve and made complete logical sense for how people came to exist. I walked from the museum enlightened and utterly confused. I can still feel the sting of my pa’s hand on my cheek when I returned at the end of summer and asked him about it. “We do not q...