Scottish Congress 2002 refreshingly different!

There was never any doubt that St. Andrews would be a splendid location for the 97^th Scottish Congress or that Chris Gledhill would, with the help of Tom Neil and Mia Casey, would provide an intellectually stimulating programme together with real insight into the Old Gray Town beside the North Sea; and so it was!

An initial anxiety was that the emergence of the British Congress at Stoke-on-Trent would adversely affect attendance; but there were 38 participants, including a goodly contingent from the South. The Cosmos Centre proved a good venue after an unusual start on the Friday when delegates and kids from the nursery seemed inextricably mixed! On Saturday and Sunday there was space in abundance; and we realised that we had a venue with adequate parking adjacent to the mediaeval precinct wall of the Cathedral: a place redolent with Scotland's history. And Chris in his walking tours of the town made that history live!

Gastronomy was not neglected; the light refreshments provided were of gargantuan proportions; and Mia and her helpers merit unstinted praise. Another highlight for foodies was the dinners at the Byre Theatre restaurant. Which was better? The food or the vigorous Esperanto conversations? The language certainly evoked many questions from the locals. Was it an Italian dialect? Enlightenment was willingly provided! It must be added that the language level of the whole weekend was superb; and that relapsing into English was a rare phenomenon

And what about the lectures? A varied diet, indeed. Our guest-of-honour, Atilio Orellana Rojas, from Argentina, but now Director of the Esperanto Institute at The Hague brought his customary charm and high linguistic proficiency, His most exotic lecture was concerning the way in which Esperanto is being used in the effort to preserve the existence of threatened smaller languages, especially in Latin America. He is a world-expert in teaching Esperanto by the Direct Method; so his lecture on the techniques used utilised many of the techniques and ensured that his audience never succumbed to slumber!.

Don Lord expounded, larded with anecdotes, his conviction that grammatical perfection must never get in the way of fluency; he effortlessly combined both! Graham Blakey lectured concerning Zamenhof's Jewish roots and in what ways they influenced the language itself and its social structures during the early years; he also pointed out that Zamenhof's interpretation of Zionism did not include a Jewish state in Palestine. Ed Robertson, with massive erudition, analysed the linguistic labyrinth of the Caucuses region in which, for example, some words begin with seven consonants and in which a village of four thousand souls may have two mutually incomprehensible languages. Whew!

The Congress had all the other elements which make a congress more than a conference: singing, drama, poetry, humour, discussion groups, tuition for learners, a Service in the mediaeval church and a parallel meeting for humanists; kaj tiel plu, kaj tiel plu as one puts it in Esperanto, including the Scottish Esperanto Association's AGM and committee meeting.

In short, enough was happening to make the participants forget about the glories of golf; and that is quite something at St. Andrews!

David W. Bisset