Personal
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Hello! My name is Charity Mansfield, and I would like to share a few things about my life which reflect the way that I look at the world and work with other people. Since sixth grade, I have been in love with choir because it basically created the woman I am today. Singing brought me the self-confidence I lacked and the purpose I needed. When I began acting, as well, I knew that I had found my place in the world; I had found myself.
Theatre, especially community theatre, put me in contact with a vast array of people I would never have met without the experience. At the Paw Paw Village Players, I had the opportunity to perform with people ages twelve to sixty, and during the The Sound of Music at Mattawan High School I worked as a senior with students in 4th, 6th, and 8th-12th grade.
Spanish has also been a passion of mine since my sophomore year of high school. I knew when I entered college that I had to continue studying the language, if only to preserve my own sanity. My most wonderful experience with Spanish came in January of 2005, when I travelled to Querétaro, México. For five and a half months, I lived and studied in the colonial town located in Central Mexico. While abroad, I took classes with Mexican students, and in one culture class, we had the opportunity to travel to Southern Mexico to study indigenous ruins.
My professor also recommended me to a colleague (a chemistry professor at the same university) who wanted to brush up on his English. He wanted classes every day for a month because he was going to be travelling to Germany and thought that English would serve him well there. The man was about sixty years old, and I found that developing ways to teach him was a unique and valuable experience. Twice a week I also tutored a girl my age in English because she wanted to go to the United States to be a nanny.
I did not only meet Mexicans in Mexico; I also met people from Germany, Switzerland, Holland, and New York! I was not expecting the diversity that I encountered when I arrived. The student from Long Island put me in contact with a Casa de Cultura (Culture House), where I studied private voice and sang in both a semester-end recital and a special recital dedicated to my departure. Also at La Casa de Cultura, I worked with a theatre professor and wrote my own short story in Spanish, which I told from memory to young visual art students.
While studying and performing, I lived with a family (a mother and her two adult sons). The experience was very interesting, and I learned so much about different types of Mexican culture that emerge based on socioeconomic status. The family shared some Mexican traditions with me, such as a serenata (one of the sons hired a mariachi band to serenade his fiancée at midnight on her birthday), the cutting of the Rosca de Reyes (bread of the kings) on Three Kings Day, and the eating of tamales while drinking atole (a hot drink made of corn, which tastes better than it sounds).
Needless to say, the whole experience was priceless and one I would not trade for anything. It gave me a new perspective on the world and people of diverse backgrounds, and it also helped me improve my spoken Spanish tremendously.
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Last updated: April 3, 2006 0:07 AM