Nathan West is an Instructor in Spanish, a house counselor at America House, and a coach for Boys Junior Varsity Tennis, while assisting with Outdoor Pursuits. Speaking multiple languages, including Spanish, French, and Portuguese, he has lived abroad in various countries across Africa and Asia.
Lancaster is a wholesome place to grow up. It’s not a flashy place. It has an agrarian donut around it, which is the Amish community. It’s a farming community, primarily. So, people there are honest and hardworking that will give you the shirt off their back if you need it. They’re known for their delicious food and family values, and growing up there preserved me from a lot of the craziness that I might’ve been exposed to in bigger cities. It kept me grounded, and made me realize that ultimately happiness is not about possessions. That was a Lancaster legacy in my life.
I’ve lived in a few foreign countries. Each experience has marked my life in an indelible way. I studied in Spain during college, and that was really my first long-term stint abroad. Then I lived in Paris for three years. Paris put me in contact with Africa, because there are many African immigrants from other culture[s]. And I became really interested in the way sub-Saharan Africans speak French. So that lit a fire in me to travel through Africa and put me in contact with people I still know and love from West Africa, Senegal in particular. Then I lived in Sierra Leone, which is not a French-speaking African country. It’s English-speaking, but I taught English there for a school year. That experience shaped me the most, [because] it put me in contact with people who have very little, and yet are non-complaining and content with the little they have. And it almost made me a bit envious, because they seemed way happier with their everyday life, even though it had so many hardships, than the people I know in America. I just thought, whatever their special sauce is, this contentment, this simplicity, I want it. The daily happiness quotient was so much higher in West Africa.
English is my birth language. My Spanish is solid. My French is solid. I’ve gotten into Portuguese in the past two years, and I’m making good progress. I just went to Brazil over winter break and had a lot of fun speaking Portuguese. It’s kind of like if Spanish and French had a baby. It’s got nasal vowels like French. Eighty percent of the vocab is identical to Spanish, just with a slightly different accent. Like divertido, fun, in Portuguese, written the same way. So you just kind of need to learn a pronunciation code that’s different. I have unfinished business with German. I took three semesters in college. and still have a dream of getting really good at German one day. We’ll see. I’d love to keep on going, but I don’t know if this brain can handle all those languages.
This might be surprising for people, but… [at the gym,] most people want aggressive punk music so that they work out harder. I like classical music. It actually makes me work out harder. It’s not necessarily restful classical music. There’s some bombastic symphonic pieces with a lot of kettle drums and cymbal crashes and brass, and those triumphant orchestral pieces really get my blood flowing at the gym. I also love nineties pop. I do think the nineties made some really great pop. And I love jazz. I love Brazilian music. I have far-reaching and eclectic musical tastes. I love the simple kind of folk music I heard in West Africa. I love music from all over the world. It’s a love language of mine.
To be clear, I was in hotel room service. I wish I had been a bellman. I can’t say I was actively inspired to pursue hotel room service, but while I was living in New York City, trying to do the whole aspiring performer thing, I had to pick up a job. And there wasn’t as big of a gig economy back then. Nowadays, you can find a lot of work on the internet, but back then, you had to show up face-to-face. So I found this job. It actually turned out to be pretty fun. I’d go into a celebrity’s room at a fancy hotel in SoHo and serve them breakfast.
The artistic aspirations in my twenties always led me back to language. When I was in New York, I was ostensibly there to figure out music and acting, but I fell in with the African immigrant community from Senegal, from Mali. …Language seemed to be the unifying factor, as in communication. It would be great, and it would still be great to act and to sing, which is mediated with language, but just the study of the languages themselves is the purest form [of working with language]. And someone said education is the highest art form, because the canvas is the human person. That’s a really interesting quote to ponder. There’s something artistic about education. You’re crafting a lesson, how students appropriate knowledge, how best to do that. So there’s something creative there.
It made me respect so much the immigrant community in Lancaster. It used to be an only Puerto Rican community, but then Cubans came, Dominicans came, Colombians, and there were even some Argentinians in Lancaster. So when the doctor comes in and he says something, and then he goes out, you’re left alone with a sweet 80-year-old Puerto Rican woman. So you talk about, what’s your story? It’s just fascinating to hear all these life stories about what brought people to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, farmland, which now has this huge Latino population. When you hear all those stories, there’s just no way you can’t tolerate immigrants. That job especially, probably more than anything, made me to really value the immigrants that we have amongst us, and be grateful for them and the ways we can learn from them.
I think they’ve caught on that I enjoy a little humor from time to time, but I hope that they understand that that’s not license to break down the learning enterprise. It is still about learning. I think implicitly they understand that yeah, I like to have fun, but I also run a tight ship and have a high academic standard. It’s going well. And I think students are figuring me out.
I do love to work out. That’s just like a natural antidepressant for me. Huge mood booster. I love reading in coffee shops. I don’t know what it is about that, but the distant conversation that you can kind of hear helps me focus. I love the kinds of people that wander in and out. You can kind of temporarily insinuate yourselves in all these different life stories because you overhear, and a lot of them are artists or academics. It’s just a fun vibe. I love planning trips and executing trips. I’m just a natural travel addict. And [I love] learning my languages.
My brother worked in show business, on the back end of things, and got me into the MTV Video Music Awards once, when I was at [New York University], and I remember waiting for the bathroom with Lenny Kravitz. But other than that, no, I can’t say [I met people] directly through my pursuing performance. I met a lot of celebrities at my hotel job in New York, not as a peer in the art form, but by serving them breakfast. There was Jude Law, Alisha Keys, Kirsten Dunst, and Sean Penn. And [there were a] few I didn’t know, but apparently they were famous.
