Presentation in Hindi?

Tales of Valencia and Rome are soon coming.

Until then, I´ve got a bit of bizarre news I figured you´d enjoy. As I was signing up for a weekend trip to Salamanca in the office here at school, the administrator asked me where I was from. I was a little confused by what she meant and why she was asking, seeing as we´ve been interacting since January and she knew that I was from UMD.

"En los Estados Unidos, soy de Maryland, pero mis padres son de la India," I replied.

She asked if I spoke Hindi, and I launched into this explanation about how I can understand quite a bit and I can sort of speak it, although my Spanish is much more grammatically correct because I´ve learned it in school whereas I´ve never actually formally studied Hindi, but I would like to one day. As I´m rambling on, I´m wondering in the back of my head where this is all leading.

She asked me if anyone had talked to me about el Día del Libro, where the international students read a passage about a specific topic (this year´s is water) in their own language and then explain it. Turns out they normally have some Indian students studying here, but this year they don´t and they were looking for someone to recite something in Hindi. The catch is that the exhibition is this coming Monday and I have to find a passage today to turn in by tomorrow, and then I have to write some kind of essay that´s due Thursday.

Hmm, lets see, that gives me less than 24 hours to find a text from a culture with 5,000 years of history written in a language that I can´t read and send it to my mother so she can read it to me and teach me to recite it to the entire school in my broken, heavily-accented Hindi.

How in the world do I do this to myself?

I´ve started looking for excerpts and don´t think it´s going to happen, but I´ll talk to Mom and let you know the final verdict is.

And I thought all I was going to get out of this semester abroad was better Spanish skills...