From:         Don HARLOW <donh /c`e/ NETCOM.COM> 
Organization: Esperanto League for North America, Inc. 
 
David Lawrence <73372.377 /c`e/ CompuServe.COM>: 
 I have been learning Esperanto just for fun.  However, I'm at  
the point where I'll either drop it or learn it properly.  So  
what I'd like to know is this:  what do the 2 million (?)  
Esperantists use the language for, besides posting things in  
SCE?  What do UEA and ELNA actually do?  Is it primarily a hobby  
or does it have practical uses?  I stumbled across Esperanto by  
chance in a London fair long ago, but I've never met anyone who  
really knows what Esperanto is. 
 
ELNA and UEA both exist to promote Esperanto. If you are  
interested in this, you might want to join one or both. ELNA  
publishes a newsletter and UEA publishes both a monthly magazine  
and a yearbook of great interest to _movadanoj_. If none of these  
things interest you, then you probably wouldn't be particularly  
interested in either organization. 
 
Otherwise... 
 
(1) Posting things to SCE. 
(2) Posting thiings to IRC. 
 
O.K., I'm just being funny. Beyond this... 
 
(3) Correspondence. Getting friends all over the world is great  
fun, and can teach you much about other places that you won't  
learn in your daily paper. Besides, having friends all over the  
world can be very useful and money-saving when you want to ... 
 
(4) Travel. And if you don't have a network of pen-pals to  
depend on, you can join Pasporta Servo or SAT's Amikeca Reto,  
which will provide you with lists of people who provide lodgings  
for peregrinating Esperantists, usually in return for a bit of  
conversation in Esperanto.  As mentioned above, this can be  
quite money-saving. An acquaintance of mine, who stayed on in  
East Asia after the 1986 World Esperanto Congress in Beijing for  
about six months, estimated that he saved between three and six  
thousand dollars on hotel bills just by having Esperantists to  
stay and talk with. (And try talking with a foreign hotel clerk  
sometime; their English is often limited to "Please fill out  
this form", "You may change your money over there", and "One  
hundred dollars, please".) I should also quote the case of Joel  
Brozovsky of Spokane, who went to Europe one years with a few  
hundred dollars and a return ticket in his pocket, interested in  
meeting a few Esperantists and then returning when he ran out of  
money. He ran out of money and returned ... about three years  
later, from Japan. (He's back in Japan, now, helping edit an  
Esperanto magazine.) Of course, if one-on-one isn't your thing,  
you may want to go to ... 
 
(5) Conventions. There are several hundred of these every year,  
ranging from small local or SIG meetings with half a dozen  
participants to the World Esperanto Congress (which will be  
held in Tampere, Finland, this years with an estimate 3000  
participants). Some of these, of course, are quite serious.  
Some are not. WARNING: the unwed should tread warily at some  
Esperanto conferences. I know of cases where participants  
returned with more souvenirs than they expected when they left  
home. 
 
This, by the way, leads us to another practical use of the  
language, raising children who speak it as their first language.  
Sometimes this happens because the parents are enthusiastic, as  
was the case with Lisa Helmuth in San Diego or Xie Revon in  
Beijing. Sometimes it happens because the parents don't have a  
lot of choice, not having some other language in common, as was  
the case with the Chomettes in Los Angeles and the Bartos^iks in  
Prague (from among those I know). 
 
Of course, if you don't have a lot of money with which to travel  
abroad (a situation with which I can easily sympathize), you may  
be stuck with doing a lot of ... 
 
(6) Reading in Esperanto. There are plenty of magazines out there  
-- I estimate, about 500 of them (including a zillion local group  
bulletins), of which perhaps 100-200 are of genuine international  
interest. There are also lots of books to read, from many  
different parts of the world, including some with which you are  
probably unfamiliar. You can check out some of these by taking a  
look at the ELNA Book Service's on-line book catalog, which is  
available in both plain vanilla and HTML format at the ELNA FTP  
site (see below). Of course, if you belong to a generation that  
doesn't like reading, you may prefer to use Esperanto... 
 
(7) Audio-visually. Aside from a mass of tapes and CDs of rock  
music in Esperanto, there are several movies and a number of  
travelogues available on tape (but warning: most of them are in  
PAL format, and if you get them and live in the States, you have  
to pay to convert them to whatever format it is we use -- NTSC,  
I think). Also, you may like to listen to the radio in Esperanto  
(but warning, again: you need a very good short-wave radio to  
pick up any of the dozen or so stations that broadcast in  
Esperanto). 
 
I hope this gives you some idea of what Esperanto is useful for. 
 
> I apologize for using English, but my Esperanto isn't great  
and I want other beginners or interested people to be able to  
understand this message and any replies. < 
 
If you repost your message in Esperanto, you'll probably get a  
wider and more interesting range of replies. Ne timu. 
 
> PS If there is a connection between eating meat and anti- 
esperantism, I don't want to know about it. < 
 
Many Esperantists realize that meat-eating is not only  
inherently immoral, involving as it does the murder of many  
innocent animals, but that it is also basically unhealthy,  
leading to massive buildups of fat and cholesterol in the  
human body and, ultimately, death. Others of us mutter, "Oh,  
what the hell!" and dig into our steaks. 
 
One of the major disadvantages with learning Esperanto is that  
you will probably encounter a broader range of opinions than  
you are used to -- and some of them may disagree very profoundly  
with the axioms on which your world rests. Something we all have  
to learn to live with. 
 
-- 
Don HARLOW                      donh /c`e/ netcom.com 
Esperanto League for N.A.       elna /c`e/ netcom.com (800) 828-5944 
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/el/elna/elna.html         Esperanto 
http://www.webcom.com/~donh 

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NOTE:  The above addresses are no longer valid.

Current address of the Esperanto League for North America:  
http://www.esperanto-usa.org/  (800) ESPERANTO / (800) 377-3726 
Don Harlow's site:  http://www.best.com/~donh/Esperanto/