OXNARD : Club Polishes Skills in Spanish Speeches

Most people admit to a fear of public speaking. And to expound in a foreign language is the stuff of nightmares. But the 19 members of Los Amigos Bilingual Toastmasters Club in Oxnard look forward to doing just that twice a month.

“It’s fun but scary to get up and speak publicly, even in English. But to do it in Spanish is more than just scary. It’s also challenging,” said Teresa Ferguson, 45, a college English teacher from Ventura. “But even if I make an error, I feel better for having tried to speak in Spanish. And I still get my point across.”

About half of the club members are not Latino, and like Susan Martz or Herb Nowlin of Ventura, they speak Spanish as a second language with various levels of fluency. “I’m not a fluent speaker, but I do use Spanish in my immigration work,” said Nowlin, an attorney and past international director of Toastmasters. His wife, Creda, improved her college Spanish during two years in Colombia with the Peace Corps and uses it daily as she helps train child-care providers.

Los Amigos is the only bilingual Toastmasters Club in the county and one of only about five in the state, according to Herb Nowlin. Club meetings are conducted half in English and half in Spanish. The club celebrates Mexican holidays and has even attended meetings of several Toastmasters clubs in Tijuana.

Toastmasters learn to make a variety of speeches including extemporaneous, humorous and informative. Such a task might seem doubly difficult to a native speaker of Spanish like Marta Hernandez, 37, a decorator from Baja California who joined the club to improve her English.

Hernandez received a ribbon last week for giving the best two-minute extemporaneous speech of six speakers. “I plan to continue with Toastmasters because, besides my normal routine at work, it is the only way I can practice English and extend my vocabulary,” she said.

Joe Obregon, 63, was born to Spanish-speaking parents in Arizona but was required to speak only English once he started school. Obregon joined an English-speaking Toastmasters club in 1978 for self-improvement. But nine years ago, he and Creda Nowlin founded Los Amigos. “I know many people who speak both languages,” Obregon said. “We do fine in one-to-one situations. But we have no opportunity to practice Spanish or to express our views in public.”

Los Amigos meets the first and third Thursdays of each month from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at the Child Development Resources Office, 505 South A St., in Oxnard. For information, call (805) 656-2054.