As a middle school student growing up in Colorado, I had a choice between taking French or Spanish. I chose French because everyone else, it seemed, was speaking Spanish, and I wanted to be different.

Jump forward a few years — I won’t say how many exactly — and I’m heading over to the Lewis and Clark County Courthouse, not to see the judge for another moving violation, but to meet a woman from Argentina named Florencia Plazas.

As life would have it — and as you might guess — Plazas speaks Spanish, not French, leaving me to wish I could do seventh grade all over again.

What was I thinking, anyway? Growing up in the interior West, the Rocky Mountain region, believing French, not Spanish, would somehow serve me better in life?

Luckily for me, Plazas speaks English. She speaks my language far better than I speak hers, or anyone else’s for that matter.

Mine is such a typical American mentality — let the world come to me, adapt to me, communicate with me. I didn’t mean for it to be like this. It just turned out this way.

But these are just thoughts bouncing around my head. I’ve actually climbed three flights of courthouse steps (they’re steeper than the steps they make today), to talk with Plazas not about language, but about her remarkable career as a young Argentine lawyer.

Only 30 years old, Plazas has logged her share of achievements. When she worked for the Center for Legal and Social Studies, she helped present a committee report to the United Nations in Geneva on the state of children’s rights in Argentina.

A few years later, still with the Center, she helped present a case to her country’s supreme court. After a long battle that went on for years, she and other legal activists succeeded in stripping immunity from her country’s former dictators, allowing prosecutors to try them for their war-era crimes.

What a remarkable victory that must have been. Yet growing up American, I knew little or nothing of her country’s struggles.

Of course, I had heard of the Falkland Islands. It was all over the television (think Walter Cronkite) when I was a kid; how Britain laid waste to Argentina’s navy and air force to reclaim that patch of land.

Until I met Plazas, I didn’t know that at the time of the Falklands war, her country was under the rule of a military dictatorship; an ugly time where a series of military juntas orchestrated a campaign of terror, leading to the disappearance of thousands of Argentine citizens.

As many as 30,000 people simply vanished under military rule. These were brothers, sisters and parents, each gone forever and without explanation.

But when the British defeated Argentina at the Falkland Islands in 1983, democracy was restored, creating a foundation that would, years later, afford Plazas the chance to expose her country’s former dictators to the punishment they likely deserved.

It’s true that small people can effect big changes.

Talking with Plazas this week, hearing her story, I learned a new chapter missing from my mental book of modern history. Her knowledge of the United States was profound, but my knowledge of Argentina was, well, it was embarrassing.

Through it all, I was reminded yet again how insulated we Americans are from the rest of the world, resulting in our egocentric point of view that has distracted us from what may be truly important.

This brings me to Tuesday, our newly elected president and images of people around the world celebrating America and waving our flag once again.

These are proud moments, and while Plazas was here to observe our criminal justice system before taking her lessons home, I hope she observed something more. I hope she saw that while many of us don’t speak Spanish, we are willing to listen and learn and adjust our point of view when exposed to the bigger picture.

I hope she saw that by electing our new president, most Americans still are eager to step from our country’s self-imposed isolation, show interest beyond ourselves, and rejoin the world community.

The world’s people — they might just welcome us back into the fold and ask us to stick around, even if we don’t always speak their language.

Reporter Martin Kidston: mkidston@helenair.com or 447-4086