My name is Dulce Rodrigues and I am the author of Barry's BOOK in French and the CD-ROM in Portuguese. I was born on a Spring day... many years ago in Lisbon, the lovely capital-city of a land of navigators and poets. Though Portuguese in my heart and by nationality, I nevertheless adopted Europe as my "home", most probably because living here makes it easier for me to widespread the rich historical and cultural aspects of my country; because I'll then know better other people's culture and mentalities which, in exchange, will open out my spiritual frontiers and influence my own life.

I believe the language is the soul of a people, and the best way I found to understand other cultures was by learning their own language - I speak six living languages (and also a dead language: Latin) - and by practising some of them in their native country.

My deep interest in always learning more led me to taking two university courses: I graduated in Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, and followed a Science Foundation Course with the Open University, Brussels Dept, lab workshops at the Reading University, UK, with a scholarship by NATO, Brussels, Belgium.

But life also has its practical side, those materialistic aspects of our short passage on this earth which is far from being a paradise, and soon I realised that I should follow a professional career. I therefore took some other courses of professional interest, and for about forty years I spanned my career between my home country and those foreign countries I adopted and that adopted me.

As knowledge is to be shared otherwise it will become useless, I took advantage of my early retirement on health reasons for giving a more humanistic direction to my life by putting at other people's disposal the teaching and knowledge life offered me. I'm particularly worried about children and young people and their access to reading and education in general, this being the main reason why I created the didactical site Barry4kids.net and got involved in pedagogical activities in different European countries, most of the time through the Service du Livre Luxembourgeois.

I have also been participating in literary activities such as writers' meetings and book fairs in Belgium, Luxembourg and France, and addressed conferences either in Portugal or abroad. And since History is one of my favorite hobbies, for some time now I have been publishing articles on historical subjects in the NATO Bulletin, in a Luso-French website, and lately also in the magazine "Family" in the UK, in the French magazine Archéologia, and in an Arts website in Belgium.

As anybody else, I had ups and downs in my life but perseverance and work helped me overcoming bad moments. I enjoy life and life has been good to me, rewarding me with grants for my studies in Germany and in the UK and with literary prizes in France.

Travelling is another of my hobbies and I'm a little like the wind - always on the move. I nevertheless enjoy staying comfortably at home, either in Portugal or in Belgium. Nature too offers me delightful moments of meditation, through its splendour and diversity, and I love every form of artistic expression as far as it transmits Beauty. This is why I'm filled with sadness sometimes when I think about the Arts legacy - if ever we can call it Art - passed on to us through the last decades of the XX into the XXI century.

I am a member of several associations and societies, either in Portugal or abroad.

I have two grownup sons whom I brought up by myself. They are the best reward life could ever have given to me: Eduardo Rodrigues, PhD (in Particle Physics), and Gustavo Rodrigues, MBA.