Opinion Sur Joven

Is there a better world? Is it possible to consider it? I don’t know. Though I personally think that said world is to be built: slowly and brick by brick.

During November I was selected by the International Youth Foundation to travel on behalf of this digital magazine you’re now reading to the United States, specifically to Washington, where I lived for seven days with 17 guys and girls between ages 20 and 26, who decided to do their bit to change this strange world we live in. And instead of talking about it sitting in a cafe, they chose to move on to practice.

Different cultures, life experiences, lifestyles and viewpoints; but many things in common; the idea that in order to improve things it is necessary to get involved.

Dániel Nduati is from Kenya, an African country with a bit more than 34 million inhabitants. Until last year, its capital city –Nairobi- had 538,000 inhabitants, 60,000 out of which -10% of the population- are kids living in the streets.

Dániel is black. Really black. His body and soul are black. His wonderful shirts were black, as well as the music he made with his body, the way he plays football…

Dániel lived for a long time in the streets until for some reason –“God”, he says- he managed to get out of it. He started his community work ever since.

Dániel founded in 2000 the “Emmanuel Boyz Rescue Center”, a place that provides a home, food, education and health to 40 homeless boys. Dániel –today he’s 26 years old- personally assists the boys, to whom he also gives affection and other kinds of help. With a strong religious conviction, now Dániel says he would like to be the president of his country. Will he make it? Who knows?

Before this trip, I only knew Somalia through black humor jokes. The poorest country in the world meant nothing but that to me. After the trip, I found out that it wasn’t really a country. Apparently, at the beginning of the 20th century Somalia was divided into four parts, each of them controlled by France, Italy and England, which owned two regions. There was a fifth zone ruled by Ethiopia.

In the 60’s Somalia reaches independence, but in the middle of a great amount of internal wars, which caused its president to be killed 1969. That year, a military coup led Mohamed Siad Barre to the power.

This man turned out to be a typical African-Arabian “caudillo” [1]. of the 70’s: allied with the Soviets, he said he would promote a communist regime, but he ended up imposing a dictatorship which lasted until the 90’s. In the way he left a terrible war with Ethiopia.

When Siad Barre was overthrown, civil war started in Somalia between the different clans coexisting within its society. This whole introduction was made to talk about Abdinasir Nur. A strange man from that strange country. Abdinasir wore a suit and a tie at all times, in spite of being 24. The formality in his country so demands it. “In my country there’s no government or peace –he said– and I like peace and democracy”. Abdinasir founded an organization aimed at promoting specifically those two values. “Many Somalis think that democracy is a perverse system coming from the West. I try to prove that having a democracy preserving our culture is possible”, he explained.

Maybe one day Abdinasir will get to be the president of his country. At least that’s what he wants. Again: will he make it?

Alexi Buzu is from a country that I didn’t know it existed. I’m always uncomfortable when talking to foreign people who don’t know what Argentina is, or who think that we are a state of Brazil. I knew this would happen during the trip, so I prepared myself to be patient to answer stupid questions.

The opposite happened with Alexi: “Where are you from?”, I asked him with my third-world Tarzan-speaking style. “From Moldova”, he answered. Silence. One second, two, three... I had to ask where that was. Four, five, six... I remember how annoyed I get when asked where Argentina is. “Oh”, I said, nodding, as if I was a Moldovan myself.

After living two or three days with him, I had the chance to learn some more about that country next to Romania and Ukraine. Just as in every region in Eastern Europe, determining which one is a nation and which not is not that easy there. They were part of the Soviet Union until 1991, when the Russian empire was dissolved. Then, in 1994 some wanted to join Romania, a country with which they share the language and many traditions. NO was the winning choice and that’s why they’re independent until today.

20 lines to talk about a country that I didn’t know it existed; 20 lines to talk about Alexi. Self-defined as a loser, he’s 24 years old and at the age of 19 he was a town councilor in his district. I repeat: at 19. “I didn’t think I would win, I had nothing better to do so I became a candidate”, he said ironically. You could never know if Alexi was speaking seriously or joking. I think it didn’t really matter. He and a bunch of friends had made an important work by restoring the central square of his community, and he said that that had been an important aspect. On the elections day, some friends called him at about 6 p.m. “You’ve won. You’re gonna be a town councilor”, they told him.

Alexi got to know the world of politics and decided to leave it. Maybe there was too much protocol for a person like him. That’s why he continued to work in his organization called Geronimo, which somehow tries to make youth get involved with its community. The last project was the kindergarten restoration, something his community needed.

I like the Caribbean accent. I particularly like that someone in the world –apart from the Argentinians– uses “vos” as the second person in singular.

Justin and Ana Luisa aren’t Caribbean, but “gringos” or Yankees (a varying qualifier according to the country of origin of this article’s reader). But they absolutely speak as Caribbean people.

Apparently, their folks are best friends, and chance brought them together in Honduras, where both families had to do some works. Justin’s mother is Bolivian (he invited us to have a traditional meal of his country, which was undoubtedly much better than the food I had when I traveled to the altiplano). In his house he showed us that she appeared in Times magazine as one of the most important women in the USA because of the social work she does.

As I was saying, Justin and Ana Luisa’s parents met in Honduras –where they settled with their whole families– and then came back to Washington D.C. God knows why, Justin and Ana Luisa –now they’re 25 years old- decided to go back to Honduras to try to leave something in that country where 33% of the children live in malnutrition conditions, half the population is poor and a third of it can’t read or write.

Given such statistics, they decided to create an organization which is called OYE Honduras (“listen” in Spanish)… Organization for Youth Empowerment; smart.

They are (or were) settled in El Progreso, a pretty poor Honduran location. The aim is to help giving education to less fortunate children. They grant scholarships and they also help them with accommodation, food and other things.

They also have programs for health, arts education (Ana Luisa had studied art history) and they organize recreational activities for the little kids.

Our meeting also implied for Ana Luisa the end of her living in Honduras. “Living there’s not easy for a ‘gringa’ woman”, she told me. Her aim was to continue working for OYE Honduras, but “from here”, that is, from there… from Washington.

Each story has a history and breaking the rules of this magazine (regarding the page extension) wouldn’t be right. So I’m going to use the last paragraphs of this account to talk about two projects.

You never think that stereotypes may be so stereotyped. Although sometimes caricatures don’t even get to caricature people. It was never clear for me if Cindy was a pseudonym or a real name (other documents named her Di) but for the purposes of this article we will call them Cindy and Holly. They’re both from China. Talking about stereotypes, when I met them they greeted me with the classic Chinese bow, but the funniest part was trying them to speak Spanish: we started with the words Andrea and Maria, or –as they said– Andlea and Malia; of course, my classes didn’t work.

Apparently, voluntary work is not very common in Chinese society. They aim at promoting this type of work from the university they attend to, which is located in a province, that is, outside Beijing. Finally, I want to talk about Vikram. A man from India, quiet, he spoke almost in silence, if that was possible. The most impressive thing about Vikram was not really his personal characteristics, but the project he was leading.

Vikram had been on drugs for a long time of his life. Somehow he stopped and decided to found a rehab center. The interesting thing is that the coordinators of this center were (were?) all drug addicts. “It’s the only way the coordinators and leaders will understand the problems of the young people who are trying to get rehabilitated”, Vikram pointed out. The purpose of the center is to deal with the addictions problem from an integrative perspective, with a strong policy of damage reduction and without punishing them or treating them as sick people, the way this matter is usually approached.

Were? The problem Vikram encountered, and about which we have talked sometime trying to find solutions, is that many of those coordinators, merely because of being in touch with drug users, fell back in the trap. In this way, the idea of former addicts helping current addicts was in crisis. Does that invalidate the idea? In my opinion, no. It’s a brilliant idea that just needs some more practice and better mechanisms to work more effectively.

Is it possible to build that ideal world I mentioned to you at the beginning? Utopias are Utopias, they’re “no places”. However, it is possible to approach them. But for that it’s necessary that people leave passivity and dare to face the problems, analyzing them not from a selfish point of view, but trying to aim at the common good.

At least this is the example I got from Dániel, Abdinasir, Alexi, Justin, Ana, Cindy, Holly, Vikram and the rest of the young people I shared the trip with. An example worth following.