During the time I spent in Georgia I was really naive about many things. One was racial discrimination. At that time we did not have blacks in Chile and our discrimination was not based on race but on last names and social classes.

I realized that in 1967 we were only about 150 foreign students and about two handfuls of black students out of a population of 15,000 students at the University.

The new president of the university, Frederick Corbert Davison, had just taken the position in July 1967. Under his presidency, the university reached a position among the US top research universities.

One student from Macon, Georgia, who was in my same dorm, was kind enough to talk to me and help me with my pronunciation. I also became acquainted with a black student from Savannah, Georgia, who was studing a science-related subject, entomology. She told me that she came from humble origins. I was curious about her definition of being poor. She said that, for instance, her family could not afford to paint their two story house often enough; they could not afford color television; and they had only three black and white televisions in the entire home. In her family, all had cars but they were used cars, since they could not afford new ones. I told her that typically in my country, a poor family of 9, as she had would live in a one-floor house with, at most, three rooms. The kids would share beds; they would not have ANY televisions; and sometimes they would only have dirt floors that they keep clean by sweeping with a broom, no vacuum cleaner. The dirt floor has to be sprinkled with water to prevent more dust.

She concluded that people in the US did not know how good they have it.

I used to go for pizza with a student from Macon some Friday nights. One day I asked if I could bring somebody else for pizza that night, and she said okay. So I brought the student from Savannah. I noticed coldness from the girl from Macon during the dinner so, on my next opportunity, I asked if something was wrong. I told her that I had noticed her stress during the dinner. She totally surprised me by saying that that was the first time in her life she had sat at a table with a black person. Later I was informed that her grandfather have been a member of the Ku Klux Klan.