Faced with the hard paperI stop.Very few questionsintimidate mebut this one has memessed up. What am I?Am I white, siram I pink?Am I black and yellow,brown or gold? A hundred centuries aremixed in my veins.Who knowswhich blood prevails? Why don’t you ask meother things?Or nothing at all? Yes, I feel sorry that childrendie of hunger,golden, […]

When I was still in the equivalent of High School we had to take an examination, done by teachers of a Government approved School, to get our official certificate of studies and then apply to the Bachillerato test to be able to continue studying at a University. When my classmates and I were preparing for […]

After two months and 12 days, a letter with lots of stamps came for Sofia. Floro picked up the correspondence from the mail box and put the letter for Sofia on a kitchen counter. Filomena saw the letter and went to look for Sofia who was upstairs making a bed. Sofia took a knife and […]

Filomena was concerned and worried. Many month had gone by without knowing anything about Antonio. After he has been sent to Peru, it had been difficult to communicate with him. Letters would take up to two or three month to reach him, and after his experience with the “heaven hunger” creatures in the mountains, Antonio […]

In 1967, I obtained a scholarship from Rotary Club International. I was working at the Public Relations Office of the University of Chile. I was doing an exiting job interviewing scientists at different Schools such as Engineering, Medicine, Veterinary, and Architecture, and publishing articles in newspapers and magazines about their latest research. However, I longed […]

One thing Filomena was absolutely sure about was that after spending time in purgatory she will go to heaven and then resurrect with the rest of the good Catholics. So shortly after she had her daughter Clara, she started to prepare two big boxes. One with things for her daughter to have when she got […]

In 1967 I learned through TV and comments in my dorm that Martin Luther King, Jr. was going to Atlanta, GA on August 16, 1967. There he gave is famous speech: “Where Do We Go From Here? I was quite surprised when I received a call from the radio station I had worked for in […]

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 […]

The last semester, I could not find a course to fit with the two required ones, so I ended up taking an unexpected subject, criminology. I learned about Cesare Lombroso’s theories that matched facial features to identify different kinds of criminals. Lombroso, considered by some as the father of criminology, believed that criminality was hereditary. […]

Once in Vermont at the Baptist Church, we were taken to a house which was set up for retreats. Boys were placed in a big room full of beds and girls in another similar one. They had showers like the ones in my dorm in Georgia–one after the other separated by walls and only a […]