Narrative Essay
09/26/19
Carlos Cerna Reichmann
Prompt 3: Choose a particular memorable event from your life and relate the series of events associated with it and discuss the impact on your life. Try to choose an event that lead you to an awareness of a culture other than your own.
Latin America is one of the regions in which the culture is most unified. The region, is known to have a lot of rivalries. For instance, Colombia has a rivalry with Venezuela, Brazil with Argentina, and both Argentina and Peru rivalry both in terms of a football rivalry and in territorial terms with Chile. Although everything of this is true, we share a lot of cultural background, in a lot of things like food, architecture, music , and even political development.
I think that Latin America has a very unified culture, howver in terms of development Chile is the exception. One day I woke up and decided to take a major life decision in my life. I decided to make the decision to apply to the most important seminar of Latin America. I chose it because Chile is the most developed country in Latin America and I wanted to know what made Chile to be known as the best country in Latin America in economic and political terms by most hispanics.
Chile has had a very diverse history, from a very stable but undeveloped economic situation, to a troubled communist democracy with Allende to the free market dictatorship of Pinochet, and finally to the democratic transition in 1990. How can a country with so many changes can be so developed today? Why a country with the Latin American culture can be so ahead of Colombia or my country Honduras? All, of these questions made me apply for the seminar of politics and economics in Chile.
Around five 550 people from 18 to 28 years old from all of Latin America applied to the seminar, and I was one of the 60 lucky ones that was selected for the seminar. When I was selected for the program I was extremely excited for the opportunity. I was screaming when I read the email, telling my close friends and familyabout it. However, a new email arrived saying that I was on the waitlist. It all seemed like a dream, after an extreme burst of happiness , a sudden extreme anger and impotence of my situation occured. This was actually a good transition to a comic relief at that moment of my life, because five minutes later, another email entered saying that the previous email was a mistake of the foundation, and was sent on accident to some users that shouldn’t have had received that email. After knowing that I was definitely accepted to the seminar in Chile I told my dad and we bought the plane tickets to Santiago as soon as possible to prove the foundation in Chile that I was going to assist to the seminar.
The flight to Santiago was about 13 hours from Honduras because there is no direct flight from Honduras to Chile. I had a stop in Miami and in the next flight I sat next to a german girl who was going to study at Chile in the south, in a place called Temuco.In that conversation I learned that Chile had a lot of relationships with Germany.
Upon setting foot in Santiago I could see the way it looked in terms of infrastructure and saw what I wanted for Honduras. I saw the development that we should aspire as Latinos, and had the hope more than ever that it was possible. The fact that there is a country with a culture really similar to ours could achieve a great amount of development. This was a really big shock for me at the time; it was a big shock for the positive.
I spent some days in Santiago, and then later went to a small city in the outsides of Santiago called Santa Cruz. When we arrived we had our first talk about a movie of Will Smith called ‘The Pursuit of Happyness’. We discussed political ideas associated with the film and learnt more about the main differences between the Latin American mentality and the American mentality of limited government.
The lecturer, Axel Kaiser, concluded that Chile would be a more developed country if it grasped the American mentality. I spent a lot of time with chileans at that moment of my life and got to know more their general mentality about their country and their general mentality. I learned also talked to the average chilean in the streets of Santiago and learned that they don’t have a good view of their country. They think that the problems are extremely big, and that Chile is doomed to fail. I learned that chileans don’t see how bad economic shape is in the rest of countries of Latin America.
Now, I get more the perspective of chileans, although as I stated previously Chile is indeed the most adavnce country of Latin America and we can strive to be like them if we have the right attitude and policies. Chileansview to strive for the best disregarding your surrounding context has proven success. If we have the mentality of Chileans I am sure that at least most countries would be in a better economic situation.
Carlos Cerna Reichmann 