The importance of speaking english

Well, since school, every english teacher (and almost every adult from time to time) gives you that lecture about how essential is the english proficiency for any 21st Century worker. Yet, after having worked in more than five different places in every kind of jobs, I believe I’m prepared enough to strongly discredit such statement. 

No doubt it was essential that time at my internship at UN’s OHCHR, but I hardly used it once or twice when some inconvenient tourists showed up at the bookstore in the middle of Chile-Spain match during the World Cup. Same thing while working as a waiter in a lousy bar in República, and so far, exactly never at my present job at an NGO.

Anyway, the fact that nobody needs to speak english to have a decent work in Chile doesn’t mean that I deem it to be useless. On the contrary, I consider it essential.

Consider, for example, how long my lvl 5 orc shaman would last on a PvP of World of Warcraft If I didn’t speak any english. Or how could I tell if that strongly-accented chinese kid wants to help me in Counter Strike or is just waiting for my head to pop up to split my pixel-brain on the pixel-ground. More than once knowing english has allowed me to survive in the digital wild, but also allowed me to enjoy the lyrics of my favourite music, and to avoid being confronted to the horrible spanish dubbed movies (I feel kind of pity when I see my parents bearing such mess).

Is the english proficiency a must-have for a professional? The way I see it, not exactly, but I have no doubt that english is a tool to make life less boring in our days.

Good and bad stuff from 2014

To me, 2014 was a year full of new experiences and challenges. A year of sharing with my family and to recognize the friends who are actually worthy of being called so. I couldn’t really talk about the good and bad, I could however say that this has been a year of opportunities, with my brother Lucas struggling against leukemia.

This situation has been an opportunity to us and for himself to realize what tough material he is made of. It’s an opportunity for returning to our essentials, and to value those who have supported us with their efforts and commitment.

Besides, it’s been a calm year at the University. I’m about to get my license with mi friends and partners.

It’s also been a good year concerning sports. Reaching two finals that are coming soon and on which I’m expecting victories with both teams. I think is hard to talk about good or bad  years, because these are built by several moments and in the end there is always something positive to recall, wether a struggle, a lesson or a resistance.

This year has given me the chance to be closer to my friends and family. Has allowed me to believe once again that there is good inside people and taught me the wisdom to tell my real friend from those who are not.

It has been a nice 2014 and I expect it to finish even better with the recovery of my brother, with two sport cups and with my brand new license in journalism.

Real-World Superheroes

Very often, the biggest comic villains are created as an unwanted consequence of the deeds of a superhero. Something similar happens in our (hi)story, except that in the real world there are no superheroes, there are plenty of supervillains, and there is a whole group of nations thinking that having super-powers makes them automatically the superheroes of the world. They don’t bear a name as colourful as Justice Leage or such. They prefer to use acronyms like NATO and USA.

Picture this: we’re in the middle of the Cold War. The US and the Soviets are fighting petty little wars on petty little countries all around the world, but specially on the middle east, because you know, after killing each other, oil is one of the top of priorities of mankind.

So, to ensure a tidy and cheap river of black gold flowing to the western world, and prevent it to flow anywhere else, and fearing the contagion of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, Uncle Sam comes up with the great idea of overcoming the so-called republics of the middle-eastern states, most of them former colonies with less than 30 years of independence, and put a set of puppet-dictators such as Al-Assad, Mubarak or Gaddafi. After all, that technique had been proved succesful in Latin America during the past decade.

But if there are two things that change people the most, these are time and power. And these puppets had plenty of both, plenty enough to become not-so-puppets-anymore. And so, all of a sudden the middle-eastern fellows start to raise their voices, rally on the squares, showing banners written in english and conducting the uprise via Facebook events. ‘The arab spring’ it was called. And the whole world  acclaimed it.

As we all know, there was no summer to that spring. The civil war that started in Syria was the seed for what we know as Islamic State.

Red and (not so) green

Every monday morning when I pass through the pastos of my Campus I found myself among a sad wasteland. Beer cans, bottles of almost any spirit you could imagine, and the whole place turned into a dumpster. It gets even worse on March, when the mechoneo also takes its toll (and stench). All of that pitiful sight is crowned by four containers of different colours strapped to a metal grid with a post calling to use them to recycle.

I guess the main function of this recycling point is just to add a sarcastic turn to the landscape.

But even more ironic is the fact that the very same students that cause this mess on a weekly basis are always taking pride on their progressive values, which includes very often to stand for the defence of almost every environmental cause on Chile.

Maybe it’s the booze what turns these paladins of Pascua Lama, Alto Maipo, Caimanes, Punta de Choros and so many others into regular filthy citizens of the third world. Maybe they don’t get the actual meaning of the word environment, and don’t realize the fact that environment is also the place where they’re actually standing. Or maybe, just maybe, they’ve never really cared, and are just posing to fit in the ‘Gomezmillean’ leftist crowds.

For my part, today me and my friends had some cans of after-class Beckers. Yes, we threw the (few) cigarette litters everywhere, but I had the decency of smashing the cans and dispose them in the recycle point. The thing is that, when I opened the cans container lid, I found it half-filled with glass bottles, papers, even a cardboard box. Whoever put it there didn’t even took a few second to unfold it.