The land of a thousand ways of suffering

Translation courtesy of Dario Fioravanti

It was the year 1994 and I was 16, when a remote African country virtually unknown to South Americans suddenly echoed in the news. I must say that almost nothing is published about Africa in my country, so I barely remember that moment, but what I do remember is that it was a new tragic story coming from the black continent (after all, bad news is all we hear from Africa). What I did not know until much later in my life was the magnitude of the tragedy that was taking place in Rwanda in those days, which made it unavoidable to get to this tiny country with a picture of deep grief.

A new beginning

Translation courtesy of Cintia Verónica Ortiz

35 days in the first world

I was born, raised and lived until I was 28 years old in a country called “developing country”, a political and hypocrite concept recently created by economists of rich countries when referring basically to the third world. I am a third-world citizen from Argentina and have spent most of my life in South American and Asian developing countries, that is why every time I visit the so nobly called “first world” is when I most feel what is known as “culture shock”, the opposite effect of what many first world inhabitants experience when they are horrified after landing in an unknown poor country. After travelling in Africa for several months, the shock is even stronger, the first world where everything is in order, clean and civilized (at least on the surface) is the one I really find exotic.