A few days ago, Earth Day was celebrated worldwide. It’s a day when people come together to raise awareness of how precious and valuable our Mother Earth is. Over the years I have seen and attended pro-environmental festivals worldwide and I’m amazed how many people are really concerned about our planet and all species that inhabit it.
This year, to celebrate Earth Day, I decided to embark on a trip by myself to the most natural place I could reach.
When I first came from Venezuela to study in the U.S., I decided to go to Santa Barbara to study English with an open window to go to college there. This resulted in the best, but also hardest, years of my life. The beautiful town, with its old Spanish architecture and immensely diverse community with the doors open to anyone, allowed me to meet and become friends with people from countries I’d never heard about.
After almost three years, I finished college and had to make the hard decision to leave the place that received me so warmly, and now I consider a second home. I transferred to SDSU with the expectation to get more involved with the community, which is why I decided to give a shot at the Intercultural Ambassador Program.
A daily routine like going to class is becoming harder and scarier for the younger generation in this country. Young people are being shaped by an environment that has become more stressful and painful than enjoyable and rich. This year in the U.S., there have been more mass shootings than days itself.
I was born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, one of the most dangerous cities in the world. It’s a place where violence is experienced daily in everyone’s life, or at least to someone related to you. Over the past few years the wave of emigration from Venezuela has been abrupt due to high rates of violence and crime, mixed with political problems that have deteriorated the quality of life in every way possible — and even violated the human rights of most Venezuelans.
Continue reading “From Venezuela to the U.S., Violence Casts a Long Shadow”
My family back in Venezuela has this tradition of traveling to at least one place we don’t know every winter for a vacation. Many times we return to places that we know and like, but we always reach a new destination. With me studying in the U.S., this year was the first time we wouldn’t spend Christmas and New Years together.
So I decided to embark on a trip and continue this tradition. What I found in Big Sur — about eight hours north of San Diego — was much more than what I was looking for.
The global experience, as told by SDSU students 