a waiting for a miracle (work in progress)

            My mother went to Porto Seguro - Bahia for her honeymoon. Around 9 months later, I was born. Since then, every time I go to bed the Earth spin, the ozone layer get more damaged, tons of trash are produced, people die, lots of people born, I get a day older and might had grown a little while the whole planet was actively moving around me. 

            I know it happens to me since I cried for the very first time, at the hospital with my mom and dad, right after I discovered the existence of air, but probably those facts are a little older than me. Regardless historical and cultural issues, since I was born in Brazil, when someone ask me what day it is today, I automatically consider Jesus’ birth as the first day of my measurement, since the Pope said it happened for about 2014 years and some months ago. My Jewish neighbors would not agree with my answer, but we all would agree with a detail: time keep passing since we accept we exist. Nevertheless, the fact that we do not know if it is someone’s will, a random coincidence or just a dream does not change our time to go to bed.

However, fighting against science and its methods, most of us certainly believe that tomorrow we will wake up and rush to do all the things we have to and we all know what happens when we choose turn off the alarm and sleep a bit more. We can get late, be fired, be out of money, be in trouble in school, lose grades, be punished by how strict our routines normally are. Therefore, we wake up on time. We control our wills and do what we believe we have to. Then we are able to make plans for long periods. We dream with the face of our children, with hypothetical graduation parties, with how much we will cry when a friend dies, with the drawing for a tattoo we hope that one day we will have guts to make, we predict the next winner of our favorite reality show on television.

            That is why nothing is a miracle. Because for some reason, we were born able to control our wills, our duties, our lives and our future by the simple and deep necessity of looking for a purpose. People born, grow and start searching for a reason to do not give up on waking up early every day because we are sure we have been working on something that has a meaning. Maybe for your own, maybe for your family, maybe for your community or maybe for humanity, and there is no miracle in our beliefs and ideals. There are us and our objectives, our actions, our opportunities and our options. We and ourselves controlling what we can and cannot do. It is you and I sharing our choices with our destinies. It is you and I waking up because we believe there is something more interesting than sleep.  

doubling citizenship

Once, during a Chemistry test at school, my teacher called me on her table after observing me for a while. She asked if I had some family relation with Portugal, because according to her I sit, write, talk and look as a Portuguese girl. I was 15 and I was so surprised by the question that the only thing I could answer was “yes, ma’am”. I knew my both grandparents, who have always lived right next to me, came from the other side of the ocean during the 50's to run away from the Second World War. A year after that episode, my mother started a long process to provide me a double citizenship and a European passport that would facilitate my travels in the future.

Later, in 2013, I finally traveled abroad to the United States for an exchange program with five other Brazilian students. We prepared ourselves for the great day of the flight during almost a whole semester, and at that time I started wondering what is to be a Brazilian, Portuguese or from any other country according to the rest of the world and its rules and agreements.

I paid US$10 after answering some simple questions on internet to get my Visa. My friends traveled to São Paulo, each one with a legal responsible, to pass through many interviews and a complex documentation checking. They spent more than a R$1.000 per person to complete their processes, and for me it was senseless. We grow up in the same country, talked the same language and shared the same culture, but my grandparents were born in Europe and that would give me the right of going abroad easily.

Then I started searching for the logic of international agreements. I felt a necessity to understand how decisions made in organizations such as the United Nations, the European Union and the BRICS group would affect the everyday life of peoples all over the world. Participating in several Models UN during High School, I could play the role that nations representatives do in every single assembly in the UN, writing resolutions and changing lives of huge amounts of people by some hours of debate and a single document.

That is what makes me want to go beyond. Study in the United States would provide me the perfect educational conditions, considering not only the academic area but also the cultural and social experience it is to be at a great university. Make the difference is my only objective, and I am sure that being Portuguese, Brazilian and me are the abilities I need to be able to do that.