by The statistics on children who are born in a context of poverty and manage to develop a reading habit are discouraging: poor families do not have books within reach of their childhood, and in many cases, parents are illiterate and cannot instill a habit that they do not possess. However, there is something that surveys ignore about poor children and that is that sometimes parents inspire a love of stories even without knowing how to read. Is this possible?
I was born in a humble family, in the interior of the province of Misiones, we were seven brothers. My parents lived in a rural area throughout their lives, mom was able to attend up to third grade, dad, orphaned by his father and in charge of his stepfather, kept the memory of the only day he went to school: the night before it had fallen cold and They sent him barefoot, so he associated the study with the pain of frozen feet.
For many years I wondered where I had gotten the desire to read. Where do the desires to study come from? Where does the taste for telling stories come from? I didn’t know. Furthermore, school, for me, was the best place in the world. That’s why neither the frozen days, nor the atrocious storms, nor the scorching summers, prevented me from attending. My mother taught me to read at an early age and from then on she frequented the school library. Soon I began to write stories that she read to my brothers and they told me: where do you get all those ideas? At that time we didn’t have a TV, so we made movies in our imagination.
My mother warned me, since I was in primary school, that I would not be able to go to secondary school. When I was in seventh grade, the rural EGB 3 was created, and I was able to do eighth and ninth grade, my mother explained to me that that was where my training would end. Then, as if my desire to study was so strong that it moved the forces of the universe in my favor, the director of Bach came to my school. No. 39 of Fracrán, to promote the school. So I asked him how much do I have to pay to go? He looked at me with a smile full of tenderness, I guess my ignorance moved him, he told me: “You don’t have to pay anything, it’s public, it’s free.”
That day she returned to my house, which was three km from the school, running, almost out of breath, excited, and shouting I told my parents that I had found a free school! My parents couldn’t believe it either. Dad wrote to me at that school, which was about 25 km from my house., also in rural areas. The crisis of 2001 was going on, dad was counting the coins for my ticket, I will never forget his expression when doing the math that didn’t close, in the end he told me: “I think this month is not going to be enough for your ticket” and I: “no Don’t worry, dad, I’m hitchhiking.”
Dad protested: “God gives bread to those who don’t have teeth,” and added: “Many parents send their children to study, and the goons don’t study, they don’t want to know anything, and you who love so much won’t be able to because we “We have no way.” To which my mother always responded “Have faith, have faith.” After a while, as if in response to my mother’s prayers, dad brought me the coins for the fare. I will never know what things they stopped buying so that I could take the bus to school.
Following my mother’s advice, I had faith, because I told everyone that I was going to go to university, some classmates told me “get the little birds out of your head”, “To study you have to go to Posadas, how are you going to do it?” “I didn’t know how, but once again I invoked the forces of the universe in my favor. It was my last year of high school, in my house we had nothing but cassava and beans to eat, dad had lost his job and did odd jobs for my fare. My God, how much I owe that man! And to my mother who stood for a while looking sadly at the empty pot, and suddenly He invented a lunch with polenta and scrambled beans, with cassava and egg or with corn and milk.. And while I dreamed of the taste of bread and meat, I also dreamed of leaving the farm, of studying what I loved and being a teacher, but even more so being a writer, writing real books like the ones I read, stories capable of making . that other people, like me, dream.
Where did that desire come from? One of my friends, with the best intentions, warned me: “Those books hurt you, they make you believe things that are not, they make you think that you could be like those people.” And yes, I believed that just as in the stories the characters dreamed of achieving something and one day the opportunity came, so it was going to happen to me and the least expected day things were going to happen.
In the end, I finished high school, and the comments turned out to be true: my head was full of birds that flew away when I hit reality! She worked in three houses as a domestic worker, trying to raise money to go to Posadas to study, but what they paid me did not cover minimum expenses for rent and food, I worked like that for three years. Each of those years I went to Posadas, I enrolled in the university, I brought the admission booklets, I completed them thinking, this year yes, this year the miracle is going to happen!, three years of passing in front of the Faculty sign that said “Welcome entrants” and knowing that once again I was not welcome.
Until the fourth year happened, they told me about a job that was for kids who, like me, couldn’t pay for their studies, it was called “colportage” and it consisted of. in a disease prevention program that, in conjunction with the South American Publishing House Association of the Adventist Church, awarded scholarships, in addition to a percentage of 50% of material sales, to students who would promote the healthy lifestyle contained in books that promoted physical, mental and spiritual well-being. I was an Adventist at the time (I haven’t been to church in a while but I still like many Adventist practices).
That’s how, with more dreams than certainties, I started working from Monday to Monday, from 5 am to 10 pm until I raised the money for the ticket to go south with a group of students. I worked for a year and a half in the south, I raised the necessary money and enrolled, once again, at UNaM. This year I was able to take the entrance course and start the career of my dreams: Teaching in Literature. Every summer and winter break, instead of resting or preparing for finals, I traveled to work, thus raising money to continue paying the rent and everything that living in Posadas entailed.
As for my siblings, the older ones were not able to complete secondary school, some did not even finish primary school, because the economic condition had driven them to work to contribute to the home economy. I wanted my younger siblings: Darío and Patricia, to be able to study. Patricia managed to finish high school at the same school as me and Darío left primary school halfway through, so I brought them to live with me in Posadas, I included them in the canvassing so that they could continue studying.
Thus, Darío returned to school and was finishing high school when he became ill and had to return to San Vicente. Patricia started Psychology, the career of her dreams, but life didn’t make things easy for us, in the end she had to leave, although she got a good job and continues to go to school but this time as a proud spectator of her daughter, Emi’s, process. My niece says that she is going to be a teacher, a hairdresser, a doctor and a veterinarian, as if she wanted to study for all the generations that couldn’t do it before her. And my sister continues reading everything I write with the same amazement as when she was little.
I graduated in 2015 as a teacher and in 2016 with a degree in Literature, my proud father told everyone: “my daughter is a teacher and a graduate.” He didn’t understand much what being a graduate entailed, but he told me that in the movies, whenever someone important appeared, they said “here comes the graduate,” so my dad saw me and treated me like someone important.
In 2021, dad was discovered lung cancer, it had already metastasized, he left one afternoon while I, lying on his chest, listened to songs by Antonio Aguilar, his favorite singer-songwriter, with him, and recorded the Christmas in which he . He laughed while cutting the roast in the light of the petromas, listening to Aguilar in the background on the battery-powered radio.
After he passed away, I was left there without knowing what to do with so many memories, and I began to organize in “little boxes” inside my mind, the most beautiful moments with him, the ones that I did not want to forget and that was where I discovered where it came from. . my love for reading stories and my passion for telling them. My dad! It had always been him! Without knowing how to read or write, dad loved stories, I remembered that since we were very little he would sit us down in a circle and tell us about the time when, after stepping on Pombero’s trail, he got lost in the mountains, how he found himself. . with the wolf, about a friend of his who slept in a haunted house and because he was not afraid he found the gold that the owner, now a ghost, had buried under the floor, or about the time he faced the poras with his machete…
This is how I grew up surrounded by stories and mysteries that occurred in the missionary jungle. I suddenly realized that my father not only instilled in me the habit of reading, because thanks to those stories I, hungry to know more, discovered others in books and creating new ones on paper, but he also transmitted to me the taste for scary stories. Thus, my mother, with only the third grade of primary school, taught me to read, without suspecting that she would open the window to the world for me, and my father, without knowing how to read or write, He taught me to love stories, without even imagining that he gave me the only thing that can never be taken away from the poor.: the ability to dream, to weave stories, to create possible worlds in which your economic condition means nothing and in which you can be whatever you want.
Now I am finishing my master’s degree in Education, and I feel that I am doing it both because of my desire to continue learning, and so that my father can proudly say, wherever he is: “my daughter is a teacher.” Today I know that what I am I owe to a mother who did not give up in front of the empty pot and to a father who broke his back digging into other people’s land, and counted the coins for my fare. Not only did they give me everything they had, but also what they had never had in their childhood: Christmases full of laughter, proud smiles at every school event, slippers so my feet wouldn’t touch the frost in winter.
Gladys Noemí Horodeski She is a professor and graduate in Letters, Specialist in Semiotics of Language and Literature (UNaM); She is currently pursuing a Master’s Degree in Education (UNQ). She works teaching classes at the middle and higher level in Posadas, Misiones. Her story “Gol de Juan” was the winner of third prize in the IV Micro-Story Contest “Don’t open that door” of the Misiones Public Library. She was also the winner of the V No Para-Normals contest by the Palabra Herida publishing house, from Colombia with the story “Caramarked”. Her texts have been selected to participate in several anthologies and have been published in books and magazines. She thus combines her three passions: writing, reading and teaching.
