Fynsa
At the time of writing, I am 40 years old. I have not earned the John Bates Clark medal, I have not completed a doctorate, nor have I published in a prestigious journal. Needless to say, I have not bought a Porsche as part of the age crisis I am going through. Unlike what I believed as a child about people in their forties, I have nothing figured out and probably have more doubts and fewer certainties than I did in my twenties.
However, perhaps what I have learned during the last few years is that I am still privileged. I was able to study in the first light bulb of the nation, founded in 1813, once the best school in Chile, the Instituto Nacional. I learned the republican values, the obligation to be useful to society and that work conquers all. My alma mater, the University of Chile, taught me the importance of the public (not the same as the state) and the common good. I had to apply for funding, since it was not possible for me to pay the tuition directly. At that time it did not exist, but I wish I had had the possibility to study with CAE. My options were solidarity credit, for which I needed to prove that I lived under a bridge, or CORFO credit, at a very low 8% real annual rate. We tend to forget, perhaps until now, how important the existence of a liquid fixed-income market has been for the financing of long-term projects, such as education or real estate.
I had to invent a third option: not paying and kicking the debt at 1% monthly interest. There are politicians who today find the 2% annual CAE abusive, but being university leaders of the House of Bello they never blushed for 1% per month. In short. I would do it again, a thousand times, since studying has allowed me to change my reality and that of probably all my descendants. In 1984, when I was born, half of the population lived in poverty, with 20% of it being extreme. Most of it, children, with poor access to services, education, health and calories. When we bake bread with my children, we do it as a sharing activity. When I was 6 years old when we made bread with my mom and other children in the village, it was out of resilience. Forty years later, 6.5% of Chileans live below the poverty line, with 2% living below the extreme poverty line. Each person who experiences this is a drama that should outrage us as a country, but not understanding the progress that means reducing almost 45 points this indicator of shame seems to me, at least, unfair.
I would love for more people to be able to tell the story that I can tell at 40 years old. But it seems to me that just listing the things I am missing is an enormous injustice to those who have allowed me to get this far, my mother, above all. But also to those who defined the foundations for a better country, with more opportunities and access, more democratic, more modern and fair.
I do not intend to rest on my laurels, I still have a long way to go and I have ambitions for more. I think the same for our country. But let us not lose sight of where we come from, because perhaps we can make the mistake of thinking that getting this far has been easy. And no. Because as Churchill said, it has cost blood, sweat and tears.
