Unidos – A great Experience

Last Saturday, I went to Unidos in order to do social service from 10am to 2 o’ clock. When I arrived at Pitic’s park, I was quite stressed and I had this feeling of anxiety because I have never interact with special needs people before, so I didn’t know what was going to be my reaction towards these kids. I was scared because what would happen if I made them a rude gesture or if I make them feel bad… I wouldn’t like to make them feel bad. It wouldn’t be my intention.

It was the time to meet our new friends; they came and the organizers assigned us kids. That was the moment when I met Carolina, she is 12 years old and she has this Down’s syndrome. I presented myself and I asked her several questions. The bus arrived and took us to 300 (Bowling place). Here everyone played and I made a lot of new friends.

I loved this experience because they showed me something that is important to society. We, as society, have to reach equality and support ourselves, not everything has to be: me, me & me; We have to think for others, support them, help them or at least don’t make them feel less and not only with Down’s syndrome but also with women, eldest people, and so on. We (Mexicans) have this weird culture that doesn’t support these kinds of kids, so we have to make a change because they are important to our society. Why? Because they are people! That think; that have feelings! I think that society has to make a drastic change to avoid those problems. The good thing here is that there are several groups, as Unidos, that’s making a change in society.

P.s. I wanted to make this blog post about this because this was a totally new experience to me :)

My summer 2009

This past summer I had the opportunity to go to Madrid, Spain. One of my mother's brother lives there. I went there with my grandparents for about 50 days. I had a great time. The point is that going there for that long helped me to understand, more or less, the Spanish culture.

The day I arrived, we went for a walk with my uncle's girlfriend. It really amazed me to see so many people walking in the streets, despite the fact Madrid is a touristic city, a lot of persons, including my uncle, walk to arrive to their destiny.

The first time I used the subway, some Romanian girls stole my grandmother's wallet. That left me a really bad impression about security in Spain, especially in places like bus stations and the subway. But it didn't matter much at the end because a few weeks later I started to use the bus and the subway by myself.

It was really weird for me to see people reading in every free moment they had to do it. For example, people in the subway read, even they only have 10 minutes to do it, but they read. In the park you could find a lot of persons from all ages reading while having a tent. I liked the idea of going to the park and read, so I did it a couple times.

At Madrid, there is this incredible park called "Jardines del Buen Retiro". It is enormous. It has grass all over the place, skating rinks, artificial lakes, many fountains, ponds, a crystal palace, ducks, among other good things. What was impressive of that park is that it was always full of people. Parents with their children, people exercising, people reading, old-people exercising clubs, skaters, and bike riders.

I like the part of the food because I ate food from a lot of styles. I tried my uncle's style, Indian food, food from different regions of Spain, Hungarian food (wasn't my favourite), and Arabian food. The ingredients were similar, but the way of cooking was totally different in every restaurant.

Going to another country in another continent helped me a lot to open my eyes to the different cultures that we have in the world. I couldn't choose among all cultures because each one of them has something special and unique and that makes it wonderful.