On April 13, 2015, the Uruguayan writer and journalist Eduardo H. Galeano died at the age of 74, author of great readings of Latin American repercussion as The open veins of Latin America (1971), Upside down (1998), Football in the sun and shadow (1995), Mirrors (2008), and others.
In 1989, he received the American Book Award for Memory of Fire in the United States. In 1999, Galeano was the first writer awarded by the Lannan Foundation (Santa Fe, USA) with the prize for cultural freedom.
I like to describe him as a perforator of reality. Someone who does not stay in the epidermis of the issues but is able to go deeper and penetrate the most difficult recesses.
A surgeon with the ability to open the guts of society and show us its entrails as they really are. Today we will remember just five of the best phrases written by him.
'In the end, we are what we do to change how we are.'
There are certain aspects, behaviours and attitudes in us, with which we are not satisfied; and it is for this reason that throughout our lives we try to change what we do not like until we become the kind of person we dream to be.
'I think we were born children of the day because every day has a story and we are the stories we live.'
Each one of us is made up of stories, each day is a new page in our book of life. Some chapters are sad, others are full of colour and joy, some of the tears and broken hearts.
But no matter how your story goes, never stop writing it, because life is to be fought for and although sometimes it is exhausting, it is always worth living.
'If I fell, it's because I was walking. And walking is worth it, even if you fall.'
How many stumblings have we not had, how many days when we would like not to get up, how many dreams that seem impossible to reach?
But are not difficulties one of the most important parts of life? I consider them so because it is in these difficult moments we discover our strength, where we have the opportunity to demonstrate to ourselves what we are capable of achieving and realise that we are warriors full of valour. The difficult moments are the ones that have left us the most important lessons, and although they made us shed many tears, today we can remember them with the satisfaction of having not surrendered.
'We are in a culture of mere containers. The marriage contract matters more than love, the funeral more than the dead, clothing more than the body and the mass more than God.'
How life has become superficial! We no longer try to be but pretend to be. We have allowed ourselves to change the meaning of love or beauty, and the saddest thing is that we are not aware of it. When we go shopping, we are more interested in the beauty of the package than the importance of the content. But the emptiness that many experience is evident, and if you also feel it, stop! Evaluate yourself and do things differently regardless of your age, because one of the best things in life is the ability we have to start from 0 whenever we need.
'Many small people in small places, doing small things can change the world'.
There are more than 7,500 million people in the world, and about 9.6% live in extreme poverty (according to the report Global Monitoring Report, prepared jointly by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 2015). If we rely on this data, the reality of our planet is sad, but if we understand that in our hands is the power to initiate a change and a revolution, there is still hope, because that remaining 90.4% can join together to help, leave the indifference aside, stop thinking only about their well-being and start to change history.
