Years listening to stories of pain
Carmen Ocaña Gómez, activist
Sometimes I have to hit the brakes. Brakes that immobilize my heart, as if someone were pressing it to force it to stop. I’m not entirely sure if the stop serves to regain strength or just to stop suffering for a moment. I’ve been listening to stories for years. Said like that, it almost seems easy, but behind each one of them are children who, sometimes, I say only sometimes, are not aware of what society is stealing from them. And behind them are desperate parents, anguished by a reality that grows larger each day; and behind them are grandparents, who don’t always understand what’s happening and only perceive that they aren’t allowed to help, even when they don’t know how to do it; and behind them are siblings who sometimes cry thinking their parents don’t love them, because they only love their other sibling, the one who is different.
How cruel is that difference! And we establish it, all of us, with our way of acting, of behaving, sometimes even of looking the other way. And don’t tell me you haven’t. Surely if you think about it, you too have looked the other way at some point. I can’t blame you for it, but only if it was for a second and then you looked again with the enthusiasm of believing in a world for everyone.
Sometimes the stories I hear send me into an eternal déjà vu. There is always a discriminated child, there is always a teacher who does not want to teach properly, there are always educational authorities who have no idea what they are talking about, there are always unfair rulings, obsolete tests, judgments against families… And pain, there is always a lot of pain. I have always believed that human capacity in the face of pain can be infinite. There are always situations that overwhelm us and that, a priori, we believe we will not be able to cope with, but we do. The pain of families who pick up the phone and call a stranger in the hope of finding help is beyond all explanation. You have to live it, you have to feel it…
When, sometimes, I pick up the phone to talk to strangers who call me believing I can help them, I’m not always okay. One carries their own burdens and personal demons, but I always force myself to smile, even when the other person can’t see me, to convey serenity, to help them more easily build that bridge of desperation towards someone they don’t know and to whom helplessness has led them. I want to think that smile reaches them.
I’ve been doing this for years now, sometimes I think nothing has been achieved yet, but despite how disheartening that thought is, I am always grateful to life for the opportunity it gives me every day to be able to, or at least try to, help someone.
I got into all this by chance. Someone called me and, to my surprise at the offer, I didn’t know, nor could I, nor did I want to say no. Life must be understood as a great chain of favors, like a gigantic domino, that allows us to knock down one piece and thus expand whatever we want. I couldn’t continue doing activism if I didn’t understand it that way, if I didn’t believe that the piece I knock down today will have a continuation tomorrow in another, and the next day in another, and another after that, and so on…
Someday, we will have knocked them all down and the school we want, the one we believe in, where there are no labels, where children are not inoculated with the gene of discrimination, but with that of respect, where the gaze is the same towards everyone, where we understand that differences enrich us, that they add up, because every human being adds up, regardless of our differences… That school will be a reality.
And that day I won’t feel my heart shrink.