Machuca

I am Pedro Machuca. I am a 50 year-old man, which has witnessed the history of our country from both sides. When I was around 10 years old I lived in what the people call a “shanty town”, I lived with my mother and my little sister… Well I had a father too but he was always drunk and he mistreated us. I was attending to a school in a high neighborhood, Saint Patrick, with some other boys, because father McEnroe invited us to meet some boys with a totally different reality to ours, the idea was to learn to respect each other.

At the first moment I felt like a strange bug, because all those students were blonde, clean, well-dressed and it showed that their families had a good economic situation while we were poor, dirty and bad-dressed boys.

With the days in that school I met one boy, Gonzalo, we became very good friends, despite what different we were. He also went with me and my uncle to sell flags in demonstrations. All was nice, He usually went almost every day to my house and sometimes I went to his.

Everything changed one day… we fought because he treated me really bad, so we stop talking and get together. One day after the military coup some policemen went to my neighborhood, killed some people and arrested others. Gonzalo was watching all that and he realized how unfair life was like for people like me. I could escape of those policemen, I lived alone in the streets, that time of my life was awful. I had to hide of the military trucks.

But now my life it is different because one day, a school accepts me and then I could go to the university. Nowadays I had a beautiful family and all those past days remember me that we must be humble and remember where we came from, yet we have to strive and get ahead.