You are in your office, sitting comfortably in front of your latest generation computer, worrying about the calls from that 5G cell phone you have on your right and looking at your pristine watch on your left wrist, possibly a gift from that jocular celebration you had a couple of months ago, the one where you had such a good time. You get home and lie down on the sofa, open all the existing social networks and even dare to share the mythical image of the starving African child or that refugee family escaping from war. Let’s not be hypocritical, no matter how much you claim from your home all those injustices, nothing is going to change.

Something stirs inside you, and searching and searching you find many NGOs that do their bit in this unjust world, and you think that there is still hope in human beings. You juggle between your income and your vacation from work and you join a foundation that, thanks to a simple cataract operation, can recover the sight of an entire village and as a consequence, the life of an entire people.

Never underestimate the perseverance of a Galician to achieve everything he or she sets out to do, and if you meet another Galician along the way, even if he or she has roots, there is no turning back, we have everything to gain.

You put on your pink fuchsia polo shirt and your white convers knowing that it will be the last trip with them and you arrive at the Prat airport at 04.00 in the morning, so awake and excited that it seems to be 18.00 in the evening. You meet those who will be your battle companions, and although they are all strangers to you, you have something so strong in common that you seem to have known each other all your lives. Soon you will meet the one who will be the captain of your experience, you see a little jumping body arriving in the distance, with a smile on her face and pure nervousness inside and like someone who is going to greet his favorite soccer star, who has seen a million times on TV, you introduce yourself and keep your composure, maybe she does not even realize that illusion that you carry inside and the emotion contained that this moment will come.

The trip flies by, never better said, and you appear on the fourth largest island in the world and with the greatest illusion in the world.

The next few days will be a mixture of hard work, satisfaction and desire to continue doing your bit to help others, I don’t care if you are from the arts or sciences, I know of a law graduate who has spent a whole week helping in an operating room. And little by little your week progresses, you learn the likes and dislikes of others and you realize that they adapt to you and you to them. If we have to go all over Antananarivo in search of a loudspeaker to operate, it is done. And if we have to count 1230 times the surgical material, it is also done. But the day you will remember forever and count a thousand times will be the last day of the consultation, helping your colleague to uncover the eyes of all those people who have thanked you in every possible language. That sincere face of gratitude with which they will look at you, as if you were the light that illuminates their life, will stay with you forever. If you make it out of there without a tear, you are not alive.

You will get back on the plane back home as a different person, seeing life from another perspective and with eleven more “follows” for your social networks, because in Madagascar there are also influencers, those we have to follow closely and let them mark you.

Thank you Elena, Coco, Álvaro, Maite, Natalia, Andrea, Jesús, Marta and Iñaki for letting me be your follower.

Fahazavana

Cristina Fernández