Dear Pat

Dear Pat,
Here I am in 7th Heaven!! Not because I’m dead, but because I feel at my best.
I must say that all this experience is fascinating, something I could have never imagined in far away Patagonia. I celebrate every single day here. It’ like the sun always rises to me, there’s always a new day coming full of chances that I feel I cannot turn my back and walk away. Even if now I’m done with my assignments I keep going to the library, read, summarise books. It’s such an invaluable resource that I feel it’d be murder not to make the most of it. Every time after lectures, my mind flies away to my schools back in Esquel. There are so many things we can do!!! So many changes!! So many ways of adapting what I’m learning and sharing here to our context dear friend.
The atmosphere on campus is fascinating. Never in my life have I been with so many people from all over the world. I keep telling my flatmates that our flat is a small version of the UN, there are people from China, Japan, Germany, and Denmark. My flatmates are just fabulous. We really share this sense of community every time we celebrate birthdays and get together for the sake of having a good time. They tell me about their lectures, and “hopes and fears”. They have to hear, in turn, my stories about lectures, seminars, my experience in a project called “Right to Read” in a primary school in Coventry, the book club at the Centre of Applied Linguistics, my regular letters to the Students’ Union. They will think I’ve got nothing to do. The key is to use time wisely.
You know I’m not the sport type of person…let me read and talk over a cup of coffee and I’ll be grateful that I’m living and learning. Every week I get together with some other guys from Latvia and Canada and we talk about how our lives are being changed for the better here. I particularly feel that I’ve become more critical, my levels of insanity remain normal, which is a good sign. I also feel that the whole experience is empowering me to take chances, to embark myself on different projects that I think can help us all become better people. Among my changes, I’ve started to write in English this time. It all started when a PhD student asked me to be part of her research…I ended up being her creative writing hamster. Since then I’ve started to write some stories in English, stories I share with her and one my lecturers. As you well know, I apologised for my intrusiveness into her academic life, but once she said it was ok, I send her my moments in black and white. Much of her lectures are somehow reflected in my writing, I take some concepts and give them a little twist here, another meaning there and I come up with a myriad of lives knitted together. Because, after all, my experience here is in a way a collection of experiences, the ones the people I spend my time with either studying, talking or living, bring to me through conversation. I listen, step back and stare at the whole picture, contemplate it for numberless seconds and say to myself that when I get back to Argentina I’ll be taking them with me in my mind, in my actions, in my words.
I feel I’m changing all the time, all of us do, inevitably, but the key is to discover what lies underneath that process, that flow of energy, of dreams realised in an MA (you know how much I wanted to carry on with my studies, let alone in the UK, wow!!!!). However, I know that this is going beyond my expectations not only in academic terms but in life terms, so to speak. What really matters after all is that I’m walking and on the path you find living stories that you can’t give your cold shoulder. I feel I have to approach them and start a conversation because all of them will contribute to my development not as a teacher, but as a person, which is our first degree in life and we have to honour it.
That’s all from here. I’ll let you know more in my next letter.
Take care.

Darío