Human Connection

Winner of a Mother's Day poem contest, this young girl attends high school in San Juan Miraflores in a compound much like the one we are helping develop farther down the road. In the video her classmates and the principal join her in the reciting of the poem. As a fellow writer, this experience reminded me of one of the truths about the world I find the most fascinating: the simplicity of human connection.

I became aware of this phenomeon over several years of reading and recent work in UNO's Writer's Workshop. I've found that, to me, the most amazing thing about stories is that no matter how different a character's life is from the reader's, the reader can always relate and connect to the character.

This is true in real life as well. I may not have grown up in severe poverty, but I do know what it is like to be a girl who admires her mother, a writer, and a high school student. While I don't know what it is like to live without the comforts of America, I'd bet anything that she and I have fought with our parents and siblings, had our hearts broken by high school boys and gossiped about similar things with girlfriends. Even though we live different lives thousands of miles apart, we are more the same than different; and while this world is huge and has a population of almost seven billion people, in the end aren't we all doing the same thing?--Just trying to get by the best way we know how.

Erin Gesell: BA Creative Writing