Desideratum

Suddenly he stopped and explained to the students: I wanted to tell you about Colombian music and traditional dances so that you should know that as well as having problems, we Colombians have an identity, a dignity, traditions, and a culture, and that we laugh, and smile, and live. In thirty minutes he had taught me an unexpected lesson: never reduce the other to my perception, to his problems, his poverty, or his crises. He had taught me a lesson about the pedagogy of solidarity… One should begin with the being, the smile, the dignity, the culture that fashions the person before reducing him to a sum of needs which ‘I’ support. Those thirty minutes radically changed my outlook on others and on life.