My project for course: Introduction to Personal Storytelling

As a little boy, I learned to swim by accident, and to my surprise...

I used to spend my summers at my grandmother’s village where I would forget everything about the city for a couple of months. All was freedom and discovery. Not so far away there is a river with a fluvial beach, that at the time was little more than low grass and high trees by the shallows. We would bury sodas in the river bottom to keep them cool and on Friday we would venture to get a sugar-packed water ice cream from the ice cream bike.

On one of those days, while playing catch in the river shallows, I tripped and fell face-first into the water. And to my surprise, in the 2 or 3 seconds that took me to grasp my feet back on the bottom, I realized that I was effortlessly floating. It blew my mind. It felt like flying!

This river, full of fun and life, contrasted heavily with the creek next to our apartment building back in the city. It had its springs in the mountains but by the moment it reached us it had already crossed half of the town and nearby industrial areas. I heard stories of how it used to have fish, but now it was hard to believe when looking at these acidic-smelling trickling waters that they had somehow had more life than the occasional frog and rat. This was “a side effect of progress”, I heard people saying.

I grew up feeling that something was wrong with this kind of progress that kills rivers and it sparked my interest in all subjects about bringing life back to the water.

My curiosity on this theme led me to study biological engineering and specialize in pollution control. From there I’ve worked in wastewater treatment facilities, designed new facilities and new services, and long-term asset planning.

Now I find myself, not by accident but by choice, deeply committed to de-pollution, circular utilization of resources, and the ecological transformation that the economy needs to go through to produce sustainable progress, so I can return every summer with my children to that river where I accidentally learned to swim.