Girl Rising - Peru Collection
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GIRL RISING
Girl Rising is a feature film that presents
the stories of nine young women
from around the world, and the critical
role education plays in each of their lives.
Each story is written by
celebrated authors from around the world.
This collection of three videos features
Senna, a young woman from Peru
Senna plays herself in a story written
by Peruvian author, Marie Arana.
Senna - La Rinconada, Peru
by Marie Arana
“The Black Heralds,”
by the great poet Cesar Vallejo.
“There are blows in life,
so powerful...
“I don’t know.
“Blows as from God’s hatred;
“like a riptide
of human suffering,
“rammed into a single soul...
“I don’t know.”
The first time I read that,
it took my breath away.
The rhythm of it.
The force.
For me it was unforgettable.
Poetry is how I turn
ugliness into art,
dark into light,
fear into will.
I didn’t learn this
over the years
as I learned math or history.
I learned it all at once,
in a swift kick to my heart.
My name is Senna.
I am fourteen years old.
I study and live
in La Rinconada.
La Rinconada is a
gold mining town in Peru.
Perched on the side of a
dead volcano 17,000 feet up,
in the perpetual snow
of the Andes.
They tell me my town
is harsh, hazardous,
the highest human
habitation in the world.
I don’t know.
My father named me after
a famous warrior, Xena.
He had seen her on TV, but since
he could neither read nor write,
he didn’t know that
her name started with an “X.”
He said that, like her,
I would grow
up to be a fearless defender of
the poor, a heroine prepared
to go to war against ruthless
men, if honor demanded it.
If a warrior’s name was
my father’s first gift to me,
a brave heart was his second.
There is no hardship
I can’t overcome.
My father knew something
about brave hearts,
for he, like all the men
of La Rinconada, was a miner.
He comes looking for hope
and finds nothing but misery.
For every golden ring,
2,000 tons of rock must move.
For 35 years, my
father drilled and dug,
hunted tirelessly for a glimpse
of glitter winking in the granite.
But this mountain, she will
trample the fiercest spirit,
shatter the strongest back.
I still don’t know what happened
that day, but I imagine it.
The slam of ice.
The rock on rock.
The crash, the grind.
The sudden black.
He survived, but he never
returned to the mines.
And each day after that,
he died a little bit more.
I was barely five,
but the memory
of that day still haunts me,
as if a shadow had
fallen over my father.
As weeks went by and we
grew desperate for money,
my father became a cook
and my mother took his
place on the mountain.
Every day, she and my
sister, joined the women
who scrambled their way up
steep inclines to pound at rock.
Looking for gold the miners
had missed, until night fell
and cold stiffened their fingers.
Still, my father insisted
that I go to school,
learn all the
things he hadn’t.
“There is no hope for me,”
he would say.
“Ah, but there is for you.
Make a better person
of yourself, Senna.
Study.”
He made sure I saw what
became of many girls
who did not go to school.
It was impossible not to.
Beside every gold buyer’s
stall was a loud, raucous cantina.
Above every cantina
was a busy brothel.
Miners squandered their gold
as fast as they could find it;
drunks staggered
out of whorehouses
in the full light of day.
I had heard about the
thousands of girls sold to men
in those places, many of
them infected with AIDS.
They seemed
hard-faced, wild-eyed,
with an infinite sadness
about them.
Don’t die.
I love you too much!
But the corpse--
Ay!
He kept on dying.
I went to the man who owned
La Rinconada’s public toilets
and begged him
to give me work.
My job was to get to the stalls by
dawn, wash down each cubicle,
scrub out the holes in the floor,
and take 20 centavos
per person.
I could add the earnings
in my head
as fast as the owner
with his calculator.
My father beamed
when he heard of it.
“You see?” he crowed.
“You have all the makings
of an engineer!”
In La Rinconada, the engineers
are the bosses, the owners,
and the ones with
all the money.
In truth, I was having
a hard time at school.
I was too worried to do anything
but think about my father.
With every day,
his health sank to new lows.
I told myself I was a warrior,
a defender of the weak.
He needed me to stay strong.
I sang to him, did all his sums.
One day my mother told us
that she would take my father
down the mountain to
find a shaman, an herb,
anything to slow
his racing pulse,
stop the bone-rattling cough
that was threatening
to claim him.
I never saw my father again.
He collapsed and died in
my mother’s arms shortly
after they got out of the bus
at the foot of the mountain.
When my mother told us this,
it was as if I had been punched
in the chest, as if the ground
beneath us had fallen away.
For all the years that my family
had climbed that frozen rock,
for all the gold that had been
dug out, burned clean,
sent to glitter around the world,
we had never owned
a fleck of it.
We were poor, bone poor -
the poorest family
in a mud hole of poor people.
I cursed the mountain,
cursed the mines,
cursed the gold buried
beneath my feet.
And then I found this.
This poem about the
black heralds of death,
about the powerful blows
fate can rain on us...
I don’t know.
Those poems, those words,
altered something in me.
It was as if I had chanced upon
a cache of buried treasure.
Each page opened a world.
Each line stopped my heart.
I memorized every word
on every page.
Then all the people of the
earth surrounded him.
The sad corpse gazed
at them, touched.
Slowly he sat up,
embraced the first man,
and began to walk.
And so I say.
In time, I saw that my father
had been right all along.
I was a fighter, brave; and words
made for mighty weapons.
I began writing poems.
I recited them for all
my schoolmates to hear.
I even won a poetry contest.
I will be the engineer
my father always wanted me
to be: I will be a poet.
I know now that the
fortune my father sought
so haplessly was always
buried in me.
It was just a matter
of finding it.
Fewer than half the girls
in the developing world will
ever reach secondary school.
By beating the odds, Senna
is writing a new chapter
for girls in Peru.
Girls need good schools.
And they need to stay.
Because a girl
with one extra year
of education can earn
20% more as an adult.
Because women operate
the majority of farms
and small businesses
in the developing world.
Educated girls are a
powerful force for change.
And this kind of change,
it happens fast.
In this next video,
writer Marie Arana, takes us on
location and shares what it was like
getting to know Senna
La Riconada for me was an
absolutely compelling experience
and I don't think I will
ever, ever forget the feeling
that I had in La Riconada,
not only for Peru
but for the human part of us.
There is something very medieval
about it; the people laboring
up the hills, the
misery of life.
The most important thing
in La Riconada is the gold.
Everything's up in the air,
no oversight whatsoever.
There are abandoned children
who roam the streets;
5-10 years ago it was 15,000
now it's 80,000 people
and they're all working
the mountain and the mines.
That's a toxic place and it
seeps down that mountain.
That is a very, very hard thing
to watch people live that way.
So education is really very
low on the sense of priorities.
You are brave daughter, fight.
You want to be an engineer,
Fight for it, never give up.
If you really have in your mind
the desire to want to do this,
you have to succeed.
I was blown away by this
little girl, Senna, who is
such a warrior in a way.
In the middle of a conversation
she will start spouting poetry.
"I don't feel the cold
of existence"
It's the most amazing thing
really in such a difficult
and hard and punishing place.
"My troubles and my triumphs..."
But this child has such a
great appreciation for words
and the power of words and she
digs down and loves poetry.
"I have lived little,
and I have become very tired."
There are a lot of
troubles that have come
in her life, a lot
of challenges.
Don't worry about it, no...
But she has managed to take it
all in stride and work harder
and feel good about herself.
Do you know what I'm saying?
She has a big heart,
she has a tiger inside.
I'd like to think that she has
the power and the will to rise
and somehow you feel
this from this little girl.
She says "I will do
this, I will succeed.
"I have no help, I have
nothing, I have nothing
"but I will do this."
That's pretty amazing.
In this final video, we see
how Senna is doing today.
Since the release of the film,
Senna's courage has inspired
the Girl Rising community, Intel and
CARE to support her continued education.
In June 2013, Senna's dream of
moving off the mountain
and going to a better school
came true.
Together, Senna and her family
relocated to a community that could
offer a better life.
My life has changed a lot.
I came here,
I saw new things...
a lot of people.
I like my school very much.
I feel comfortable
with my classmates...
In La Rinconada, I didn't have a
room for myself.
my siblings and I
all lived together.
But when I came here,
I had my own room
so I could study alone,
whenever I wanted to
do all my stuff and
become independent.
Now it's time for me to
live a new experience.
On December 27, 2013 Senna
graduated from secondary school.
I feel happy about the future
because I know I'll be a professional.
I will study hard so I can make
it into the university.
I will study to become a professional
and change my country, Peru.
I've always liked
business administration.
It's a career I've been interested
in since I was a little girl.
[These are Senna's
first pair of eyeglasses.]
I was born on a day
when God was sick.
Everybody knows that I am alive.
that I am bad;
and they do not know about
the December of this January.
In January 2014, Senna was
accepted into university.
The girl who proclaimed that she
would one day own her own company
and pay her workers well is now
on her way.
Senna is Girl Rising.
GIRL RISING
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