2023-05-15 05:00:00
The journalist Kiko Cabanillas narrates in Immigrants the hard experience of those who come to Galicia to look for a better future
15 may 2023 . Updated at 05:00 h.
29 years ago Kiko Cabanillas had a serious accident. He almost cost him his life. She suffered a head injury and spent two months in a coma hanging on by a thread. Her rehabilitation was long and complex, paralyzing her profession as a journalist. While this was taking place, started working with the immigrant collective of Pontevedra. He taught them Spanish and attended to their social and administrative needs, among other things, she recalls. After a few years he settled in A Corua. And he continued with the same solidarity activity linked to the NGO Ecos do Sur, of which he even became its president for a period of four years.
Now he teaches Spanish at home. He also does it on Skype. I have five Arab students right now in a classroom that I have created in my house. In three or four years, if they have proof, they speak Spanish. Some have achieved it even in a year. Learning the language is the best way to integrate. If you don’t know it, it’s very difficult, if not impossible, he says. He lives in O Ventorrillo, a popular chorus neighborhood that has a high rate of immigrant population. I bought a small apartment with the compensation they gave me for the accident. They are like my family. I lead a very modest life and help them where I can, she says.
In the classes we do not only talk about grammatical constructions, vocabulary or linguistic twists. They also talk about life, about the harsh existence that these people have suffered. In many cases they come from Morocco and have arrived in Spain by crossing the Strait of Gibraltar in harsh conditions.. The immigrant is, above all, poor. These are people who spend all their savings to come to Spain in search of money. Most end up in foreign detention centers. They remain in no man’s land, without papers, without any type of rights and, many times, harassed by the police. Getting out of that situation is tremendously difficult, he describes.
Time.news in poetic prose
Based on this, Cabanillas has written the book immigrants, a Time.news in poetic prose of my didactic and organizational experience with the immigrant group of A Corua, according to the author. He is 57 years old and has several previously published titles. Cabanillas explains that his students tell him that they have left their parents with illnesses in their country. Or that they have had bad experiences with the security forces. And all of this is found in the pages of this title, which can be obtained online and which, shortly, will have a physical edition. Throughout the book I let myself be carried away by internal and literary games based on those stories, he says.
The initiative has a charitable purpose. All proceeds from the book will go to the NGO Sen Valos.
When you arrive you are afraid of feeling that look of rejection for being an immigrant
fine ulloa
Manuel Alejandro Flores Osorio came into the world in 1996. He studied Computer Science and worked for the international cable television company Direct TV for seven years. He fell in love and got married. If in 2020 we had to tell who he was, we would talk about a young urbanite (he still lived in the city of more than two million inhabitants where he was born) who at 24 years old was fully integrated into the labor market, beginning to build a family own and that he enjoyed leisure with the same friends he had since high school. However, today Manuel is defined with a label: immigrant. One arrives with many fears. You know that what you were up to here is as if it were erased and that, possibly, you are going to face things and situations that you did not face in your country. When you arrive you are very afraid of feeling that look of rejection from people precisely because you are an immigrant, this young Venezuelan recounts. Fortunately, he says that in Ourense he has only seen that look on very few occasions.
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