Are our sons able to handle the world we deliver to them?

In these last fifty years, our world was drastically changed. The life we had in my childhood was completely transformed. I’m trying to remember my first year in the school. It’s like to plan a voyage through the time. I can remember some day in the middle of the nineteen sixties. It was a very rigorous winter. I have some photos from that time to help me to bring those memories.

I always woke up when my mom had made some noise in the kitchen, next to my room. There was an incredible smell of food, at that morning, still in the dark; I could feel the cold on my face. The winter was coming, and in these days, it´s hard the walking to the school, the winds from South Pole easily can make the temperatures to fall under zero. Last week there was a big snowstorm and the classes were suspended.

I stand up, quickly, putting my cold clothes on, and I went to the kitchen; where there were a warm coming from the burning in the wood stove. Last year the electric light had come to our village, and in the kitchen, we had our unique point of light. The electricity had made a fantastic improving in our life style.

There were some books on the table, now every night, after the dinner, under the light, we stayed some time reading, playing game tables or listen to the radio. It is a kind of new life. My dad was a genius of the radio, he changes valves, turn buttons, and there they were sounds from all parts of the world were arriving to our kitchen. Things that I couldn’t understand, the radio brought to us.  Last night, the man in the radio was really exciting, speaking something like “beetles”, and, in the following, one strange music invaded our hearings.

Our village, in the south of Brazil, near the Argentinian’s border, was becoming into a little city, in the first seven years of my life, beyond electric lights, streets, cars. There were a new church under construction, “it will be a most beautiful cathedral in our state” had told me the catholic priest. Sometimes we had leave the school to help in its construction. And mainly, the place to where was walking, this cold morning, my school. The dirt road, frozen water puddles and a cold wind make me shiver in this journey, but it no disturb me, because be with my friends again, worth the effort.

The alarm of phone interrupt my thoughts, this winter the temperatures are strangely hot. The guilty is “El Niño”, but last decades is very rare when the thermometers are under zero. I left the frontier, and moved to one of the most beautiful places of the world, the Santa Catarina Island; it was, more than forty years ago. The modern place and city we live doesn't remember, in nothing, my first home, neither my little town.

I wake up, to have the coffee, thus we call breakfast here, with my son. His classes start in two hours, the city remains in silence yet. The noise will start soon, the smell of the cars, either. We have some industrial food to eat, like a cereal, some bread, they are a colorful with almost no smell, and few flavor. His school is near my house, there is a good weather, and despite this, I'll take him to there. In last years, my safety preoccupations are be increased; these problems are becoming epidemic in Brazilian big cities.

My wife, like me, also has many concerns about the future of our family. The quality of food we bring home. Our safety, the freedom of our kids to go to some places with friends. And this world, where the expenses, to maintain the level of live, have rising year by year. What our children could do to be prepared to take care themselves to live in this time. This is our most frequent thoughts.

The walk to the school was transformed. I am here, in some electronic place, concluding this class work, supporting by colleagues that I probably never will meet. In a school, in a place of the world, where I never was.  But, something have never changed, the willingness to learn. Always! And the good will to do the things to make the world better for to my sons and to everyone.