When I was in school many years ago, the school maintained a support initiative with a home for girls under the "national service for minors" SENAME. I remember that this home was in "metro San Joaquin", very close to the jail located there, it was called "Hogar los Girasoles", and there were more than 45 girls in a situation of abandonment and mental disability.

I visited this children's home with my teachers from first grade to third grade approximately, they were very intense years in which every two weekends I visited the girls, played with them and did manual workshops.

It was a very meaningful experience for me, because I was also a child and seeing the children of the home locked up in conditions of abandonment was very shocking.  At first it was difficult to enter because the girls were very close to us school students, now I understand that it was because they were in great need of affection.

With time we learned to know them and to listen to them, they had a lot to tell us... it was not easy to be part of that space but over the years we realized that we could contribute a grain of sand in such a difficult situation for them.

 

When I left school, I think that experience left a deep impression on me and made me reflect on the serious problems that exist in our society. Therefore, I decided to get involved in some way and start a search to understand these social problems.

It is for this and other reasons that I came to sociology and I am very interested at some point in the future to meet again with the issues of childhood. SENAME is an organization that showed me the state violence experienced by thousands of children in Chile and therefore I think it is an experience worth telling about with respect to my professional motivations.