Liliana Cardona Marín
The celebrations and other activities that are planned for today go beyond the fact of gender. What the movements want to vindicate are the struggles to obtain spaces and achieve them, in societies created purely by men and for men. In recent days nothing less was known on social networks as the global vice president of Coca-Cola Communications, someone from Quimbaya, Quindío there?
And there is no reason to feel less, for being from this promised land. What you do have to be very proud of is that this has not been an impediment to fight for your dreams, to study, make an effort and study more. Today’s two stories are a bit similar: it is about a village girl who loves music, and a scientist who studied and studied. Both represent the tenacity of the pereiranas, but the most important thing is that they are very happy in what they do.
The street is music to your ears
Miyerly Ensueño Rodríguez Urrego knew from a very young age that her life would revolve around music, when she heard the Christmas carol ‘Mi burrito sabanero’ for the first time. She was the Cartago of more than 40 years ago, but her family, which has had a musical vein, interpreted that what the girl needed was to enter the town conservatory and that is why she entered the bandola, tiple and typical strings. .
But the spirit of Miyerly is a free spirit, adventurous to take risks and listen to the inner voice. What deeply motivated her was the electric guitar, it was the decade of the 80s, she also wanted to be her own boss, for this reason, when shortly after graduating with a degree in Music from UTP and the afternoon before being named by Pereira’s Secretary of Education, as a full-time teacher at Aquilino Bedoya, approached the mayor’s office and told them no, thank you very much and left with her music elsewhere.
Science, a narrow path for women
Raquel Weinhart-Mejía, she does know what it is to study. For her, talking about algorithms, nanoparticles, molecules and scientific publications is like saying hello. Her love for chemistry and taking advantage of the space-time where life put her, led her down the path of Engineering, then the Master of Science and Macromolecular Engineering, the PhD in size adjustment and surface functionalization of nanoparticles supramolecular and metal-organic structures for biomedical applications, to a postdoc in surface chemistry for the development of a bladder cancer detection kit.
Dr. Weinhart-Mejía, a Pereiran living on the border between Holland and Germany, deeply believes in the family, she is the mother of two children, a warm and simple person, nothing to do with the concept of a science student who looks above of the shoulder
How is a dream come true?
Like any young woman who recently arrived in the city, Miyerly had several jobs but the only thing she paid attention to was the vendors who came to the places where she was a receptionist, she took the opportunity to ask them everything related to the subject, while she was investigating that world she took A serious and wise decision, she enrolled in the university, but she was part of the half that was after musical knowledge and not being a teacher.
A short time later the opportunity to sell red wine in the streets came into his life and eureka! no one ever took her out of there again. The faculty was in Olaya Park, so he took advantage of when he didn’t have classes or there was a strike to fly off to sell coffee, already in the middle of his degree he saw that the electric guitar thing was never going to happen and although he thought about retiring he saw that in the wind instruments something sounded to him “I continued, it was forward, forward”, recalls Miyerly and he did not let himself be intimidated by social pressure when they told him: was the degree too great for him and that is why he sells coffee?
You have to show motivation!
When Dr. Raquel is asked about the key to achieving dreams, she only answers: “Let them see your motivation, what I have achieved is because they have seen that in me and I show it to them.” She admits that when she became a mother things changed, because she can no longer spend so much time in the laboratory and although she admits that her husband gives her a lot of help, she compares herself with scientists who are fathers and sees how for them life goes on the same and even though It is Europe, in that the situation is not different at all to the Latin countries.
The doctor demonstrates every day in the laboratory that there are no barriers that prevent doing what one wants.The doctor was asked how a women’s day was lived in Germany and she said that you don’t see roses, gifts or things like that there, what they do have is that they have normalized women doing doctorates and that they have equality opportunities to compete with them for jobs.
Given
Miyerly sold coffee until March 22, 2013, he went from coffee to music in the same street, the coffee had given him to buy a sax. She is about to celebrate 10 years delivering beautiful melodies to the people of Pereira.