After watching Chimamanda Adichie’s Ted Talk, I realized how much impact stories have towards our views of life. When she spoke about when she was small and wrote her first stories, she would write them as Westerners did because that is all that she knew. Chimamanda didn't know about African writing, she just repeated what she had read. It was only when she discovered African writing that she got a new perspective of how to write her stories.
This is how sadly life is. Being Colombian, makes it hard of how internationally people view me. When I say where I am from they don't think of the beautiful mountains, coffee, or the great fauna and flora that exists in my country. Instead what first pops in their mind is drugs, violence, FARC, corruption and more. This is due to the one story that most people read: the bad ones. These things may be true, but as Chimamanda said, "Stereotypes sometimes are true but they are incomplete." People read the stories of how bad Colombia is, but they don't read the rest which talk about its beauty and greatness.
I can´t judge people when they do this though, because when someone talks to me about Africa I can´t differ the situations of most countries. This is something that I must change because one cannot let ignorance take power over what is happening. I must read more stories and not just focus on one because if I do Colombia is just a jungle where all people live in trees.
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