Here is the full transcript of NBC News journalist Mariana Atencio’s TEDx Talk presentation: What Makes You Special? at TEDxUniversityofNevada conference. This event occurred on January 21, 2017. Read the full bio of the speaker here.
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Mariana Atencio – NBC News journalist
Thank you so much.
I am a journalist. My job is to talk to people from all walks of life, all over the world. Today I want to tell you why I decided to do this with my life and what I’ve learned.
My story begins in Caracas, Venezuela in South America where I grew up, a place that to me was and always will be filled with magic and wonder. From a very young age, my parents wanted me to have a wider view of the world.
I remember one time when I was around seven years old, my dad came up to me and said: “Mariana, I’m going to send you and your little sister, who was six at the time, to a place where nobody speaks Spanish. I want you to experience different cultures.”
He went on and on about the benefits of spending an entire summer in ‘this summer camp’ in the United States. Stressing a little phrase that I didn’t pay too much attention to at the time, ‘you never know what the future holds’.
Meanwhile in my seven-year-old mind, I was thinking we were going to get to summer camp in Miami. Maybe it was going to be even better and we were going to go a little further north to Orlando where Mickey Mouse lived. I got really excited.
My dad, however, had a slightly different plan: from Caracas he sent us to Brainerd, Minnesota. Mickey Mouse was not up there and with no cell phone, no Snapchat or Instagram, I couldn’t look up any information. We get there and one of the first things I noticed was that the other kids’ hair was several shades of blonde and most of them had blue eyes.
Meanwhile this is what we looked like. The first night, the camp director gathered everyone around the campfire and said: “Kids, we have a very international camp this year. The Atencios are here from Venezuela.”
The other kids looked at us as if we are from another planet. They would ask us things like: “Do you know what a hamburger is, or do you go to school in a donkey or canoe?” I would try to answer in my broken English, and they would just laugh.
And I know they were not trying to be mean; they were just trying to understand who we were and make a correlation with the world they knew. We could either be like them or like characters out of a book filled with adventures like Aladdin or The Jungle Book. We certainly didn’t look like them; we didn’t speak their language. We were different. And when you’re seven years old, that hurts.
But I had my little sister to take care of and she cried every day at summer camp. So I decided to put on a brave face and embrace everything I could about the American way of life. We later did what we called the summer camp experiment for eight years in different cities that many Americans haven’t even heard of. What I remember most about these moments was when I finally clicked with someone, making a friend was a special reward. Everybody wants to feel valued and accepted and we think it should happen spontaneously. But it doesn’t.
When you’re different you have to work at belonging. You have to be either really helpful, smart, funny, anything to be cool for the crowd you want to hang out with. Later on when I was in high school, my dad expanded on his summer plan and from Caracas he sent me to Wallingford, Connecticut for senior year of high school. This time I remember daydreaming on the plane about the American high school experience with a locker. It was going to be perfect just like in my favorite TV show: Saved by the Bell.
I get there and they tell me that my assigned roommate is eagerly waiting. I opened the door and there she was sitting on the bed with a headscarf. Her name was Fatima and she was Muslim from Bahrain and she was not what I expected. She probably sensed my disappointment when I looked at her because I didn’t do too much to hide it.
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