Storytelling

Challenge and Selection      Storytelling is one of the tools that I am more comfortable using. As

a person who was born in Venezuela, I have lived majority of my life  seeing a country go from one of the richest, to one of the most violent,  poorest, and worst places to live in the world. During years that had  multiple civil unrests, war and misery in my country, almost every college  student, including myself, became some sort of social advocate. The ones  that were lucky enough like myself had to find ways to help those in need,  as well as utilize storytelling, empathy, among other tools to try to strive  for change. Once if moved to United States, I became part of several  Venezuelan support groups whose job was to create awareness of the  situation as well as find donations for resources to send back home to the  people in need. Storytelling became one of the things we used to do every  day and the reason I selected this tool.     Application      Storytelling basically covered almost all the job that we tried to do

raising awareness and trying to find funds, but the one time it was most  significant was during a Speech class in college after I transferred schools  to the United States. We had to do a big presentation for our final grade  on any topic we wanted, and of course I chose Venezuela as an attempt to  raise awareness. One of the first things to realize about storytelling is that  people need to be aware of the context and the facts surrounding your  story, so me giving a story about a different country wouldn’t resonate  greatly with my audience. Half of my presentation was basically facts,  some students did not know we were in the same continent, or same  hemisphere, background, the downfall of the country, everything that  could help them understand the situation. For the rest of the presentation  was trying to teach a group of students how something like this was  actually happening few hours away from their country and they were not  even aware. I would try to explain the situation while also trying to make

the audience relate with my experience and the experience of others.  Explaining things such as how I could go from trying to survive every  day, to a normal life in a different country, how people in the top 10% in  Venezuela make less than minimum wage in the USA due to devaluation  in our currency. Trying to relate their struggles, which are real struggles,  with the difficulties other people like them were having with a much more  difficult and undesired context and opportunity.    Insight and Approach      Some of the most valuable insight that I learned was how unaware

people are of the realities that other people live in other countries. How  telling a story sounds almost like fiction to some people or how hard to  relate it is for someone who simply doesn’t really know that these  problems exist. Another thing that I realized is also the fact that someone’s  misery is not bigger than someone else even if you could objectively rank  one as worse than the other, to each person their biggest misery or  difficulty feels just as hard as someone else’s biggest misery. With this  insight it helped me understand why it is hard to make people relate  sometimes. Telling people, they are lucky or spoiled living in a country  with opportunity, doesn’t make them be able to relate better to someone  else’s misery; however, telling my story, my personal experiences, other  people experiences and explaining the situation with the right storytelling  will raise awareness and people will relate to you. In the end most of my  class mates asked for information to either learn, help, support or send  donations, so my storytelling was successful and we were able to help  people in need. As far as approach, I would approach it the same way with  storytelling as the main tool since it is the most effective; however, I  would learn from experience and mistakes in previous instances of  storytelling. Finding better ways for the audience to relate, being more  understanding of their own problems before expecting them to care about  my own or other people problems. In the future and as time goes by, I  believe I am more prepared every time to use storytelling as a tool,  whether it is for raising awareness, or for other professional situations.

