When dance merengue assimilation office
A group of friends rode the Brazilian restaurant Galet The Tijuca almost 30 years ago in the image and likeness of another, with the same name, which is love, and which remains open today in Rio de Janeiro. Alvaro Marchesi knows both premises. It was also prendado from Brazil 13 years ago, a country with which it has a great professional relationship, but especially emotional. The vagaries of fate led him in January last year to head the Organization of Ibero-American States (OEI) for education, Scientific and Cultural Organization, which has enabled it to strengthen further this relationship.
Among great caipirinhas and caipiroskas (he prefers vodka to cachaça), a feijoada (manioc flour to thicken) and Galet (a chicken tomatero) account how important it is to get seriously in the role when it leads a body representing 23 countries as diverse, despite their obvious cultural closeness. And it has put to the bottom. Among the worst things that took after his appointment was that any minister latinoamericana you out to dance. It was the most frightening ridiculous, confesses. So Gema, his wife, removed Rome with Santiago to find a solution. Thanks to an advertisement he saw in the pharmacy, gave to Eve. "You see, my husband is that for reasons of work has to dance," he spit Gema. The persuaded. The first opportunity to show what they learned he arrived in Panama, one year after starting classes. "I booted up with a merengue, dance I like most, though neither gives me wrong ... and the sauce around the bachata and I get very well. Neither felt Latin America or Latin American representative until I was dancing merengue" . Marchesi is thorough with everything. It has a 14-year-old son, Luis Fernando, who lives in Brazil with her mother, who is from Sao Paulo. It is going to see him every two months, but called on the phone to take the lesson three times a week. At his home in Boadilla del Monte in Portuguese have a copy of each textbook that examines the child. "Dad, you're a heavy," he said often repeated as the father without hiding pride.
For almost two decades, Marchesi of the hand-made by the then education minister, his close friend Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba the much-criticised by some as admired by others, educational law that put the stones leading to modernize education Spanish the logs. Education is his life (also for Rubalcaba, although it does not feel that way) and now is turned in all of Latin America "to promote social equity". Headed the Conference of Ministers of Education that starts next Monday in El Salvador and which set targets for the next decade. The meeting coincides with the celebration of the bicentennial.
Already in the dessert, with a passion fruit mousse front, back to his son. "Luis Fernando changed my life. It took me to know the social reality of those countries. Discover the passion they have to learn new things, move and enjoy, which collides with the conservatism of Western societies. His wealth is the vitality ; His big problem, inequality. " Can they settle in a decade that these inequalities have continued to grow for 200 years? They are in it.
