Big Dreams

Chapter 1: Roots

 My name is Sara Monteiro, I'm 30 years old and I'm portuguese. I was born in Porto, one of the most famous and visited cities in the country.

Portugal is a great country for vacations which attracts many tourists; it has good weather and beaches, beautiful rivers and views, amazing food and wine, a lot of history, among other things. Porto is known as the city of "francesinha" -it is kind of a sandwich with a special sauce- and the Porto wine, it's also my hometown and will always be. I just love walking around the city and when you notice it has already been a whole afternoon and all you did was eat ice cream and take pictures of the river and the bridges or the sky and the monuments, because the architecture is also very beautiful.

The year was 2021, I lived with my father and my grandmother, had just turned 19, got into college and we were going through a worldwide pandemic - Covid-19. I'd like to say that life was good with no big complications, but that wouldn't be true. Life had always been complicated, we had never had enough money for everything and the virus affected us a lot turning things even worse, we even had to move from Porto to a more remote location, Valongo, due to high rental prices. This was not a change that I liked.

Despite all of that, I had never seen my father so happy. He met this woman in early 2020 and at the end of the year he proposed to her, so we were planning the wedding that was supposed to take place in May 2022. I actually liked her a lot, I thought she was perfect for him and it was really nice having her around the house, she took some joy there with her.

I was taking a course with an integrated master's degree in pharmaceutical sciences which I was loving, although it was really demanding. What I liked the most were the lab lessons because I could work as a real scientist: I understood what I was doing and why things happened the way they did. I think that was exactly the thing that always fascinated me and dragged me to science: the need to know why things happened in a certain way.

I had worked a lot to get there but finally I was in the Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Porto. That had been my dream for a very long time, I always liked science and wanted to work in labs in some way and that college was going to give me that opportunity and, even though I didn't agree with the education system in Portugal, I knew that that University was very good because of the amazing teachers and the good facilities, which gave me some comfort thinking that I would leave there prepared to be a great professional.

For any freshmen in Portugal the first year of college meant entering a whole new world; there would be parties and something we call "praxe" which is a term that describes the whole traditions in universities, it's like an initiation ritual for freshmen and, despite what it might look like, it's something that a lot of people wait their whole life to be able to do and, whoever does it, says it was one of the best things of college. It involves respecting the older ones as a hierarchy and rise over the years; over the time there are special festivities like "queima das fitas" and ceremonies of special occasions like when we use our costume - called "traje" - for the first time. Different add-ons are also gained over the years to complete the "traje" and older students become college godparents of the younger ones. Due to the pandemic that devastated the world, none of this happened in my first year, we didn't even have the whole classes at college, most of them were online. It was difficult to stay at home all the time without being able to do anything besides studying such as going out with my friends, going to the park or to the beach to see the sunset.

It was also kind of impossible to meet new people during a pandemic, so I considered myself lucky because I had made one friend, Khatarina (or Trina, as we called her). She was Brazilian and was alone in Portugal to study there. We got along really well, as if we had known each other forever and it was nice to have someone in college that I liked and whom I could talk to about the studies and everything else.