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This is going to be a speech with three parts. Let's try not to leave anything out.
It's like when
- I'm sure that some of you have tried-
it's like when you have to write a tweet and it doesn't fit
just because of one character and you have to decide what's the first grammatical mistake
that you are going to make. More or less this is
When the guys from Gramo asked me what I wanted to be introduced as,
a lot of things came to my mind... Designer, father, creator, director, etc.
But actually I think that my biggest achievement is the fact of having stayed
in Paraguay after having had the opportunity to travel, study and work abroad.
Mainly because I come from here. There are people who know me
and know that I washed cars, I was an administrative assistant, fixed computers and
eventually somewhere around the nineties I started designing for the web and from there on
I didn't stop.
Logically, like a lot a of people, like a lot of our youth - I say our youth because
I'm already 33 so I'm starting to look backwards too
what happened to me is that I was HERE with my head THERE.
That is, I always had the idea that happiness and opportunities and success
were always going to be in the end of the road, there, not here.
In 2001 I sold everything I had and I went to Switzerland
with an offer from the United Nations.
I lasted 2 months...
Two months later, I came back, I bought back everything I had sold...
In 2006, I thought, well, it must have been because I went alone,
so I married and my wife and I sold everything we had
and we went to Albuquerque, New Mexico.
We lasted three months, we looked at each other, we came back, we bought back everything we had sold...
So in that moment, exhausted and accepting my condition of an unsuccessful emigrant,
I applied myself to make a list of those things,
that magnetic force that always drew me back to Paraguay.
And since I don't play football, so obviously it was not the football,
and it wasn't getting drunk with friends either,
so definitively it came from the people side.
The people I work with.
The people you meet, the neighbor,the people.
And more than that, the ability that the Paraguayans have to heal.
Because the Paraguayan is the type who has typically
and I raise my hand because this is what I just explained
sold the motorcycle, sold the house,sold the furniture,
gotten a loan to pay the flight ticket because he didn't have enough,
went to Madrid, in Barajas was forced to return,
was put in the same plane, sent back, didn't eat for three days,
got here, and the mom asked him "how are you my son?"
"All cool, mom...". And this is the Paraguayan.
And that ability to recover, together with the guts
I say guts because there are a lot of distinguished people here
To put an example, when we had just started this, what you just saw...
what happened is that a wire burnt out and the technician was back there,
while you were here watching, and fixed the wire in the darkness...
Well, I can't believe it -- an applause-
-- an applause-
And that is the Paraguayan. What would have happened in another place?
No, cut, tomorrow, it's not possible...
No, he fixed the wire in the darkness,
and what's more, he apologized,
he came out here and said I had to fix the wire in the darkness, forgive me...
Having already decided to stay, in 2010, with a company working, one day I was on the Skype
with a company working,
one day I was on the Skype of the company and I received a message,
like when somebody tries to contact you,
and it says: "How much are two weeks of your time
to shut the agency and design something with you in private?"
Well, such a budget I have to reply to...
First I asked why.
They said they were a company from the Netherlands
and I said that we had a lot of experience,
that we already worked with foreign clients
so they needn't come all the way here.
And they answered
"it's always a good excuse to go to Miami and escape from this winter
Apart from this, this is a very confidential project,
so we have to physically be there"
So just like you right now,
I was also chewing this over and wondering... Miami?
And it turned out that in our website,
in the contact part,
there was the address of a PO Box that we had in Miami
where our Yankee clients sent us the contracts...
So logically the Dutch company thought they were dealing with a company that was set in Miami.
And the answer was more difficult to write.
Let's see how do I explain to you...
So I wrote them, and then silence.
It was a matter of going and coming back,
and then suddenly silence.
Sometime later it became clear what my clients were doing -we have been working together for already two years-
they were actually going to the Wikipedia website to search where Asunción, Paraguay was.
And then they answered and said
"well, it's just another flight connection.
We just request that our rooms have AC".
I thought that was quite reasonable.
Finally three developers from this Dutch company
the company is an innovation company from The Netherlands 80 years old or more,
came and this was how, on the one hand, we started designing and
, on the other hand, they started programming
what currently is the Dutch Health Platform,
called Caren-Cares and Homs.
They are two products because they have two different profiles.
On the one hand, Homs is a portal.
For you to get an idea,
this is how it used to be done.
What's more, probably here in Paraguay it's still being done by hand.
Homs is where the health institutions in the Netherlands receive the urgent cases and consults.
And once the patient is ready to go home,
they don't stay in the hospital for the treatment because of the high rotation
when they are sent home, the health system designates a nurse for them.
There was such a high volume of information that they decided to digitalize it.
Nowadays this means that the nurse won't even have to go to the hospital.
She wakes up at home, checks the website
and the website tells her which patients she needs to take care of that day...
For instance, let's say, a 75-year-old man had a varicose veins operation.
In the Netherlands the buildings are very narrow,
generally 2 or 3 floors high,
and a man this old who's recovering from an operation
can't go out or open the door for the nurse to come in.
This is not a problem because the government replaces the lock
with a digital lock that can only be opened by the nurse's cell phone.
And of course, I, suspicious Paraguayan, like Jorge said a while ago,
also asked what happened if the nurse lost her cell phone
or decided to rob the man's house...
But this is not a problem either because the nurse can only open the lock
within the period of time in which the consult had been appointed.
Once the nurse has taken care of the patient,
she writes down all the vital information about the patient,
such as pressure, sugar, etc.
And from then on, all the loved ones can follow thepost-operative process of the patient.
This whole system was made by 5 people.
Two of them are here today
and three of them are in the Netherlands
This whole system was made by 5 people.
And today it's used by more than 170 hospitals
more than 70.000 nurses
and covers 200 thousand patients in Netherlands.
Why?, and logically this is a necessary question,
why can't this be done in Paraguay?
This is a tweet that I wrote last week because I thought it would be very interesting to share it with you
and it says that 8000 members of the TSJE registered 85 thousand people during 2012
and in that same time period only 2000 medical staff vaccinated one million children.
Why does Paraguay still shy away from technologies that are effective in terms of costs and accept obsolete systems that are becoming out-dated?
and accept obsolete systems that are becoming out-dated?
This is the question today and this is the answer that we have to search together.
Because of this, Paraguay has the highest voter cost in the whole region.
Just as an example.
So, again, why can't this be done in Paraguay?
This is a message for the youth.
I say youth from the perspective of a 33-year-old.
What catches my attention is that young people are nowadays
going down that road that I already went down,
where you think that opportunities
happiness are always there in the end of the road.
There when I finish my thesis,
there when I buy my laptop, there when I travel to Europe.
And actually we don't realize,
you don't realize that opportunities appear day-to-day
and that happiness is actually not there,
that happiness is also in the journey.
Not only in the destination.
And that happiness.. the happiness of finishing the thesis,
the happiness of buying a laptop, the happiness of traveling to Europe
is actually nothing more than prosperity,
not happiness.
I ask you to take me at my word because I was already there
and I didn't find happiness there.
In fact, in December I was in San Francisco for a month.
I had two job offers so I traveled there
and I had the opportunity to stay to get to really know the city.
I went to Tweetter, I went to Facebook,
and I turned down the two offers
because I refuse to be part of a group of people
that certainly have that prosperity
and thatare creating the current tools that we use to communicate daily
but that don't give a hand and that don't ask the other "how is your son doing?"
, who had just been hospitalized due to pneumonia, like it happened to me.
And then, apart from all of this, we can add the fact that they don't have what we have in excess.
GUTS.
This message is not only for the youth,
it also addresses the people responsible for creating opportunities for us:
working opportunities, growth opportunities
for the ones who decide to stay to build this country.
It's very important that you pay attention,
so that we don't wake up one day and find ourselves with the same scene than our Uruguayan brothers,
where only 15% of their population are between 15 and 24 years old.
And among those who decide to go abroad searching for the happiness
only 25% ever come back to Uruguay.
So I put the question and I believe that we all together have to look for the answer.
Thanks a lot!!