Partners in Learning: A Story from Chile

Rodrigo Martínez

This week I read Jonathan Livingston Seagull for the first time. As I read it, I thought about how we share our time, talents and dreams as the staff of the Shalom Center. I compared our work to that of the seagull: we invite each person who comes to the Shalom Center, whether debilitated by trauma or limited by economic or educational disadvantages, to explore all the potential that God offers in creating us as unique and special individuals. In opening a world of possibilities to others, the world opens to us, too, in the richness of experiences and personal testimonies. We are mutually dependent on each other to open our wings and fly to new horizons.

The book leads to a world without limits where the master and the apprentice learn together, where the student becomes the teacher and the teacher the student. Paulo Freire, in his book Pedogogy of the Oppressed says: “Teachers and students (leadership and people), co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge. As they attain this knowledge of reality through common reflection and action, they discover themselves as its permanent re-creators.”

Jonathan Livingston Seagull inspires me into a new kind of facilitation, one where I recognize that I am a learner. Reaching greater heights and breaking through my own limitations is not only a personal goal, but it is a challenge that looks always to what I give and receive in the process.

I want to be the one to see the possibilities, to look beyond the limitations of our past, to new ways of relating and of uplifting each other's dignity. I don’t want to hoard my learning but to watch it multiply in the experiences of others. When I fail, I want to take the failure and transform it into the resource for greater growth and recognition of my dependence on others.

Today I see my life as that of a seagull seeking beyond that which I have known and recognizing that I need the vision and experiences of others to become all that I can be.

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Translated and adapted from a journal entry by Rodrigo Martínez, Facilitator at the Shalom Center of the Pentecostal Church of Chile, a Global Ministries partner.