Before I could identify her face, I already recognized her name. Like many people, I had seen her books and knew that Isabel Allende was a great national writer.

When I was 12 years old, my mom gave me "The City of Beasts", and one scene stuck with me, it ends with the words: "(...) happiness consists in achieving what we have waited for a long time". Those words resonate strongly if you think about it in the context of women's rights. Happiness put on hold while we wait to be treated without violence, with dignity, respect and in an equitable manner.
Isabel Allende has actively contributed from different spaces so that a part of that happiness reaches women and girls around the world. Her work as a Latin American writer of international scope, allows her to be a reference for young people around the world. Did you know that Isabel Allende is one of the ten most recognized cultural exponents of Chile abroad? Her stories have been translated into more than forty languages, adapted for television and in total millions of copies of her books have been sold.

Along with her impressive presence in literature, Isabel chooses to go beyond letters. She is also an activist for women's rights. Since 1996, in memory of her daughter Paula, she has run the Isabel Allende Foundation. With this initiative she seeks to guarantee reproductive rights, economic independence and protection against violence to girls and women.

Uniting activism and her writing, Isabel Allende is an inspiring woman who for years has oriented her actions to create a future where women are leaders and spokeswomen for change. A future where we can have that longed-for happiness and girls' dreams flourish.

It was not a normal shopping day at the supermarket, starting with my daughter Bruna pulling my sleeve with extreme childish strength to get to the toy aisle as soon as possible. "I want the one with red hair called Colorito" she would say in a sort of mantra that she repeated tirelessly with the impetus that only a child can have. The decorations in the enclosure already had Christmas colors in October and my daughter's face completely disarmed me when she looked at me with a smile from ear to ear while holding her treasure in her hands. It was the first time I had ever seen it - a simple little cloth doll was what my daughter wanted so badly? It was, and I have to admit that the little elf gave me a love at first sight. From the cardboard box I could appreciate a surprising dedication; beautifully designed, it announced a legend that spoke of the magic of Christmas and that this being would come to life to make mischief weeks before Christmas Eve... The rest is already part of our family tradition and you will understand why.

Once at home, Bruna and I lived together the experience of touching his soft fabric and watching his red hair wobble playfully. I must admit that I found it cute, because the lanky elf is of an absolute sympathy in its design; "an elegant simplicity" is the right phrase that crowns a toy that seems handmade by a craftswoman, even thinking that Santa's workshop, as it says in its legend, exists to achieve these wonders.

And I repeat the word wonder, because watching your daughter and her friends play with rag dolls, elves, reindeer and pets, to which they put voices and movements with great ingenuity, is beautiful.

Being in goal is a singular position, a sort of solitude in company. A hunter in reverse: her job is not to get caught, her triumph is not the moment of the goal, but to spoil someone else's party. It takes courage to be in such a place. Being in the goal is a solitude that is not solipsism, it is precisely the opposite, as one must never be attentive to the intentions of the players, decipher the language invented by their complicity to attack, their cunning and reactions; it requires a kind of attention that does not accept generalities, one runs the risk of making a new decision every time, stumbling, focused on every detail. Such a position requires radical empathy.

Christiane Endler is the captain of the Chilean women's national soccer team, in 2021 she won the title of best goalkeeper in the world by the International Federation of Football History and Statistics and in 2022 she won FIFA's "The Best" award for being the best goalkeeper. Her trajectory opens paths, the most obvious thing would be to say that it generates opportunities for other women, who, like her, know that soccer has no gender; but there is something else that her talent leaves us, a subtle lesson: that leading does not always mean scoring goals and that deduction is not a calculation, but requires the art of sensitivity, of an attention in which empathy participates.

Dear diary,
It's been a while since I wrote because we moved again and I just found you today among the moving boxes. So I am going to make a summary of the last time. Now we are in Concepción, which is a very nice city. I said goodbye to San Felipe with sadness, but also excited about what would be in our new home. And what we would eat. Because here there is sea, so dad promised he will give me to taste some delicious things that the fishermen pull out with their nets. In Conce we didn't have a house when we arrived, so we settled in a HOTEL! Just like in the movies. At night they left chocolates on our pillow and for breakfast we could take whatever we wanted. The best of all was the bread baked by Don Jose, the hotel cook, whom I watched every day working through the half-open kitchen door. It was so much fun living there, I wish we could have stayed there forever, but dad already found a house and we moved a few days ago.

Yesterday was a round Saturday. It started out melancholic, continued amazing and ended super happy. I woke up very early missing my abuelitas, now that we live in the south we don't see them as much and I miss them a lot. Last night I dreamt about my grandma Checha. She came to see us and brought us a giant pot of lemon chicken. So I woke up with the taste of delicious chicken in my mouth and with a sad heart, also longing for my grandmother Marta and the aromas of her kitchen. Mom noticed and, as soon as we finished breakfast, she asked me to go with her to buy fruits and vegetables. That's how I got to know the fair, the most incredible place in the world. There were many colorful stalls, the most beautiful vegetables I have ever seen and the vendors were shouting loudly to offer their products. It is pure life in that place! "Ya, casera, you're going to take the garlic, the good garlic, the garlic for the husband, so he won't fall asleep", shouted a lady with a polka dot apron, while a gentleman offered pumpkins saying that they were "the best for legs, hair and blue eyes". Mom walked slowly among the different stalls, smelled the fruit, contemplated the tomatoes and carefully chose what she was going to buy. I looked from one side to the other, impressed with each thing I saw, with the sounds and the smells, with so much love that was everywhere.

-Eating is much more than feeding, Fer- mom whispered to me, while she pointed out to a landlord the most hidden watermelon of all. -It is a beautiful art, made by carefully choosing the ingredients, cooking with love, dressing the table beautifully and sharing the food with those we love. When we cook we say many things, we show love and tell our story.

At the fair all my sorrows were taken away and, when I returned home, the surprises continued. Dad had gone to the port with my sister and a lot of different aromas danced in the messy kitchen.

-Come closer, mijita, today you are going to taste the delicacies of our sea- he shouted excitedly, offering me between his fingers an elongated shell with a soapy tongue inside.

-That's disgusting, Dad! I'm not going to eat that filth!

-Daughter, be respectful with the fruits that the ocean gives us. This "filth", as you call it, is called "macha". And it is the tastiest thing you can imagine. It has an intense flavor and you will love it. Trust me. And so I did. I closed my eyes tightly, wrinkled my nose and swallowed saliva before opening my lips. A second later, an explosion of flavor in my mouth. First, strange. Then, delicious.
-Yummy, Dad, I want to eat them all!

Here's an ode I came up with for the macha :
Macha of the seas
That you came all the way to my mouth
Don't ever leave me
That you have driven me crazy

Now I go to sleep happy, with my belly full of machas and my heart very happy, my head full of ideas and my soul full of dreams. Or decrees, which are the dreams that come true. And today I decree that I will be the best cook in the world, I will have a restaurant near the sea, I will go to the fair every morning, I will invent the most delicious recipes and I will tell many stories through them.

But, dear diary, this is still a secret, so do not tell anyone. Tomorrow I'm going to wait for mom to take her nap before I get down to work.

Fernanda Fuentes Cárdenas is a professional chef and amateur poet, owner of the Nub restaurant in Tenerife and the only Chilean to have been awarded a Michelin star for her cuisine. In 2022 she will open her first restaurant in Santiago, where she hopes to continue rescuing culinary heritage and transmitting the history of her roots through her creations.

Would you live in a house of water? He had said there was once a body that was a house that was a plot that was vital work substrate warmth and breath was. I had said: imagined. I would have said house and did. It is. It manufactures the mind and gathers: the temperature that a body needs, minimum residue to furnish the world, organ that lives and that which is lived, would you live? The home must be light. A house: organic matter, amniotic fluid, oscillation in contact. He imagined: and if your body is a house of water, would you live? Fish in thought, fish in the abdomen embrace an idea. Skin speculates its warmth. Speculates judgment the possibilities of making a belly that was stay project on land. Intimacy between wood and ocean. Trust the substance, respect the materials, observe the verbs: think, conceive, sketch, rehearse, plot, touch, compose. There was (past tense) a mental image in the inner garden of the head / there is (present tense) a shire that throws earth / there will be (future tense) a community around the rain. A house takes root? Tell me: if you were told she made a house of water, would you live? If they told you gills if they told you float in the secret of moisture if they told you return to seed. If you were told the world is vast and you are small, would you live?

The difficulties of astronomy are unknown to those of us who do not belong to this science that studies the celestial bodies of the universe. But in a field of knowledge that we have traditionally been taught -and encouraged- that it is for men, for several years now Chilean women working in this discipline have begun to shine.

Although the new generations still face obstacles such as insufficient presence in academia and also prejudices about the capabilities of girls in the exact sciences, everything indicates that little by little, at least from the sciences, gender stereotypes have begun to be eliminated through facts: women scientists who are changing the world.

Laura Perez, PhD in astrophysics, is a star, a rank that she has received two awards: one international, the Award for Young Researchers in Frontier Science in Developing Countries (2021); and another national, the Adelina Gutierrez Award for Scientific Excellence (2020). Recognitions that highlight her contribution to the development of astronomy and also an inspiration for those who want to venture into complex disciplines.

The discoveries that Laura has made throughout her career allow us to visualize a future in which we not only see more women scientists working in astronomy but also leading research of excellence. A world in which new generations will be able to enter more and more into those areas of the scientific field that until now have been unjustly linked to men. Laura's life story will undoubtedly help girls and adolescents not to hesitate to follow the path of their vocation.

What animates and fuels the flame of science in each of us, asks biologist and ecologist Bárbara Saavedra in a Lecture presented to the Society for Cell Biology in 2017. The metaphor she uses in her presentation is significant for those who, like her, have made the public space their own room: women in the sciences are like fatuous fires, she says, a tiny flame that burns by itself in a hostile territory and that travels, at ground level and in a zigzagging way, a path traced by hand. We are a new force, numerous, creative, passionate, prepared, she affirms with conviction, and her words remind me of all those curious little girls who play with small earthen pigs, collect shells on the beach, assemble herbariums with the plants in the garden or memorize the constellations that illuminate the night sky. Each one of them is a woman of science and that tiny, mischievous and fickle spark, which drives them to observe and think about the world they inhabit, can become a flame capable of imagining other possible futures.

The famous phrase "the personal is political", attributed to the American feminist Carol Hanisch, seems to me to be an apt way to talk about Barbara's professional trajectory. Her deep conviction about the value of biodiversity for the well-being of humanity marks her own roadmap, the one that has led her to promote initiatives to protect Patagonian peatlands and to reflect on the urgency of incorporating the intrinsic relationship between nature, human rights and democracy in the new Magna Carta. To listen to her is to connect with her passion for the preservation of wetlands, for the restoration of ecosystems devastated by human action and for the defense of guanacos and huemules stalked by an extractivist economy. To read her writings is to understand that the ecological perspective is not a fashion, but an imperative, and that the urgency of her discourse is consistent with a personal choice that seeks to generate concrete political action.

This enthusiasm for building a culture of conservation, which will place Chile at the forefront of biodiversity care, makes her a person who inspires many girls and adolescents to pursue scientific careers. Having female referents in science, considering the long history of silencing or minimizing their work, is a subject that interests Barbara: There is a gigantic value every time a woman does science. A learned work unfolded inch by inch by each craftswoman of her own life. And that, when she begins to share it, she can bring the raw material of science closer to others like her. I share that feminine synergy and the revolution involved in making her way in the arid academic and professional field. That image of collaboration and sisterhood, implicit in Barbara's wishes, invites us to see how women in science, apparently isolated from each other, with their own stories of struggle and survival, have collaborated in the weaving of that network that illuminates the path of those who precede them and those to come.

Eleven years ago, Barbara wrote in her blog that women in science would make a difference and would turn the hand of history as it has been known until now. We will build a different future, she asserted, which will only be possible if we recognize the vital interrelationship between humans and biodiversity, the cornerstone on which our national socio-ecological system is built. From her personal and public trench, Bárbara Saavedra summons all of us, the hardened and difficult to extinguish fatuous fires, to work, in a subtle way and with tenacious resistance, for that necessary change that we must make in one and a thousand human practices, transforming them from activities that destroy the natural base of our planet, to practices that allow us to sustain it in time.

He was born on an island and has the music. It is enough. The invisible cord that unites the pianist, with that land in Rapa Nui language, is not cut. Neither with fame, nor with travel, nor with her studies in the best universities, nor with her album, which has become number one in sales. Better is the sea, he says to himself, and again and again he returns to the island.

He started at the age of nine and in only three months the music was there, he knew it, he understood it, he heard it from the inside. Until several years later, he gives concerts around the world that speak of an Easter odyssey.
Mahani Teave invents a school. On her island there is art, there are traditions; they have their own notes, their own colors, she believes. And he does it: a school where the children learn to play what they want; they learn music. They build it with debris that people throw into the sea: bottles, plastic, garbage that others throw away and that come to cement a shelter because the sound, the melody, an orchestra and the piano, are important, the pianist says to herself.
She does not want to look like anything other than what she is: an Easter Islander woman with black hair down to her waist, her volcano hands on the keys, a flower near her face. Concentrated, the language in which her fingers speak is universal, she does not need language. The body understands. She is an island woman who attracts other musicians. She is an island woman who has reached the top and who, looking down from above, misses her land. She is an island woman, half Rapa Nui, half bird who, dressed in the traditional way, puts us on the map. Mahani Teave only brings gifts and sunsets. She was born on an island and has the music. That's enough.