It has been almost 10 years since I met ASCS. An unexpected and sought encounter. A liking from the very beginning.

I still remember the proposal that was made to me in a room in the headquarters with a ceiling that was stunning to me. I was at the beginning of my career. I had to take the bar exam. Everything was still to be built for me. I accepted. I left to help run a Migrant House in Cochabamba, Bolivia.

That first six-month experience in early 2015 was followed by several other trips always there, always to Cochabamba, always to that House that had bewitched me. I had earned the title but had to come back.

I lived there for almost five years. I have helped and met so many people that I sometimes find it difficult to remember them all. The House can accommodate up to 80 people and in the midst of the pandemic for many months the maximum capacity was reached.

During those five years, I lived through a coup d’état by which fraud was demonstrated in the elections and the ensuing chaos, mass Venezuelan migration and the pandemic with the death, before my eyes, of a person housed in the House.

Joy, happiness, laughter, lots of laughter but also sadness and anger.

The years I lived in Bolivia were a testing of myself, my abilities, my limits. It was a journey of getting to know but mostly getting to know each other.

But I also had the opportunity to work with a law firm for three years, offering legal assistance, in particular, in the city’s maximum security men’s prison. So many stories, familiar faces. So many people I saw outside the prison and so many people I left still in there. That was a touching of human frailty.

Without ASCS these five years would not have happened. I wouldn’t have met so many people on the margins of society: so many faces of people who were either lonely and abandoned or looking for a better life. I would not have touched on a mass migration like the Venezuelan one. I could not have known the country’s justice system so closely as I could not have “experienced” prison.

ASCS has allowed me to live, to be able to always look with new and curious eyes and not be afraid to put myself out there.

I wish ASCS to continue on the path, to accomplish another 20 years and more, allowing more young people to get to know each other and more importantly.

Sara Stocco