(CNN Spanish) -
In the room where he receives us there is a small hand-painted painting, a diploma and a computer.
The computer is her best friend, with whom Milagros Costabel, who cannot see with her eyes, connects with the world.
The diploma says it will be part of Harvard's generation of 2025.
And the painting draws a paper boat with a phrase: “there go dreams”.
That paper ship has had to go through several storms.
But I was ready.
Since she was a child, her mother has purposely moved the furniture and objects from the humble house where she grew up and from her own room.
He says he did not want her to get used to the absence of obstacles, because "real life is not like that."
And, one by one, Milagros has overcome all the difficulties that real life faced her.
She was born with less than 25 weeks of gestation, weighing just 740 grams.
He was in intensive care for three months and miraculously survived.
That is why her name: “Milagros was a miracle,” says her mother, María Bionda.
Although he lived, his retinas did not develop due to lack of oxygen.
"Retinopathy of prematurity," he dictates, just to be clear.
Milagros does not see, although that is a convention.
Anyone who approaches him will see that he does see very well, with his ears and with his hands.
From a very young age, María taught Milagros to be self-sufficient: make the bed, tie the shoelaces, dress, take a bath… And her sister Chloe, two years older, was her best ally.
The one who took obstacles out of the way, the one who played with her, the one who lifted her up and moved her face so that it would come out well in the photos.
"Her friends didn't realize she was blind," says Maria.
"It helped me grow free."
But in 2006, at age 7, Chloe developed a brain tumor.
After a treatment of more than a year between Montevideo and Buenos Aires, Milagros's sister passed away, and her best friend left with her.
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For Maria, that moment marked the life of the whole family.
"I got up for her," he says, "and she picked me up."
“I taught him to be independent.
He no longer had the sister.
She was going to have to fend for herself, she was going to have to live off her career. "
Education with barriers
When it was learned that Milagros was admitted with a scholarship to Harvard, many put the accent on the Uruguayan educational system.
Some politicians and people in general boasted in social networks of the success of Milagros as a national achievement.
So she quickly clarified in a long Twitter thread that things are always more complex.
There he spoke of the difficulties and barriers he faced in public education in a city in the interior of Uruguay such as Colonia, and he told how everything would have been impossible without his effort, that of his mother and the support of his family and friends.
As soon as she entered public school, she received a key gift from a family friend: a braille machine.
Maria quickly learned the tactile literacy system, “and every day I would give her 10, 15 sheets to ink so that the teachers could correct me the next day.
So for 6 years, until I entered high school ”.
“I learned to teach her,” explains María.
From braille to ink and from ink to braille.
Thus he progressed and learned.
When he got his first computer, he started taking computer and typing classes.
"I had to type without looking at the keys," he says.
He did it and it changed his life.
In high school, he also told Twitter, he found "a lot of people who, even without knowing how to do it, were willing to support me and allow me to learn like the others."
He abounded in one of those teachers: Gerardo Menéndez.
This Geography teacher learned braille so that he could teach him, send him homework and correct it.
It was he who taught Milagros what the world is like, the continents, rivers and mountains, through maps with relief and textures, which he himself designed.
"I believe that all people - blind or not - deserve to have one, two, many Gerardos in their educational career," he wrote.
"If you are blind and your family does not support you ..." he interrupts, shrugging his shoulders, "the system is not prepared for blind people.
Many say that wanting is power.
But without tools you can't ”, he adds.
But just as she had help to learn many things, she says that she learned English alone, on her own, “watching” videos, “reading” in English, dreaming of her future.
"I say look," he laughs.
He says his English teacher did not want to teach him.
According to that teacher, her blindness prevented it.
"But I promised myself that I was going to learn English."
Today, with English as an ally, her best friend is the computer and the cell phone, which connect her with the world.
These devices and his system of accessibility through sound have allowed him to develop an unprecedented capacity to listen to accelerated audios, incomprehensible to any mortal.
"I need things now, I don't have the patience to listen in normal time."
Thus, he listens from texts of messages that come to him through social networks, to books.
"I download a book from Amazon and read it in a day," he says.
"That extra speed helped me do things really fast."
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She also taught herself to play the piano.
And it shows us.
You ask for any melody and, without knowing how to read music, you simply move the keyboard and transform it into music.
"This is called absolute pitch," says his father, Juan Costabel, proud.
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Keep the family
Three years ago, Juan lost his job and had to reinvent himself.
A great friend of the family - the same one who brought the braille machine - from Argentina, living in Europe, lent them her house in the heart of the old town of Colonia del Sacramento, and there they set up a gastronomic venture.
A small restaurant overlooking the beautiful mouth of the Uruguay River on the Río de la Plata, in front of Buenos Aires.
The house still has vestiges of the Portuguese era, which ruled Cologne in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and from its windows you can see the centenary of its cobblestone streets, now empty of tourists due to the covid-19 pandemic.
The "health emergency" and the closure of the borders of Uruguay was the coup de grace for the family economy.
A new obstacle in the life of Milagros.
Colonia and its citadel live off tourism.
The restaurant was closed for more than three months, between March and July 2020. “We ran out of income.
We are left at zero.
Nothing, ”says Juan.
María's sister brought them the assortment from the supermarket, so that they would not lack anything, and Milagros got to work: she started selling her newspaper articles in English to international media: Foreign Policy, The Telegraph, HuffPost, Euronews, Business Insider ... Opinion notes first, which are the easiest.
But then I started writing notes about the pandemic, I had my first press conference, I was with real journalists, I interviewed important people and they said to me 'what am I doing here?' ”.
With her work for international media, she was able to pay for electricity ("which is very expensive here") and cell phones for the whole family.
"If not, I don't know how we would have done it," says Maria.
It was then that Milagros began to mature the idea of going abroad to study.
Although the university in Uruguay is public and free, "I did not want to study here," he explains.
"From the age of 15, more or less, I had the illusion of living the experience of living outside."
I initially intended to go to Spain, but "I always had the US in my head."
Harvard
"If the pandemic allows it, I'll go out in August," he says happily.
He has already had several Zoom meetings with Harvard officials and his future generation colleagues "from all over the place."
There he intends to study Political Science and perhaps another language.
The American university will pay for your studies, accommodation, and will allow you to work on campus.
“They have things that I am not able to imagine.
I'm still mentally processing it. "
Her mom wants to go with her.
"I want to see where he is going to be, stay calm ... and then come back."
She has no money for the ticket, but although she has received offers to pay for it and is grateful for it, she is not willing to accept them.
She says that she will find a way to save the money and pay her back.
The decision to apply to Harvard was made by Milagros alone, without the initial approval of her parents who, although they did not object, were not very happy that she went so far.
In mid-2020, a journalist friend told him about the possibility.
She started researching and saw that it was possible for her to apply.
But he explains that he did it almost without hope.
“More than 57,000 people applied, mostly from the US and people with money.
Harvard accepts only 4% of those who apply.
I knew that most likely it would not stay. "
"I told my parents: I am doing something that is not going to come out."
And she said to herself: "I'm going to do it because if I don't try, I'm going to always regret it."
But Milagros knows about miracles, and about overcoming obstacles.
And this was one more.
"When I read welcome to Harvard 'I started crying," he says.
“I called my mom and asked her to look at the email.
I wanted to be sure of what he was saying.
I could not believe it….
Nobody could believe it ”.
"It was crazy," adds Maria.
When she had recovered a bit, Maria recorded a short video to send to her sister.
That video went viral.
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The video sparked the news.
His popularity on social media grew exponentially.
From having a Twitter account (@mili_costabel) aimed at the media for which he worked, with just 500 followers, he had almost 4,000 in a few days.
"An audience that I didn't have before," he smiles.
Now that many people know her through the networks, she was encouraged to do a live with questions from people.
"The other day they asked me, for example, if I saw in my dreams," he launches without giving the answer.
Curiosity eats away at me.
"Y?
How do you sound? ”I ask him.
"I can't see in dreams either," he answers.
I don't see images like you.
Once I dreamed that I could see, but the dream did not end because I never saw ”, and he laughs.
"I am like everyone"
Milagros is surprised by her unexpected popularity, and clarifies that she does not pretend to be an example of anything, or of anyone, that her story is unique, like all of them.
"What I think, or what happened to me or how I solve things does not have to be the way other blind people do," he clarifies.
But his mother does intend to send a message: "we have to end the thing that he who cannot see cannot."
“The 'poor thing' bothers me,” Milagros adds, “I'm like anyone else, only I can't see.
Many think that I am divine, special… but I am like everyone ”.
And María limits: “She demands you, she leaves your head like this.
She is not a poor thing ”.
Paradoxically, Milagros believes that she has an advantage.
Her reality leads her to "see things differently."
The truth is that "I would not be who I am without this."
But there is one thing that you might like to change: "I wonder what I am like."
She thinks she's ugly, because her parents always insist she's beautiful on the inside.
It is difficult to convince her otherwise.
She also doesn't know what the Harvard diploma that she is so proud of, welcoming and not in Braille looks like visually.
But he does know what it means: that is where his dreams are going.
And there she goes.