(CNN) -
Esteban Cichello Hübner's story is worthy of a movie, but it is not fictional at all.
He was born in the province of Córdoba in Argentina, where he spent a few years, because the separation of his parents led him to live with his mother in Buenos Aires.
There he grew up in conditions of extreme poverty, in a house with a dirt floor and without access to a bathroom or drinking water.
Despite adversity, he never gave up in his studies and became a professor at the University of Oxford, where he has worked for more than 20 years.
The journey there was long.
He went through various trades, including agricultural gatherer and bricklayer in Japan, traveled 82 countries, studied five careers, and can speak seven languages.
In an interview “In Dialogue with Longobardi”, he told how he learned English thanks to his hen Zulema, what motivated him to go up to the iconic Obelisk of the City of Buenos Aires and recalled how he organized Diego Armando Maradona's visit to Oxford.
Marcelo Longobardi: You were born in La Falda, Córdoba province, right? In an extremely humble neighborhood and family.
Esteban Cichello:
We used to live well in La Falda, in front of a square, but then my family broke up.
My mother packs up and we go to Buenos Aires, to the Buenos Aires suburbs, and there we go to a piece of land that my grandmother Raquel was paying in installments and where there was a very precarious little barn.
It had a dirt floor, a tin roof, no electricity, no water.
The bathroom was a hole in the bottom.
And there I grew up all my childhood and adolescence.
To top it all, my father forgot about us completely.
Today I can say it freely because it is gone, but it was very hard.
I started working at 9 years old.
Marcelo Longobardi: You land in Oxford, how did that happen?
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Esteban Cichello:
My greatest achievement in life was in Argentina.
For a child who was born and raised in poverty to finish primary and secondary school, I think it is the greatest achievement.
After there, everything was much easier.
I studied International Relations and Political Science.
I wanted to go to Oxford University.
I prepared myself, I passed the exams, the interviews and they accepted me.
They didn't give me money, I had to go to work as a bricklayer in Japan building houses to pay for the first year of study.
Then I won a very prestigious scholarship.
That's how I got to Oxford.
Marcelo Longobardi: Is it true that you visited 82 countries?
Esteban Cichello:
Yes, of course, 82 countries.
And I lived in 13.
The goose that laid the golden eggs
Cichello has always liked languages.
Thanks to his various jobs and travels, he learned to speak seven.
He started with Italian at school and then turned to a very particular method of taking English lessons.
Esteban Cichello: I
had a hen called Zulema and for me she was the hen that laid the golden eggs.
Why?
Because it was very laying.
I had a neighbor named Fernanda Fernández and she had a collection of records from an English course.
And I was desperate to know English.
So she tells me "ok, if you bring me a Zulema egg, I'll let you listen to a record."
And of course, I wanted to learn.
At that time I brought him many eggs from Zulema and he had many English classes.
The more I knew, the easier it was to get better jobs.
Esteban Cichello exchanged eggs for English classes 0:43
Marcelo Longobardi: Tell me about the relationship between education and poverty.
Esteban Cichello:
Today I cannot say that you have to study to get out of poverty, because there are people who did not study and got ahead.
But there is a very direct correlation.
For me, education was everything.
Going to school was my daily party.
Imagine, I had no water at home, I bathed maybe once a month.
At school he had running water, he had soap, he had a bathroom where he could close the door.
School was everything.
They contained me there.
The more I studied, the happier I was with myself and the easier it was to find work.
Maradona's visit to Oxford
Marcelo Longobardi: There is a very famous episode here in Argentina, which is Maradona's visit to Oxford. Were you behind that legendary lecture he gave at the university?
Esteban Cichello:
I met Maradona when he was working as a messenger at the Hotel El Conquistador, in Buenos Aires. He was poor, he was a villager like me. He would get up early to go to training with discipline, on an empty stomach. He didn't have money to buy booties and he was going through trash like me, he told me. So, in his words, he was an example of what to do and an example of what not to do. When I propose to the Student Center committee to bring Diego Maradona, I do so in a pack of other people, such as Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Mikhail Gorbachev and the Prime Minister of Israel. They all approve of me, but when I say Maradona, they don't want to accept it. And I insisted, because it was my dream to bring my idol to Oxford University. I insisted and he came. And with a magic that only Maradona could do, he lectured the entire student body.After Queen Elizabeth in 1969, it was the most memorable visit that this thousand-year-old city had known.
Cichello: It was my dream to bring Maradona to Oxford 0:52
