July 15th Espiga hosted CreativeMornings/Porto. Hugo and Inês once again prepared a lovely breakfast for all of us attendees to have a great start to a Friday morning. And what a great morning it was, with Ana Cristina Pereira’s talk about #Love.

Attendees were greeted by Luís Silva at the door, while Nicole Tsangaris photographed the event and Catarina David video recorded the talk, helped by Aleksandra Kucharczyk, the cheerful Canal 180 intern now leaving Porto for new adventures - thanks Aleksandra!

Ana Cristina Pereira is a writer and journalist, and presented some of the love stories she encountered, stories of love in the face of adversity: a young man, blind and with locomotion difficulties, who married a physiotherapist despite risking the loss of his disability benefits (a story with an happy end, Ana Cristina added, for the young man is an exceptional human being and was granted a doctoral scholarship); a couple living in abject poverty, both drug users in a house without electricity and running water, they made an effort to live in ‘normalcy’, scavenging discarded furniture they built a home. They still flirted and sometimes went out to have a cup of coffee somewhere else in the city, wearing shoes preciously saved for such occasions.

José Raimundo, one of the attendees, made a few drawings he was latter happy to share with us.

Ana Cristina pressed a case for humanism. She said:

“We don’t have to like everyone, we don’t have to agree with everyone, but we do have to respect everyone.”

She is worried how so much of Europe seems to be forgetting this, how the fear of the Other seems to be taking hold. Though there is no magical formula to make prejudice disappear, discussion, information, and education are much needed. As a journalist she tries to give a voice to the Other, and present them as the people, like you and me, they are. She concluded with a question to the attendees: and what can we, as citizens, do?

We can listen.

After a round of discussion we gave Ana Cristina a very warm round of applause for her amazing talk. We extended her our invitation to the next CreativeMornings/Porto.

As usual we will enjoy our holidays in August. In the meantime, you can read an essay in which Ana Cristina Pereira starts from her experience at CreativeMornings. You can also check out the videos of the past talks, as we are hard at work at preparing more videos and adding English subtitles to the talks.

CreativeMornings/Porto will return in September with a strong dose of #Magic! Stay tuned!