A. Listen to this audio, answer the questions and fill in the gaps:
⮚⮚ AUDIO LINK: https://drive.google.com/file/d/15KZywnYeAvm1VcpIb03n7ucV5Q9vY-6a/view?usp=sharing
1. Where was Barack Obama in 1979?
2. Who were they visited by (on campus)?
3. Who were these people?
4- What did they speak about? What did they describe?
5. __________ people can do ______________ things when they´re given an _______________. We sometimes think that our leaders must have fancy degrees, must be well-educated and these young men have none of these things. What did they possess according to Barack Obama?
6. What did Obama study at college?
7. As a consequence of that organizing on a college campus I became a _________________________. As a consequence of a community organizer I, after going back to law school, became a ________________________. As consequence of being a civil rights attorney I entered the ___________________ and I now stand before you as a United States ___________ and as a candidate for ________________.
B. Now see audio script:
I want to tell you just a brief story, because Archbishop 22 is here, one of my heroes, and let you know where I was when I was about your age. I am really dating myself now, although I am also dating the archbishop, because back in 1979 I was a freshman in college, at Occidental College, in California. I´ve had a somewhat rocky youth and teenage years. My father was not at home. I was growing up partly with my grandparents. In high school I have gotten in trouble occasionally. It was what my mother called a goodtime Charlie, meaning I was not really serious in terms of my studies, in terms of my work. I had some awareness of the world around me, had some sense of injustice and unfairness but it was not finely honed, it was not well developed.
And I remember in 1979 arriving as a freshman and doing what freshmen do, you know, trying to figure out what courses are and trying to change your study habits and trying to identify that food in the cafeteria what it is. We were visited on campus by a couple of gentlemen from South Africa who were representatives of the ANC in 1979-1980 and they spoke about their efforts to overcome apartheid. For about an hour, myself, and a group of students, listened to these young men who were not much older than we were. They described the extraordinary struggles they were going through, the sacrifices that were being made, people who were enduring jail and torture and beatings because they had a sense that somehow, someway, justice would prevail. That brief meeting, I think in some ways, changed my life, it showed me that ordinary people can do extraordinary things when they're given an opportunity. We sometimes think that our leaders have to have fancy degrees or have to be well educated, but these young men had none of those things, but what they possessed was a anger over injustice that they were able to channel in a constructive positive was. And I thought to myself that they gave me some sense of the direction that my life might go and so I became active in the anti-apartheid movement on campuses. I am not sure we were particularly effective. As I recall Occidental College continued to refuse to divest despite the various protests that we organized. I transferred to Columbia and there were similar resistance on Columbia's campus.
Over time I like to think that I was part of that mosaic that applied pressure and ultimately helped those in South Africa to achieve the extraordinary liberation that I would witness almost 10 years later as a law student. I remember the image of Nelson Mandela walking out of prison and understanding that a seminal moment in history had occurred and that Mandela's long march towards freedom was not his alone, but it was part of thousands of footsteps, of millions of footsteps of people all around the world. I traced back me getting involved in politics to that moment. As a consequence of that organizing on a college campus, I became a community organizer. As a consequence of a community organizer I, after going back to law school, became a civil rights attorney. As consequence of being a civil rights attorney I entered the state legislature and I now, stand before you as a United States Senator and as a candidate for president. So the primary message I guess I have, in receiving this award, is that all of you represent enormous potential and enormous possibility for change because we all know that injustice still exists, it exists, it exists here in the United States, in every poor neighborhood and in every inner city and every rural community. All across the country there is quiet desperation. Young people's lives are filled with sadness and desperation and anarchy and chaos.
All around the world we see those same symptoms of hopelessness made manifest in places like Darfur, places like the Middle East, in places that too often have forgotten about and not written about until they flare up in tragedy. I hope that all of you who are on the brink of doing extraordinary things, I decided to channel that talent and that energy and that imagination to figuring out how you move the process along for a better history, how you put your shoulder against the wheel and move that boulder up the hill. And, I'm absolutely confident that if all of you take up that challenge, the world is waiting for you ready to be changed because I think we live in this moment in history, right now, where the hunger for change, the hunger for something new, the desire to break out of the ordinary, the self-interested, the petty, the trivial is everywhere and they're waiting for you. And so I hope that as you see the recipients of this award you recognize that it's actually more of a tool to give you a little spark and drive you in the wonderful directions that I hope your lives take in the years to come.
Thank you very much!
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