Students in Professor Barbara Fuentes’ class were given the unique opportunity to walk a mile in someone’s shoes. Figuratively that is.
“When we see someone who’s rich or doing well, always talk about ‘Oh I’d love to walk a mile in their shoes’ but we never consider what their life is like and what they’ve had to do to get there,” Fuentes said while addressing her class during the event introduction.
Fuentes has been working at FGCU for 19 years, both as an educator and as an accommodations coordinator at adaptive services.
The students met on the library lawn on Monday, March 24 to walk with members of the FGCU and Southwest Florida community to hear about how they’ve gone through and overcome past struggles. At the event, students were referred to as “walkers” and those telling their stories, “talkers.”
“I’m the first person in my family to graduate college, and then I lost both of [my parents] within three years of each other… and that was really hard for me,” Carrie Fuentes said. Carrie Fuentes is Professor Fuentes’ daughter-in-law. “Learning how to still see the joy in life, be able to feel like they’re still proud of me, even though they can’t tell me that they’re proud of me. So, I feel like I need to tell other people that. So, I tell my husband all the time that I’m proud of him,”
Professor Fuentes has also experienced a traumatic life-altering event, one that almost shut her down from teaching altogether.
“In the year of 2012, my husband started to get sicker and sicker, in the spring of 2013 he was in and out of the hospital… I had to have someone take over teaching the class because he eventually passed away in February,” Professor Fuentes said.
However, Professor Fuentes was able to grow from it and it led to the creation of the class Unbroken: Finding Your Inner Strength. After sharing her story with her class, she found it was a beneficial experience for students to hear these stories. Students even began to share their own personal stories with Fuentes both in class and during office hours.
This then led to the inception of the idea for the Walk a Mile event.
Six community members showed up to tell their stories. Their stories included topics such as overcoming the loss of family members, making the best of a bad start to life and overcoming physical disabilities.
“Both of the stories that I did here resonated with me, but I think the one that definitely impacted me the most was Grayson’s weirdly, I didn’t have as much in common with this story compared to the other story that I listened to, but just his authenticity and his passion for why he shares his story and it really connected with me,” Daniella Bellis, one of professor Fuentes’ students said.
The experience was not only a beneficial experience for the walkers but also for the talkers.
“I feel like it’s important for people to talk about grief because there is a lot of misconception about it, and I feel like it’s one of those things that no one really talks about until it actually happens,” Grayson Aceto, an integrated studies major at FGCU, said.
Aceto lost his father, uncle, and grandfather in a boating accident when he was 8 years old.
“A lot of people have their own journeys. Some may objectively be worse or subjectively, but everybody struggles in life,” Aceto said. “Reflecting on my journey, I strive to help others seize control of their lives.”