I was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina but grew up mostly in Asuncion, Paraguay. Asuncion is a very small city and when I moved there in 1985, the city had only a couple of bookstores and one very sad, underdeveloped library. I didn't grow up surrounded with book because they were too expensive for my parents to buy. When I finished High School and started working as a teacher's aide, I spent a bit of my first salary in a book. I still have it: THe Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. I loved that book for many reasons: it was  the first book I ever bought, it was expensive, and I had to work hard to be able to buy it. Sadly, books in South America are not cheap and we don't have many resources or possibilities like there is here in the USA. I craved more books, I craved more reading but I couldn't afford it. Until one day, a little coffee shop opened in Asuncion called Cafe Literario which translates Literary Cafe. In this little coffee shop you can drink coffee, order a soda or juice and choose any of the books displayed on the shelf and read it for FREE. I felt like the day they opened that little coffee shop my world change, I had new friends like Pablo Neruda, Isabel Allende, Paulo Coelho, among other great writers. My world changed so much and I grew in ways I never even dreamed of growing. Thanks to that coffee shop, I became a passionate reader, or may be that passionate reader was already in me but it was just waiting for a possibility to come out and bloom. Today  you may ask me, "What's the best present I can ever received?" I would answer without a doubt: a book.

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