This in my entry on the contest created by this fine guy 
This year have been an one of the most important year of my life with big positive changes on a personal level and not so positive changes in my family and community.
As I said on my introduction, I am a college student about to graduate, so I knew from January the first my life would change a lot this year. I was ready to it. I knew Venezuela was a ticking time bomb so I was excited about starting to dedicate my time fully in providing for myself and earning some financial independence. That was my primary goal for this year.
Having said that...
This are my achievements from this year:
Successfully defending my thesis in order to finally graduate from college!
This was actually easier than expected because the jury was super relaxed with us, telling jokes and laughing with us while asking us normal questions about our investigation. I was actually nervous and believe me or not, previously we decided to bought a natural relaxing syrup so we could calm our nerves before the defense! Silly us!
Here we are with the jury after successfully defending the thesis
And here is the relaxing syrup we took because we are silly...
Doing fun activities and discovering new natural places.
A group of friends decided to make a trip to a nearby waterfall! The trajectory wasn’t easy at all because it was 7 kilometers (about 4.3 miles) up, and then the same 7 kilometers down. It’s was very hard at times, but in the end it was worthy.
This is my buddy's selfie, I am the white guy on the left!
This is me at the end of the waterfall!
Learning about blockchain technology and getting involved in Steemit.
Well, I have actually been hearing about bitcoin since a few years ago, and around May this year I started to read a lot of news thanks to the huge price surge happening on those months, around that time I learned about ethereum, litecoin, ripple among others, and learnt about the differences between them. But it wasn’t until this great guy 
Having a larger family thanks to my new 2 baby sisters!
So yes, my parents had me when they were very young, and those 2 babies are my first siblings!
I look like their young uncle or older cousin right? well I am the big brother!
This are my failures for this year
I didn’t start to work out.
I need to start getting more fit but I haven’t been able to do it! This is without doubt a failure.
Letting go family members and friends because of the economic crisis
This isn’t an actual personal failure, but being Venezuelan, seeing your country unable to provide for its people, and losing some family members and friends that decided to move to another country because of it, feels like a failure, a collective one. The one that hurts the most are my uncle, aunt and cousins, we were very close and used to play a lot of call of duty and risk together. We also watched a lot of football games since we are huge fans. They now live in Spain and are trying to find success there. And my dad will move to America next January ... so it looks next year will be similar to this on regards of this failure.
This is the most important airport in Venezuela, its called "International Airport Simon Bolivar of Maiquetia "
Source
If you want to know why there are so much Venezuelans leaving the country, it is because among other things, right now the minimum wage in Venezuela is less than 10 dollars per month! A good professional can hardly, HARDLY earn 100 dollars per month...
Wasting valuable time because of indifference and sort of a depression
Around late Mach this year started a massive series of nation wide protests to combat the corrupt socialist government of my country. This already happened on 2014 with no results, and this year was starting to happen again. There were days when I was just in my house afraid of going out and being assaulted, it was like a civil war and the repression was horrible, government officials even started to check people’s phones and if they saw messages or pictures supporting the protests they would take you to interrogation . Innocent people were tortured and killed! Even my college stopped activities for like 4 months! Delaying the graduation which was supposed to happen this year!
So all of this problems, besides losing family and friends kept me with a bad mood for some time.
And the worst of it is, the problem have not been fixed. The same corrupt government is still in power and it’s more difficult than ever to combat them. So expect new nation wide protests next year.
And don’t forget to keep Venezuela on your prayers! Is not easy to fight against totalitarian politicians.
Since I didn’t want to finish this post with something bad, I would like to say I am thankful for steemit for bringing me a little light on this dark times on my country!
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Playing, sharing and cleaning session at the lake with kids!
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