The field she was in charge of, and that her family and many others lived from, was flooded in 1985. A natural disaster left her without resources and direction from one day to the other. But against what was irrecoverable, she transformed her life and became a wise teacher.

She provides consultancy services to companies and people .The memories of country food, the line of the horizon, the gates and the water, always the water, turn into a metaphor in her stories. What she learnt and applies, to her own life and the life of the people and companies she works with. How to use the maximum of our responsibilities, even in adversity.

She looks like a Sufi teacher, for her symbolic richness, the subtleness of her allusions and the extraordinary deepness of her experience. Adela lived in the country until she was twenty; she studied at a boarding school in a village of the Buenos Aires province. She is 1.50 m tall and weighs 48 kg. She wears glasses and moves like a squirrel inside her house-office, and outside too. She is always smiling and always has a word of encouragement. Solidarity is a part of her, as it is, only at times, water.

—I remember when I was a child my contemplative vision of the country. I sat and looked at the horizon. I did not have a productive look. I was a humanist.

—When does that vision change?
—When I had to take in charge. My father got sick and he knew he was going to die. He emancipated me when I was 18 and left me the administration of the family heritage and of my family. He prepared a little his departure. He died when I was twenty and after that we came to Buenos Aires to study, as planned. My sister, studied psychology, and me, journalism and then social services. But when I was in the third year of my career, we made the decision of working the fields again. It was a rough time for me: I had to quit my studies because the time of harvest coincided with exams.

—What was it like to turn from a young student into the person responsible of a field?
—It was difficult for me to learn about life in the country from the productive point of view, but I was a good collaboration seeker. I was good at selecting who to work with. It ended up being a model field, for its advanced technology at that time and at that place. It was an experience which taught me about the world of business. And that is what I really understand today. But in 1985 the floods of the Rio Quinto and the lagoons of the west of Buenos Aires happened. We were left with one meter of water over the fields. They were very hard, not only for me. It was impossible to live there, with the roads full of water.

—And you were left without the source of income and lost what you had invested
—And we also lost the sense of life in the country. The country is production.

—And what about the sense of your life?
—That was my concern afterwards. I needed to do something else. At Christmas ´85 I got ill in order to think.

—And what did you find afterwards?
—I got up with the internal conviction that I needed to get a job. Some cousins offered me a job taking care of an old aunt who was ill. At nights I took care of my aunt and in the morning I took the bus, bought croissants, had mate with my mother and left to work as a secretary. I slept at intervals. Every three hours I had to turn my aunt round and slept at intervals of two hours.

—And you kept your family with that?
—That was not enough. I felt responsible for the people of the fields, who were unemployed. I sold the gold of my fifteenth birthday and the gold of my family, and with that we paid salaries until they found other jobs. We were a lot to live out of the same income. But I was doing everything possible. And the term “possible” marked my life. It was everything I could do, and I did it, although it was not enough. Adela has a green shade in her eyes. She buys a few clothes, just some suits in traditional colors. She does not dye her hair or wear make up. She gets up very early, at five or six in the morning. She has breakfast and lunch with a balanced diet. She has a frugal dinner and goes to bed early. Her house is functional because she does not like incidentals; maybe because she already has had many. In general, everything responds to a routine ( menu, timetables, purchases) She buys wholesale, the least possible, and uses the cell phone only for her family, so that they can locate her in case of an emergency. The way of taking the water out of the fields would have been, at that time, by blowing up a dune, but that meant flooding the people with smaller fields. Adela would never consider that option. Her ethics did not allow her to do so. The General Law for Waters says that water stays where it falls.

—Is that a concept that you move to other areas as well?
—Everyone has to face what it is. My life was faced with that criterion.

—You could not do what you wanted?
—I have always believed that I was doing what I had to do. It was what it was but at the same time, it was what I had to do, the solution I had. Along my life I saw that when you do everything possible, you get closer to what you want to get. But you have to do what is possible, which is not the same as believing you can do everything.

—Is it difficult to find your own measure?
—Everything is not possible. That is my line. In the acceptance of our possibility is our strength to grow and move on. We have to stand on our feet, and do it based on reality.

—Is that something similar to not fight against the water fallen?
—Water is not your product. It is what it is. Fighting it, in the bad sense, is wasting energy against something you cannot fight. Standing on your flooded reality allows you to reach dry land that maybe at sight.

—Your most concrete reality came back after as a tale and as a metaphor
—I live from those metaphors, from the interpretations of my reality. The power of metaphor is that it is richer than the example. Nobody can repeat the experiences of others. Metaphors allow you to interpret what happened to others and apply it to your own possibility, to your own reality, to your own interpretation.

—Did you get depressed at that time, or do you ever get depressed?
—I have reactive depressions, which are shaped in the way of an illness and I stay 15 days in bed and after that I feel alive again and want to move on. I respect a lot that kind of fertile womb that is reactive depression. It allows a degree of introspection necessary in a hyperactive person. My mother, who knows me a lot, says: “Be careful with this girl when she gets up”.

—Do you ever get angry?
—Life does not make me feel angry, and what comes from nature (illnesses, death, natural phenomena) can only make me feel sad, but not angry.

—Did you feel alone when you were covered by water?
—I am a lonely person in the deep sense of the term, although I am always surrounded by people. That is why I never feel lonely. For me, human relationships are like the theory of a set of circles: a series of circles where a little portion is common and the rest is not shared. The more we admit this principle, the more satisfaction we get in our relationships, as we accept what can really be shared, and we give and are given, freedom is the rest.

On my own

Adela was with pneumonia, in bed, when a friend called her to offer the administration of a building. Adela Peñaranda Soluciones started and as the company derived fundamentally towards the human resources area, it became, years after, Recursos Posibles. Today it is a human resources consultancy company; they search staff, provide consultancy, engineering, and respond to individual enquiries about career projects. They provide consultancy services to public, private, small and big companies.

—I organized that in parallel to the job I had at that time.

—How many hours a day do you work?
(She laughs) —Many. But I like working. I do what I am.

—And besides your body helps.
—I am a healthy person, with willingness

—It may happen that a person does not have your working capacity, so then what happens?
—I come from a normal family, without big issues, well fed, well raised, with a healthy childhood, with economic resources, I have a good head, a harmonic psychology, or at least not so conflictive and a healthy physical condition. That is to say, I have more than what most people have. I believe that I have made good use of my resources. But there is no virtue in that. It came with me. There are a lot of people who did not have that. I also know that there are people with more than me and who solve it in a different way. But it has to do with the fact that one part of their logical method of thought or psychology does not allow it.

—That means that you are not an example.
—I respect a lot the position everyone reaches. I would never set myself as an example, because what I did, I did it with what I had.

—What is the first thing you do with a customer?
—The first thing I do when I am with person or organization is to see what that person or organization can do. One of the examples that I always use is to compare the situation of each person with the food in the country. You think of what to cook. You can open a cook book from a famous chef and want to cook. But you will find that half of the ingredients are missing and you cannot go and buy them because the closest village is 30 km away. The other option is to open the fridge and think of what to do with what you have. That is my conception. I open the fridge and see what I can do with what I have.

—Do you tell that to business people?
—I try to make each person open the heart. I try to look for options, know their reality and see what can be done with that.

—What would it mean to know your own reality?
—Knowing the economic reality, but also the projects and possibilities of doing what you want. I try to modify the idea when I see that it is impossible. Because people want many things, but are not willing to pay the price for what they want to do. There are people who want a bilingual secretary, a young, nice girl with experience in the sector. But they do not offer a good pay. Everything is not possible.

—When they realize about all those things, how do business people react?
—The concept that goes with it, the other side of the same coin, is that you have to do a hundred percent of what you have. So when you start working with what you can do, you reach a hundred percent of what is possible for that company or person. It is more than nothing. The person realizes which the limit is and which the staring point. That is the beginning of a real project.

—Are you planning to write a book about the things you learnt with slaps in your face?
—I do not think about them as slaps.

—To speak in your language, your gates.
—When you have a gate, if it is closed, you can open the lock or you can walk over it. The options that you have are the ones presented by the road. And the best uses of that road are the ones which lead you to success.

Books recommended by Adela Peñaranda

"The best books I have ever read and which mean a lot in my life are:"

• Critical stages in life / Rüdiger Dhalke
• Journal of a good neighbor / Doris Lessing

"In both books life is taken from birth to death: In the first book, as an essay and in the second one, as a novel. But in both, knowledge and understanding of the process of life help deeply understand the natural part, and the inevitable part of existence."

"Then, when I have a new topic on my way, I go to a bookstore (fundamentally one with a good book salesperson) and look for material. I buy a lot of books, all of them for my specific interests. But I read them as if they were circumstantial suppliers, helps to think."

"These days I am about to look for an old logic book from high school, 4th year. I think that if we all worked a little the rational concept that “A + B = C” or “If A = B and B = C, A = C”, we would simplify incorrect deductions which make us ask for what is impossible and we would stop applying psychoanalytical interpretations to simple and predictable consequences of mistaken actions."