ConnectUs Youth Spotlight EP 19 - Sara and Trujilo Speaks: Addressing Social problems in her community through audiovisual production & research
Sara is a high school student from Trujillo, a city in northern Peru with a long history, a strong food and cultural scene, and, as she puts it, incredibly hardworking people. However, it is also a city with double sides, where turning on the television at night means hearing about extortion, killings, and business owners who have lost everything. To address the gap, Sara is building a podcast and a set of short films, centering on an aspect mostly overlooked by media coverages: what living inside that tension does to a teenage brain.
Sara opened by describing her city honestly
"We have a lot of legacy and tradition, as well as places that you should definitely visit ... As I sit in my armchair, turn on the television, what appears? Extortion, death, misfortunes, assorted dreams. And that's the average life of a victim from here, which is my life too."
The specific crime that plagues her city is extortion. Criminal groups demand payments from small business owners, and refusing can mean an attack on the shop or the family. Sara sees it as the problem people around her have stopped registering as a problem.
"It's affecting us in a way that we do not realize — the entrepreneurs, a lot of business owners ending with their businesses; These are only a part of the problems happening right now."
Her School and Daily Life / Passions
Here's some context of the Peru's education system for our readers outside of Peru:
In Peru, schooling runs eleven compulsory years, six of primary and five of secondary, and close to three quarters of students attend public schools (World Education News and Reviews). Everyone works from one national curriculum set by the Ministry of Education, and the only branch point comes in the last three years of secondary school, where students pick an academic or a vocational stream. Advanced or specialized courses are not on offer, apart from a small network of selective public schools, the Colegios de Alto Rendimiento, that teach the International Baccalaureate, one per region.
Similar to the countries of many of our podcast participants, what decides where a student ends up is the university entrance exam. Unlike for-profit private univerisites, public universities in Peru is hyper-competitive as it charge no tuition and carries immense prestige. In fact, Peru's oldest public university admitted less than nine percent of applicants in 2017 compared to over 50% in private unis! (Journal of Public and International Affairs). To prepare for the entrance exams, which many cite frequently outpaces standard public school standards, many students spend up to two years at a private pre-university academy.
(We see a similar pattern in Korea, India and China)
Schools compete on those results, and Sara's is no exception. She attends Colegio de Ciencias Lord Kelvin in Trujillo, a school with a science focus and a preparatory track aimed at admissions, which advertises students among the top scorers nationally. Even there, the classes are the national ones; That is what she means when she says her school life is fairly ordinary. Students work through projects meant to prepare them for university, and anything past the curriculum she has had to find herself.
Despite the academic pressure, she likes what she is learning. Biology and literature are her favorites, with anatomy and neuroscience on one side, Dostoevsky and Mario Vargas Llosa on the other.
She is also a part of her parish choir that she has been part of since she was eight, and it sings every Sunday for more than a hundred people.
"Here, our culture is to believe a lot in God, in Jesus. So going to the parish since I was eight, it was a really big importance of showing my faith. And especially singing."
Quick Note About Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa is the writer most Peruvian students meet first. Born in Arequipa in 1936, he became one of the central figures of the Latin American Boom with novels like La ciudad y los perros and Conversación en La Catedral, culminating in a Nobel Literature prize at 2010. What draws Sara to him is not the prize, but the fact that he wrote about places familiar to her locally. While she says Russian novels are full of long names and technical language that slow her down, Vargas Llosa writes in words she actually hears in Peru, about places she has been, including a beach she visited as a child.
For her, literature is especially valuable when it is local, so is journalism.
When It Reached Her Own Family
Sara did not fully understand the size of the problem until her father was targeted.
"In Trujillo, organized crime and the city's beauty seem to go hand in hand. I did not realize the magnitude of the problem until it happened to my father. The calls started, and although it was possible to stop it before the attacks occurred, many other business owners weren't so lucky."
That is the point where she decided she had to say something publicly, to Peru and to Trujillo specifically. It is also where her interest in audiovisual communication started.
Trujillo Speaks
Her first piece of work was about extortion in La Hermelinda, the market area where her father works. She interviewed a small business owner whose life had been changed by it. From there she built the podcast, in English, so the stories would travel past her own city. Her videos run in Spanish with English subtitles for the same reason.
The production choice is deliberate. Instead of an interview-only format, she builds episodes out of sound, narration, and everyday moments.
"I wanted the audience to experience the atmosphere rather than simply receive information."
She taught herself the editing in CapCut, but the structure came from courses she took at two Peruvian universities, UDEP and UPAO, where she learned technical knowledge on how to build a podcast, how to open a short video, what to hook people with in the first few seconds, and which sounds to use.
The Part She Wants to Do Next: Early Life Adversity
Episode one covered extortion as a crime; in episode two, she plans to use her interest in neuroscience.
Sara wants to look at what researchers call "Early Life Adversity", the way ongoing instability around a young person changes how their brain develops and functions. Her plan is to cover the political side of extortion, then the neurological side, then put them next to each other.
She is careful about the comparison between teenagers and adults - she does not claim one group suffers more.
"In an adolescent brain, many children have problems to keep up with school because their father lost his job, or his mother is crying because there was an explosion. In an adult way it would be completely different, because you have other responsibilities to attend. Both sides are completely different, but at the end, both are really important to take care about."
Local Accountability
The idea underneath all of it is what she calls local accountability. Adults assume teenagers are somewhere else mentally, thinking about school or friends, not about the violence in the city. Sara says that assumption is wrong and costly.
"Everything that happens around us during adolescence affects us in ways that we can't imagine. Our brains are still developing as we deal with school, family, social pressure, and the environment around us. People are just not caring about that as much as they should."
Her Advice
Sara's closing message was about starting before you feel qualified, which took her a while.
"At first I was a little bit shy to share videos and start a podcast. But now that I finally did it, I would say that it's a really interesting experience that you guys should definitely do, especially if you have multiple passions like me."
Thank you Sara for being on ConnectUs Youth Spotlight. The episode will be available on Spotify and across our social media platforms - hope you enjoyed it!
Citations:
AFP. Photograph of Mario Vargas Llosa and Julia Urquidi. "El escándalo que ha perseguido a todas las relaciones de Mario Vargas Llosa," by Dolores Conquero, El Mundo, 24 Feb. 2018, www.elmundo.es/loc/famosos/2019/07/02/5d19e9e121efa0dc0e8b45d1.html.
Colegio de Ciencias Lord Kelvin. "Nosotros." lordkelvin.edu.pe/nosotros/.
"Colegios de Alto Rendimiento." Ministerio de Educación del Perú, www.minedu.gob.pe/colegios-de-alto-rendimiento/.
"Education in Peru." World Education News and Reviews, World Education Services, Mar. 2022, wenr.wes.org/2022/03/education-in-peru-2.
"Mario Vargas Llosa." Encyclopaedia Britannica, www.britannica.com/biography/Mario- Vargas-Llosa.
"Mario Vargas Llosa – Facts." The Nobel Prize, Nobel Prize Outreach, www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2010/vargas_llosa/facts/. Accessed 14 Sept. 2026.
"Peru's Blueprint for Equity in Higher Education." Journal of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, jpia.princeton.edu/peru-blueprint-for-equity-in-higher-education. Accessed 14 Sept. 2026.
Connect with Sara and Her works:
Sara's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sara-zapata-pupuche-17214a40b/
Instagram page (Trujilo Speaks): https://www.instagram.com/trujillospeaks/
Podcast link Souncloud: https://soundcloud.com/sara-zapata-210315784/are-we-free-trujillo-speaks
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