When the social entrepreneur, Marcella Torres, was 29 years old, she met a young man who would change her career path forever.

He was 22 and he seemed to be Mexican.

He also had a Mexican passport, but he spoke Spanish for a very short time.

That's because just two days prior, he had been deported from the US, where he had lived almost his entire life.

I met him in a hostel, where young people were deported from.

Marcella was at the hostel to study young immigrants from Central America,

but her encounter with this man inspired her to shift her focus.

She would study young Mexicans who were returning from the US and landing in a country they had never known or claimed as their own.

But she would help them get jobs in a pretty unusual way, by paying them to learn how to code.

Bienvenidos and welcome back to a new season of the Duolingo Spanish podcast.

I'm Martina Castro.

Every episode, we bring you fascinating, true stories to help you improve your Spanish listening and gain new perspectives on the world.

The storyteller will be using intermediate Spanish and I'll be chiming in for context in English.

If you miss something, you can always get back and listen again.

And we also offer full transcripts at podcast.duolingo.com.

These days, Marcella Torres is an up-and-coming social entrepreneur that appears in magazines like Forbes.

But the path that led her there starts back in 2011, before she met that young man who changed the course of her professional life.

That year, I was in England.

I studied a major in social development in the University College of London.

That was also the year the era world was in the middle of a democratic revolution, largely led by young people using social media and other internet tools to change their countries.

This caught Marcella's attention just around the time she was choosing a focus for her thesis.

I decided to do my thesis about that topic.

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