With just a few hours left of 2016, it is inevitable to look back at this year and not think about the events that have made the headlines of newspapers worldwide: the refugee crisis, the rise of xenophobic discourse, among others. I'm gonna throw it back to 2014 to make my point on this one.

When I visited Istanbul in 2014 the most shocking thing I saw upon my arrival was that the city's streets were full of homeless children, asylum seekers from Syria, as the people from the city explained to me. It was not until one of my last days of my stay when I had contact with one of them.

I was taking photos of Galata Bridge when a little boy approached me with a playful smile. I noticed he was barefoot. He started playing with my camera, and I was so impressed by his innate joy that I was left speechless. I bought him a juice and a bottle of water, and he left with a smile on his face. I managed to snap the following photographs after our brief encounter, and I continue to look at them even now. It was then when I understood the drastic proportions of this human disaster, and how incompetent we have been to stop this drama.

I keep looking into this moment because it also taught me that hope is really the last thing you lose. As genius writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote, hope is sometimes all we have. In his novella 'No one writes to the colonel' he brilliantly announces what is, and will always be, one of the greatest virtues of humanity. When asked by his wife how they would make it without having money to buy food, the colonel replied he had hope in the rooster left behind by his son, and that it would win the next cockfighting tournament, and provide some desperately needed income. "You can't eat hope, but it sustains you," says the colonel.

This new year I wish you all the hope to sustain every plan, every dream, and every goal you have.