June 10, 2006
Revolution in high schools
While I was traveling north in Chile last week I started to notice some strange things. Wherever I went, there were signs hanging on buildings. SCHOOL ON STRIKE. education is a right. If Jesus lived now, he couldn’t go to school because he’s poor. Some of the signs I didn’t quite understand. It turns out that I just didn’t have the details to what has become a major event here in Chile.
High school students are striking or “taking over” schools and refusing to attend classes until the government addresses their concerns about the educational system. The basic complaints are that many school have completely inadequate facilities, and that poorer people are greatly disadvantaged in receiving a quality education. Specifically, students cannot pay the bus fare to get to school or afford to take the PCU, Chile’s equivalent of the SAT, to attend college. One article called the protests, “the largest since the fall of Pinochet.”
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June 09, 2006
The madness begins
Today when I walked into the cafeteria at Pascual Baburizza, I noticed immediately that something was different. Students weren’t lined up like usual; professors in their lunch room were silent; the typical din was replaced by one stereophonic sound from a few TVs: a commentator on the Germany – Costa Rica World Cup game. So it’s here—the 2006 World Cup. And I’m here—that is, in South America, a continent dominated by soccer fans. Everyone is glued to the results.
One professor asked me who the U.S. is playing next. I said I didn’t know and he scoffed. “You don’t really care much about soccer in the U.S., huh?” he asked. I told him that our sports attention was filled mostly with football, basketball, and baseball, but that many people did follow the World Cup. But what do I know—I’m not even in the U.S. right now. Maybe Cup fever is sweeping the country. In the meantime, I need to get caught up in the craze fast if I want to be able to talk to anyone in the new few months. Go U.S.! Boo Italy, Czech Republic, and Ghana!
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June 08, 2006
As summer turns to fall...
The local weather during April and May was somewhat unusual for the area. Instead of falling temperatures and heavy rains, we had, well, not falling temperatures and rains. While the mornings and nights got chillier, the afternoons remained warm in the 70s. There was hardly a day of rain. Most of the Chileans I know told me how they hoped the weather would change soon. The heat was too much, and without rain we’d have to take conservations measures soon. I kept my fingers crossed that the weather would stay nice just a little bit longer because my friend Elizabeth, who isn’t fond of the cold, was coming to visit in late May.
I got my wish, and the weather was well-behaved for the time Elizabeth was here. In fact, the trees were nicely painted and the valley where I live looked appropriately covered in the rust of fall. When we hiked to the top of the nearby hill, we got a nice eyeful of the changes.
Last night Elizabeth left on a red-eye flight back to the U.S. Although we saw some light rain earlier in the week, it wasn’t strong. While we were in the airport, it started to rain. Now that Elizabeth has been gone for about a half-day, we’ve seen roughly 12 hours of rain. The streets are flooded and dark, the air is wet, and, when it’s clear, you can see the snow on the surrounding mountains.
It took its time, but the weather is changing at last. Hopefully spring will be here early.
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June 03, 2006
Stories lining up
Over the last few days I’ve had a chance to see a few parts of Chile outside of my usual routine. Elizabeth and I took a short trip to La Serena and Valparaiso. I have learned about papayas, pisco production, the moais from Easter Island, Pablo Neruda, the architectural plan of Valparaiso (hint: there isn’t any), and Gabriela Mistral. Usually when I learn about something, you see it here too. Within a few more days, you’ll start to see the latest from my short diversion in Chile.
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May 28, 2006
Mooove along
As a child, my dad always brought home entertaining and informative cautionary tales from the emergency room. It’s a wonder that I didn’t grow up more scared than I did. One of the many lessons was this: don’t ride a bicycle while walking a dog on a leash. The dog’s erratic movements can quickly set the rider off-balance and lead to a crash. Knowing that, you can imagine my concern when I saw the following scene outside our house:
The other day Elizabeth and I were walking down the road and we saw this man biking down the road, leading his cow to a nearby pasture, and singing happily to himself (or better yet, maybe to his cow). These are the kind of things you don’t see just anywhere. Though I do think someone should warn the poor sap about the dangers of biking with a cow on a leash.
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May 25, 2006
From blog to reality
Avid readers know that last week I posted lengthy descriptions of the various jobs I do here in Chile. Sometimes words can only convey so much, so I’m lucky this week to be able to show my first visitor, Elizabeth, some of the realities of day-to-day life in person. After an airport pickup, I’ve been subjecting her to a week that only semi-resembles a vacation.
So far this week we’ve been following my typical work routine so she can see the things that go on here. Tuesday we visited the soup kitchen where I work. In the evening, we played with the girls at the group foster home. It was an exhausting experience, and I felt badly that one of the girls bit Elizabeth when we were leaving (she didn’t want us to leave). Wednesday we helped with English classes at Pascual Baburizza. All of the students who see me every week dropped me like a hot potato to talk with Elizabeth and ask her questions. It turns out that this gringo is old news already. This afternoon we visiting the nursing home and Elizabeth was able to confirm my suspicions that some of the elderly residents’ teeth really shouldn’t be doing the things they are doing (she just finished her first year of dental school, so she’s more qualified than I am to be horrified by the dental care some have received). I even gave her the opportunity to do some laundry by hand on our antique washboard—a real vacation treat if I’ve ever heard of one.
After this weekend we’ll have a chance to travel a little bit and see some more traditional sights. Until then, keep your fingers crossed that I don’t break my visitor. I probably won’t have many more if that happens.
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May 22, 2006
Arriving on a jet plane
I’m at the Arturo Merino Benitez International airport in Santiago. For the first time in this airport, I’m not going anywhere. Instead, I’m anxiously awaiting Delta flight 147 with non-stop service from Atlanta, Ga. to me. Departure: 10:05pm yesterday. Arrival: 7:30am today. I hope. My friend Elizabeth is one of the passengers aboard the flight, and her arrival today marks my first visitor in Chile. I’m looking forward to showing her the people here, the places I work, and some of the countryside.
This week we’re going to visit the places where I work and meet my community members (well, Elizabeth is going to meet them—I already know them). Then next week we hope to see some of the relatively nearby sights in Valparaiso, Viña del Mar, and La Serena.
Of course, all that is contingent on this flight getting here. For all the promises of rapid this-and-that that air travel offers, I find that it also involves a remarkable amount of waiting. International travel only complicates matters. After Elizabeth’s flight lands, it may be 10 minutes or an hour before I see her. It just depends on how immigrations and customs are running today.
In the meantime, I wait.
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May 20, 2006
Work Week ends
This is the sixth and final article in the Work Week series.
As promised on Monday, I did a whirlwind tour this week of some of the different places where I work in Chile. For those of you who blinked, here’s a summary:
- The parish soup kitchen
- A girls’ group foster home
- Teaching English to high school students
- A nursing home
For those of you who paid close attention and added up the total number of hours, you’ll notice that my work week totals about 20 hours. This is the recommended amount for our program, but it probably seems meager compared with the traditional 40-hour week so common in the U.S. Why the difference? Here’s some insight.
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May 19, 2006
Wednesday, but better
This is the fifth article in the Work Week series.
Friday morning I make the same morning bike ride that starts my Wednesday. Due to the gentle but very real incline, it takes 20 minutes on the way there, eight on the way back. Sometimes the distance wears on me, but the commute is enjoyable. One of the things I have learned during these early rides is that encountering a tractor offers one of the most satisfying road biking experiences possible. Passing pedestrians on a bike is too easy. It’s just what’s expected because they are lower on the transportation hierarchy. Passing cars is a futile exercise in exhaustion: it’s not going to happen. Tractors, on the other hand, are just fast enough that it’s a challenge, but not so fast that it’s an impossible one. If you pour on the steam, you can do it.
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May 18, 2006
Old folks
This is the fourth article in the Work Week series.
After working with eight-year-olds in the girls’ foster home on Tuesday, I swing to the other end of the spectrum on Thursday. At 2:00pm, I arrive at the hogar de ancianos. The name makes me laugh because it looks like it would be translated “house of ancients.” In reality, it is a nursing home.
Nursing homes in general can be lonely places, but the circumstances of this one seem worse than usual. There are four sections: men and women live separately in either individual pensioned rooms or shared group rooms. Some residents are well-off: they have their own rooms, bathrooms, personal possessions, and their families visit them. The majority, however, live in shared rooms with eight to ten beds, use a group bathroom, and never see their families; either they don’t have anyone, or their relatives don’t visit.
During my visits I move between the shared areas for the men and women. I greet everyone individually, partly because that’s how it’s done in Chilean culture, but also to offer everyone a few moments of individual attention. Then I sit down and talk with a few people. More than talking, I listen, and this is no easy task. Listening to Spanish is hard; Chilean Spanish is worse; elderly Chilean Spanish is nearly impossible to understand. The upshot is that I rarely have to demonstrate comprehension. They hardly ever ask me questions, so I just nod. One woman has a stream-of-consciousness style that Tom Wolfe would envy. She talked for 45 minutes straight about whatever came to her mind. During that time, I alternated between enthusiastic nodding and sympathetic nodding, depending on what context I could gather.
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May 17, 2006
Pascual Baburizza
This is the third article in the Work Week series.
I start Wednesday morning on my bicycle, riding through back streets in the Chilean countryside. It’s a 20-minute ride to the Pascual Baburizza Agricultural Institute where I help with English classes. Sometimes the warm sun on my face wakes me up as I go; recently, the icy cold wind does that job. After I arrive and lock up my bike, I have a short five-minute walk from the bike rack to the school to get hair back under control. Then it’s class time.
The Pascual Baburizza Agricultural Institute (IAPB) is a technical high school where Chilean students study all the typical high school subjects—math, Spanish, science, art, foreign language—plus learn in the field all the aspects of farm work. By the time students graduate, they have 500 documented hours of experience with sowing, harvesting, animal production, irrigation, and so forth. The school is an impressive facility. It covers more than 50 acres and it has a scaled-down chain of all the typical equipment on a farm. The buildings themselves are also well-kept and far from run down.
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May 16, 2006
Sagrada Familia
This is the second article in the Work Week series.
Tuesday afternoon at 4:30pm, I ring the doorbell at Sagrada Familia, one of three houses in the Divina Providencia hogar network. As I wait for the door to open, I appreciate a few last quiet moments on the outside. Then the door opens and I’m in. And my time at the hogar begins.
Hogar means home in Spanish. One company’s slogan is “Da vida a tu hogar,” which roughly means, “Give your home some life.” Hogar is also the word used for the other types of homes. In Bolivia, I volunteered sporadically at an hogar, Salomón Klein. For that place, hogar would most likely be translated as orphanage. It received abandoned children that parents left on its doorstep or that authorities found throughout the city. In contrast, my current hogar is more like a group foster home; all of the girls currently living there have known parents.
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Posted by Ryan at 04:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Three women and me
This is the first article in the Work Week series.
I work Tuesdays at the comedor in Calle Larga. Catholic parishes throughout Chile run comedores abiertos, open soup kitchens where anyone can stop by for a lunchtime meal. Ours currently serves about 30 people daily, Monday through Friday. The number fluctuates with the days and seasons. During the summer, when temporary work in the grape harvest is plentiful, the comedor isn’t even open. During the winter, when money is scarce and the weather miserable, the numbers get as high as 40 people.
I arrive at 11:00am. I greet the trio of boisterous women who run the operation, Adela, Terecita, and Graciella. They call me gringuito, “little gringo.” I am bigger than all of them (well, at least vertically). Sometimes it seems that my job is to be there just as much to entertain them as other more useful things. I don’t mind, since I figure that they work every day to cook for the daily crowd. In truth, I don’t really have a choice, either. Most of my entertainment value comes from the fact that I don’t understand them. They talk in slangy Chilean and make double entendres, which I of course don’t get. (This is a story for another time, but double entendre represent about 95% of Chilean humor.) Then, they look at me waiting to see if I got it. I tell them that I didn’t, and then they laugh. What can I say—I’m gifted with humor like that.
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May 15, 2006
Welcome to Work Week
I started my routine work week here in Chile over two months ago. Despite the fact that readers are probably most interested in what I do here (as opposed to my water heater or washing machine), I have written very little on that subject.
That ends this week. In a display of the Internet mirroring the real world, I have written articles about each of my jobs which will be published here throughout the week, at the time that I will be doing them. Tuesday at 4:30pm you can read about my misadventures with girls at the group foster home while I am misadventuring. Wednesday morning you can read about me teaching English to high schoolers just when I am explaining the difference between “do” and “does” and the incongruence of verb tenses between English and Spanish. And so it will go through Friday.
Don’t worry, though—I’ll exercise some restraint and refrain from digitizing my entire life. Some people’s lives are so interesting that you want to read about every breath, step, and baby shower ultrasound machine gift that happens. And mine is, well, not.
Posted by Ryan at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)