Near the end of July I went through a rough time of homesickness and frustration with the Spanish language. I decided to just accept the awkward feeling and make a change. The first thing I did was change apartments and I now live in a new place with only Spanish speaking roommates. At the same time, I made a commitment of taking Spanish classes with a friend of mine five times a week. For this reason, I haven’t had much time left over to write my blog since studying and working have been the only things occupying my time. But now I am happy to say I feel less homesick and I am actually able to have conversations in Spanish – however slow I am – I am speaking now.
And I can finally say for once that I am proud of myself. Next week I will have been here for six months and I am well over half of my original commitment of staying here until December. Things weren’t quite the way I had imagined when I came here. I had too many immediate expectations. For one, learning a language is a process and so I’m over beating myself up about not being better than I am at this point. And in addition to leaving my life behind in the States and coming here alone, it’s taken me a while to work out the kinks… Most of all, I just accept that I am imperfect. I have compassion for what I am going through when I look at my life on the outside…just as I would for anyone else. I want to give myself a hug and tell myself that I am doing a good job!
August was an interesting month and definitely the coldest yet. This is what the city looks like before and after the rain. Note the thick layer of smog where the Andes Mountains should be in the before pictures:
And after the rain…..
I am definitely not cut out for winter. It’s not only that I am always cold, but it affects everything about me. I sleep late, have less motivation, no energy and I can’t kick that urge to hibernate with my calientecama (electric blanket). The thing is like my best friend. I don’t know why I never got one in the States. Every morning I wake up nice and warm and it’s a struggle to turn the thing off and get out of bed. I do that thing where I have to talk myself out of bed…if we just make it through the morning, then we can come back and lay in bed later in the afternoon for an hour…I think some people can adapt well to the cold, but certainly not me. I remember years ago how I imagined dressing up in stylish coats and scarves, drinking hot cocoa and living in New York City and how romantic of an idea that sounded to me. No thanks! A few weeks ago it actually snowed in the city which apparently is rare outside of the mountains. I walked 40 minutes in the slush to one of my student’s offices, completely unprepared…no boots, no gloves, no hot cocoa waiting for me and no romantic scene…just me freezing my ass off. And then the next week I was sick.
And it’s a sickness that keeps returning. Last weekend I stayed home all weekend in bed. I couldn’t go out because I was on lock down by the mom of my roommate, Felipe. She kept a close eye on me the entire weekend, making sure I ate all of my soup, making sure I wore socks walking around the apartment, giving me medicine, preparing me teas… This is quite a change from the times I would get sick in the States. In the States, when someone is sick, the people panic. They put you in quarantine where you are avoided and forced to fend for yourself while people spray Lysol on everything you touch or come into contact with. Needless to say, I’m not used to this kind of care and nurturing.
Outside the Universidad de Chile
Perhaps another thing that sparked my sickness was breathing in all of the teargas from all of the student protests last month. College students as well as high school students have been protesting for several months now for free education and better education. The protests can be unavoidable, and on more than one occasion I’ve found myself in the middle of a mob of running students and police spraying teargas. The teargas lingers in the air and so you can be walking through the city and suddenly be struck with watery, stinging eyes. Some areas of the city will wreak of teargas long after the students have left. I canceled three of my night classes last month due to the protests and watched from my window as students threw rocks at the police and listened to people bang pots and pans together from their apartment windows as another sign of protest. I like to ask each of my students what their opinions are of the protests. All of my students are different in age and profession, but the consensus is that while they sympathize with and understand the reasons for the protest, they are not happy with all of the recent violence.
Barricades of chairs built by high school and university students
I teach a small group of women at a financial firm and they seemed to think that solving the education problem is not the real problem for Chile, but that the social class system is the bigger issue. They concluded that even if the students win, that nothing would really change in Chile for the better because there would still exist a division in the people. There is a big difference between rich and poor here, although personally I have not seen the same kind of poverty I saw when I was in Brazil. The favelas there were like nothing I have ever seen…whole families living in shacks and by shacks I mean some sort of construction with four walls thrown together with a tin roof. Still, I do feel the class system here and I have even felt it among friends I have made here that are from different family backgrounds and observing how they relate to one another. An Argentine student of mine drew a circle for me in which he placed the poorest people in Santiago. Around it, he drew another circle of semi-poor people and then another circle of lower middle class people and so on. He told me that each group of people does not associate with the other at all and that here it is very important which area of the city that you live. People actually lie on their resume and use another address for fear of not being hired.
Signs of Protest from Chilean students: President Pinera with donkey ears
I find it interesting here that the young people have organized themselves so well and have caused so much of a stir politically, enough to potentially make an actual change. Friends of mine and I recently had dinner and talked about how we couldn’t see this kind of thing happening in the United States and we wondered why. I always return to the idea that protest seems to be so much apart of the culture in Latin America, its natural here for people to protest about anything they oppose of the government and that it makes sense for the young people to make themselves heard. But then young people seem to be doing this everywhere around the world lately, in Egypt, in London, in Spain, in many other countries…but not the U.S. I read an article recently in the Huffington Post that contemplated the same question. The article implies that the young generation in the United States nowadays has become numb and complacent. It goes on to suggest that perhaps the youth (I include myself in this) in the United States are emulating the passive traits of the characters in all of our great Hollywood movies such as “Hangover II.” It could be. The writer made an interesting point in saying that the only young people who protested in the U.S. this year have been a group of angry foreign students who came to the U.S. to study English as part of a State Department program, but were instead forced to work long hours for little pay at the Hershey’s Chocolate Factory.
This weekend is September 11thand this day has quite a different meaning in Chile because it is the anniversary of the day that the dictator Pinochet and a coup backed by our CIA took control of Chile in 1973. For people not familiar with the history, before Pinochet, Salvador Allende was President of Chile. He was a Socialist leader voted for by the Chilean people. The government of Allende was not welcomed by the United States who feared the possibility of another successful Communist country, and during Nixon’s presidency the U.S. invested $8 million dollars over a three year period to boost Anti-Allende opposition. Supposedly, during the day of the coup, Allende killed himself in the Presidential Palace in La Moneda, however people seem to have doubts that he ended his own life.
The Presidential Palace of La Moneda
The poet Pablo Neruda also died two weeks after the coup and some people suspect that his death was not coincidental, but that he was possibly poisoned for being too critical of the military. Pinochet’s dictatorship lasted into the late 1990’s and during his time in power scores of people were killed, tortured or went missing. A report published in 2004 showed that at least 27,000 people were tortured under the Pinochet dictatorship, in more than 1,100 detention centers. One of my students who now manages a mining company, was a human rights activist in the early 1980’s and was arrested by the police. While in captivity, he was tortured by electric shock (in which he lost one testicle) and he watched the police murder his friends. And to attempt to end his life, the police drove him up to a desolate area of the Andes, stabbed him and kicked him off the side of the mountain to die. He woke up hours later and managed to walk to a small town and seek refuge in a church where the priests and nuns there helped him heal and kept him hidden.
It was suggested to me to stay indoors on the 11th because the people love to riot on this day and that this year will be worse due to all of the student protests. We will see…
