I don’t remember much about this day and I didn’t write down very much about it. What I do know is that it was a Sunday so we all went to Puerto Guadal, the nearest town, for mass. We piled 14 (Cole, Paul, Rodrigo, Me, Jose Antonio, the two tutors, 6 high school kids and Esteban, a college aged guy who lives on the ranch) of us into a pickup truck, 6 in the extended cab and 8 in the back. We were lucky enough to meet one of the women from the farm coming back from having dropped off some of the girls in town so we unloaded a few people into her truck. (its not unusual at all that we met her on the way there since there is only one dirt road that goes from the farm to the town) The mass was in a nice little church in town and with the 14 men and about 8 women from the farm, we made up about half of the congregation. The service was pretty informal and afterwards they busted out a boombox and some people danced Queca, the national dance of Chile, since it was the week of the independence day.
I also went for a run on this day. It would be the only run I would go on in Patagonia unfortunately because for the rest of the trip I was either too tired, couldn’t find the time or was too lazy. But it was a great run. I went out to the dirt road which was great for running on and came back on the road/trail that goes through the farm.
Day 4
Today we took a day trip to Cochrane, the “city” closest to the farm. Joselo came with us. He is the son of the Jose Manuel, the founder of the Manquehue Movement and was staying at the farm for a few weeks. He wasn’t on our part of the farm (it’s a big farm). He was staying the big family house that’s down the hill from where we were, on the shore of Lago General Carrera. It took us about 2 hours to drive the 60 km to get to Cochrane since it was all over winding dirt roads. The ride was a little rough but spectacular. We drove along the Baker River (Longest river in Chile, I think) and saw the location of one of the proposed dams on the river. This is probably a good time to tell you about the issue of dams in Patagonia
Patagonia Sin Represas
A company called Hidroaysen is proposing to build 5 dams in Chilean Patagonia (in the Aysen region to be specific). They want to build two dams on the Baker River and 3 on the nearby Pascua River. These rivers are ideal for hydroelectric dams because of their low variability in flow. However, huge reservoirs would be made by these dams which would flood some very nice regions of Patagonia. Also, since the electrical energy produced wouldn’t be going to the Aysen region, but to the electrical grid in the center of the country, a huge, high voltage electrical transmission line would have to be constructed across more than 2000 km of Chile. So as a result, this project has drawn a lot of heat and the main opposition to it is a group called Patagonia Sin Represas (Patagonia without dams).
Although the Manquehue movement hasn’t taken an official stance on the issue of the dams, there is a lot of concern for the Aysen region and many people are against this project. A few weeks after we got here Rodrigo wanted Cole and I to look into this project and into the environmental effects of dams in general so that we could explain to him in a more technical sense what all this will mean. We put together a little powerpoint presentation and gave it to the house, and later to Jose Manuel (founder of the movement) and recently to another house of oblates. I will probably write more about this issue later and my own feelings about it, but right now I just wanted to give you a little background on the situation.
One of the proposed dam sites
When we finally got to Cochrane we stopped at three restaurants before choosing one to have lunch at. We finally picked a nice little spot and ate Bistec al Pobre (poor man’s steak). This dish used to be for the poor at one time but now its become very popular and as a result its become more expensive. It consists of a bed of greasy French fries with a steak on top and a fried egg on top of the steak. I ate mine with some aji sauce (aji is a hot chili pepper and the sauce is a little like ketchup but boiling lava hot). The key was to get a few French fries, a nice cut of meat, a little egg and some aji all on the fork at the same time. I was moving a little slow after this meal. We were the only people in the restaurant and Rodrigo and Joselo talked to the owner for a while about the dams. I didn’t understand much of what they were talking about but Rodrigo explained it to us afterwards. Basically the owner figured that Cochrane would be totally changed and/or ruined by the project and he would have to sell before everything he owned became worthless. He also told us to not tell anyone because he didn’t want to be marked as anti-dam in the town. After lunch we stopped by the Hidroaysen office and heard what they had to say about the project. They had a really nice place, either in a new building or at least remodeled, with posters, maps, and handouts. They make it all sound like a pretty sweet deal for the region. We also stopped by the Patagonia Sin Represas office and noticed a stark difference. There was one guy working in the office and the building looked like all the other buildings in the town. (Patagonia has only been inhabited by non-indigenous people for about 100 years so there isn’t a lot of development and the towns aren’t much too look at) It looks like a David vs Goliath type fight.
Before heading back home we drove through a ranch that sat in the middle of a beautiful river valley. We stopped at a little puesto to get out and walk around a bit. There was a suspension bridge over the river and a beautiful waterfall nearby that we checked out.
Day 5
Manual labor. Man work. First day of real work (in Patagonia and probably in Chile). But this was all in the afternoon so I have to tell you about the usual morning stuff we did first. We prayed Lauds (first prayer of the day) while breakfast cooked on the woodfire stove. Breakfast was usually hot water for tea or coffee, oatmeal, already baked homemade bread that we heated up and then some butter and jam. After breakfast we read over some interesting Papal documents of environmental issues that we had brought with us. We had a brief session of Lectio Divina, in English, and Rodrigo explained all the steps to us so it made a little more sense. Then we ate lunch 3 hours after breakfast. The eating schedules always confuse me. I wasn’t even that hungry but I managed to put away 3 bowls of thick lentil soup. Once again I was moving a little slow afterwards. I laid down to rest and digest for a minute but then we had to leave to go work. We worked with the high school kids in the part of the ranch that was down by the lake. We had to widen a irrigation ditch that was built to divert the water coming down from the waterfalls into the fields. This ditch has been started a few months ago to keep the fields from getting flooded with water so that the cows could graze on them. Jose Antonio told us that cattle grazing is the only thing that could be at all profitable for this land (he said you could probably grow some nice flowers on it but what the hell are you going to do with nice flowers in the middle of nowhere?). However, before they could put a lot of cows on the land they had to convert it from a swamp. So basically we were digging in the ground…in about a foot of water…and I had a hole in one of my rubber boots. But it was nice outside, and we were in a beautiful place, and we were doing some real work so I felt great. I felt like a tough guy. The high school kids weren’t working very hard and this just motivated me to work even harder. I was like a machine with that shovel. But I paid for it the next day. While I was working someone mentioned that when I get back to Santiago and I could tell all my friends that I dug a ditch in Patagonia. So I got to thinking, what I am going to tell people when they ask what I am doing here.
So Charlie, what did you do in Patagonia/Chile?
- Oh, I helped dig an irrigation ditch.
Oh yeah, like for some poor farmers or something?
- Um, no, not really
But that’s not really fair because while the people who own this farm are not poor, its not exactly a money maker. And it felt good to finish a hard day’s work (half day really) and when we got back to the house all the other stuff like prayer and cooking dinner weren’t as boring as they were before because I had actually accomplished something today. Dinner was pretty simple, just salchichas (hot dogs) and arroz (rice) but we had a little pisco sour beforehand and I think we had plenty of wine during dinner. The wine we drank in Patagonia (for every dinner) came in a carton but it was great. Jose Antonio really likes it and he was his usual gregarious self at dinner and told us a bunch of stories.
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