BVC in Chile

This one is for you...mom

2009-05-07T09:40:00.009-05:00

Well its now been about four months since my last blog post and after the urging of a certain someone I have decided to get back into it. A lot of stuff has happened since January but I should probably begin by telling a little story about our time in Patagonia and a certain ferry ride in Chile Chico.

So this summer (January-February) Cole and I went down to the ranch in Patagonia, where we had been earlier in September. Everyone we were living with went down there to spend the summer vacation so we figured it would be fun to go down there again and work on the farm and then as long as we were so far south we might as well go even farther south afterwards, to the end of Chile (and South America too). So we bought two round trip tickets. One from Santiago to Balmaceda (the airport in the middle of nowhere, 1 hour from Coyhaique, the captial of the Aysen Region of Chile, and 6 hours by bus over dirt roads to the ranch the Manquehue Movement has on the shores of Lago General Carrera). The other round trip ticket was from Balmaceda to Punta Arenas (pretty much the farthest south you can fly). So the plan was to fly to Balmaceda, go to the ranch, work and hang out there for about two weeks, then fly down to Punta Arenas and travel around there, then fly back to Balmaceda, and then back to Santiago. However, since we are living in South America, things didnt turn out exactly the way we wanted them to.

Our time on the farm was great. We were living in the mens house with about 8 other guys. Cole and I and Esteban (an alumni of San Lorenzo who wandered/hitch-hiked his way down to the farm and has been there for the past 6 months or so) worked on the farm while we were there. Some of our tasks include: tossing hay bales onto a trailer and then storing them in a barn, cutting down a bunch of grass and shrubs and making stuff look nice, cleaning and organizing one of the barns, and burning garbage (I know, dont ask).

So anyway, during this time we needed to buy bus tickets to get back to the airport for our flight to Punta Arenas. So one day when we were in the small town nearby Rodrigo and I went around asking if there was a bus that left on a Saturday that was going to the airport (our flight was on a Saturday). Turns out there was no bus on Saturdays but we found out that instead of taking the 6 hour direct bus over dirt roads we could take a bus on Friday to Chile Chico (east of the farm) then get on a ferry across the lake and then take a bus to Coyhaique, stay the night there and then get to the airport the next day. It sounded great to me at the time. We could break the long 6 hours up into smaller pieces, we could see Coyhaique and we could take a ferry across the second largest lake in South America. So we bought two tickets to Chile Chico and we were also able to buy the ferry tickets from the bus company too. (This bus company was run out of a butcher shop so in addition to being able to buy a trip by minivan to the nearest town, you can also buy assorted groceries and cuts of meat).

So our flight to Punta Arenas was Saturday Feb 14, which meant our bus trip was Friday Feb 13. Yes, February the 13th. So right away we were off to a bad start. Plus I started to get sick on Thursday and I woke up on Friday feeling like crap. But anway, the bus to Chile Chico comes to get us at the farm and we get into town about 3 hours later, but still with plenty of time to get to the ferry by 2 pm, or whenever it was supposed to leave. Right away we realized that Chile Chico is probably the windiest city in the world. No joke. So we escaped from the wind in an internet cafe and checked our email that we hadnt seen in about 4 weeks. Then we headed over to the port to wait for the ferry. After waited for several hours in the office without seeing anything that looked like a ferry or hearing any official announcement we talked some woman who looked like she was in charge. (she was also wearing way too much make-up and clothes that were way too tight) She told us that the conditions on the lake were pretty bad because of the wind (No, really?) and that the ferry wouldnt be leaving from the other side until 4 pm. Then at 4 pm when the ferry still didnt show up she told us that it was not going to come to today, but it would definitely come tomorrow. So Cole and I were like crap, that sure does suck (we may have said something a little more profane) but hey, we can still catch the ferry tomorrow, take the bus to the airport and make the flight. So the lady told us to come back tomorrow at 6 am to catch the ferry. Really, I said, 6 am? Are you sure. Yes sir, 6 am. Whatever. So we went around Chile Chico looking for a place with two beds for the night. And that is what we got. A room with two beds, and nothing else. Ok, there was a light and a light switch. But there was a kitchen and a shower and the price was right - $5000 pesos (like $9).

So we woke up early the next morning and headed over to the port in the dark to catch the ferry (it was still really windy, and although it was no longer Friday the 13th but Valentines Day, our luck didnt look like it was changing). And of course on the door of the office is a sign that says the ferry will be leaving the OTHER side at 6 am and getting to Chile Chico around 8:30. Thank you so much ugly ferry office lady. So anyway, the ferry finally gets to Chile Chico at around 10 am (or something like that, I dont remember all the details because it wasnt a very memorable experience). So we are all relieved. Everyone else waiting for the ferry is relieved because although it was still windy, everyone said that if the ferry crosses to one side, it ALWAYS goes back to the other side, so we would DEFINITELY be going to the other side. And so Cole and I were relieved because we would still make our flight. So we are all ready to get onto the ferry when the captain stands in our way and says that he is not going back.
What?
Thats right, I have permission but I just dont want to risk it in this weather.
¿Qué?
Yeah, I might go back over at like 2 pm, but who knows, I hope all you passengers dont have anywhere really important to go.
So Cole and I said to ourselves - well this is no good (%$&$#), but if this ferry DOES leave at 2 pm we can still just barely make the flight, I guess we will just have to wait around and put ourselves at the whim of mother nature and this captain guy. But here is where the plot thickens ( I hope you are still reading and/or paying attention). We called up the airline just to make sure that everything was the same with our flight and it turned out that our flight had been changed slightly and was now leaving 2 hours earlier. Darn ($#&*). Looks like even if this ferry does finally leave there is no way in hell we can get to our flight on time. I guess we better cancel that flight. So we did that and gloomily walked back to the ferry port realizing that our dream of seeing the end of the world, Parque Torres del Paine and above all some penguins, was ruined. At this point we figured we had few options
1. Hitchhike back to the farm and spend the rest of the time there then fly back to Santiago on our return flight
2. Wait around for the ferry and spend the rest of the time in and around Coyhaique and find something to do there.
We decided to wait around for the ferry. At this point I just wanted to get on that damn ferry and cross that stupid lake. I didnt care what was waiting on the other side. So we get back to the ferry office and hang out with the rest of the pissed off passengers. We start talking to these two Isreali guys about our age who had stayed in our hostel and we had talked to them before. They told us they had been in Chile Chico for about 5 days now waiting for the ferry and we told them about our problem and how we had to cancel our flight and miss our trip. They told us that we could still make it down to Punta Arenas if we went by bus, an idea that never occured to us. They said it was easy, although long. So we said, hell yeah, lets get the %&$& of Chile Chico! We walked down the street, just barely caught a bus across the Argentinian border to a town called Los Antiguos, and from there we just barely caught a bus to Perrito Moreno, a place we were told had a huge bus terminal with routes all over, including one to a town called El Calafate, which was also just a short bus ride to Puerto Natales, which was going to be our second destination after arriving in Punta Arenas. So we get into Perrito Moreno and ask one of the bus companies if there just happened to be a bus leaving anytime soon to El Calafate. Why yes of course there is a bus, that one right there leaves in 15 minutes. Awesome. We'll take it. How much? $170 Argentinian pesos or something. Uh oh, we dont have that much Argentinian money, let alone do we know what the exchange rate is! So we took off running into the center of town to hit up a cash machine. We got some pesos and took off running back towards the bus station, holding out our thumbs on the off chance that someone would pick us up, and sure enough a nice young man gave us a ride back to the bus station (our luck was finally changing). So we get back to the station and we are both sweating and I still feel kinda sick, just the kind of condition you want to be in when starting an 18 HOUR bus ride.

Before getting on the bus I asked the guy selling tickets if there was an easy way to get to either Coyhaique or the airport at Balmaceda from here. (Thinking about the trip back, because we were going to need to get back to Balmaceda for our flight to Santiago and we had cancelled our flights between Punta Arenas and Balmaceda because we didnt think we were going to go anymore.) So the guy tells me - There isnt really a way to go through Argentina but hey, you know what you can do, you can bus over to Chile Chico and then take a ferry across the lake and then bus to the airport.
HA!
No way in hell I am doing that!
So we get on the bus and it turns out it wasnt actually going to leave in 15 minutes (In Argentina, probably even more so that in Chile, things usually dont happen on time.) We left about 90 minutes later and began the trek down Route 40 thru Argentina. Which was sort of like driving on the moon. There was seriously nothing out there. It was a dirt road through barren pampas. At one point a saw a fence crossing the landscape and a few horses alongside the road but I had no idea where they were from because there was nothing but flat plains and mountains in the background as far as I could see. Anyway, the next day we finally got into El Calafate. From there we took a bus to Puerto Natales in Chile and were able to continue with the trip we had planned. We saw Torres del Paine (which was beautiful), went to a penguin colony in Punta Arenas and saw the southern-most brewery in the world, although those jerks wouldnt let us tour it, or even sell us a beer mug or t-shirt.

I will try to put some pics up at some point.

Well this has been way too long. I will try to write more about what else has been happening here in Chile. You know, stuff like what am I doing here, how is it going, etc, etc.

Peace

January

2009-01-15T09:32:00.005-06:00

Wow, almost an entire month has passed again since my last blog post. There is something about living here in Chile that makes time pass it a strange way. I dont know if it is the different seasons (southern hemisphere, its hot right now), being away from home, or the slower pace of life here. Its hard to believe that I have already been here for almost 5 months. Speaking of 5 months, I finally got my Cedula de Identidad Extranjeros (Chilean Identity Card for Foreigners) yesterday after many struggles with the local bureaucracy. I know what you are thinking, 'Charlie, you have been in Chile for 5 months and you are just know getting legal?'. Yes. I already had my one year visa coming in but upon arriving I needed to register with the international police here and get an ID card. It was quite a hassle (for me at least, Cole got his with no problems). Let me go back to the start and explain all the steps I needed to take in order to get a one year visa and ID card. (I hope I dont leave anything out)

Apply for a one year temporary resident visa to Chile – This requires sending a few things to the Chilean consulate in Chicago

A signed letter from my doctor stating that I am in good health
Results of an HIV blood test (negative)
FBI criminal background check – requiring the following

Fingerprints taken at Ramsey County Government Center (the first of many fingerprints)
$18 money order
Wait 3-4 weeks

3 passport sized photos
$131 money order
My passport
Application letter

Take a family trip to Chicago to pick up my visa in person and have my thumb print taken

Customs in Chile at the airport (duh)

Register within 30 days of arrival with the Chilean International Police

After registering, obtain an ID card from the communa where you will be living. This is where the fun starts and my memory gets a little hazy.

Applying for the ID card requires more fingerprints, photo, and about $6. Should take no more than 2 weeks

Go to Patagonia for 2 weeks, forget about the whole thing

Return to Santiago to find that the civil workers are on strike (this of course includes the people working on my ID)

Return after strike to pick up ID card only to find that it has been rejected. Apparently the last name on my visa – Sawyer III, because my full name is Charles Edmund Sawyer III – didn’t work in the computers so they rejected my application

Go to three different government buildings downtown to get the name on my visa changed to just Charles Edmund Sawyer

Return to the International Police to re-register

Return to the Vitacura community office to reapply for my ID card with my updated visa. More fingerprints

There was another civil workers strike in here somewhere

Discover that my card was rejected yet again

Return to the Vitacura office to find that they didn’t have my date of entry into Chile in my application, which they did have. The guy we talked to said my card would be ready in under a week

Celebrate Christmas and New Year’s with my sister here in Chile and forget about the whole thing.

Return on Jan 2 hoping to get my card. This time without Rodrigo, our contact guy, who talked to all the civil workers for me and was a real good sport about the whole thing.

Find out my card is not ready and go through the process of applying for an ID again – more fingerprints, another photo.

Return after a week and a half to the Vitacura office and finally get my ID, although it has the old photo and old ID number on it and says that it was issued on Dec 30. So my last visit was totally pointless.

But the point is, I have my ID card. Sorry if all that was confusing. This isnt meant to be a knock on the Chilean bureaucracy or government (well maybe a little), merely an observation or maybe a little venting.

But hey, on the bright side my sister Anne came to Chile between Christmas Eve and New Year's day and we had a great time together. Here's a few of the fun things we did.

Went to Valparaiso for three nights and explored the entire city - hills, beautiful colored houses, delicious food, hills, the ocean, great food, ascensors, hills, one of Pablo Neruda's houses.
While in Valparaiso we took a day trip to a nearby national park and climbed a nice hill (if it was in MN I would consider it a mountain, but since its in Chile its a hill) We didnt quite make it to the top but it was still great. Saw a huge spider
Checked out various sites in Santiago - the central market, my school, parks, Plaza de Armas, another one of Pablo Neruda's houses (that guy sure knew how to live)
Toured two vineyards (with tastings) just to the south of Santiago
Rode in the teleferico (sky ride) that offered great views of Santiago and my neighborhood in particular. Anne was terrified.
Spent New Year's (the rest of the nights in Santiago) in Bellavista, a hip, Bohemian part of town with great restaurants, bars and clubs.

After Anne left, Cole and I went to Trabajos (work missions) with about 30 of the high schoolers from San Lorenzo. We stayed in a school in Pabellon, a small town outside of Melipilla about an hour from Santiago. We slept on hard floors in the classrooms and had cold showers but we got to help the people in the area fix up their houses and we had a lot of fun with the students so it turned out great. I dont want to brag, but while we were there we played a few games and I won musical chairs, the dance contest, and the fun run (although one kid really pushed me and I was impressed with how fast he was, and also that all the kids ran and ran fairly fast. I couldnt help but think of how kids in America would react if they had to run 2-3 km, but these kids were all about it). We also hitch-hiked in Melipilla...twice...both Sundays we were there...to go to Mass! It was my first experience with hitch hiking but it went great. The people here in Chile are ridiculously friendly. Either someone would pick us up along the road, or the students would knock on the door of a house if they saw a truck in the driveway. And it worked!

Cole and I are leaving for Patagonia tomorrow. We are going on a work trip there with about 30 other kids our age who are involved with the Manquehue Movement and we will be in three different towns all close to the retreat center the Movement has in Patagonia. Not exactly sure what we will be doing. After that is over (about 2 weeks) we are planning on staying at the retreat center/farm for two weeks and hopefully working with some of the gauchos again. And then after that we are flying down to the end of Chile, Punta Arenas, and travelling around there for 8 days, including a few days in Torres del Paine, one of the best natioanl parks in Chile, if not anywhere, or so I have heard. Then by the time we come home in will almost be March and school will start again. Its a rough life down here. I guess I will probably miss the inaugruation and the Super Bowl too, but at least it isnt below zero.

December

2008-12-17T12:24:00.002-06:00

Well I guess I should apologize again for letting my blog get so far behind. Its not so much that I have been super busy. We don’t have internet at the house I live at and while I am able to use computers at San Lorenzo (the school) and I use them often, they are pretty slow and I seem to waste most of my time on the internet keeping up with emails and the news. But Cole’s laptop finally arrived here (long story) so now we have a good computer that’s available to us at all times at school. However, the school year just ended (its summer here, well, technically its not summer yet, but its pretty hot). But we will still be at San Lorenzo for a little while doing some stuff. Then we have Trabajos (works) starting in early January. Trabajos is a service trip run by the school every winter and summer. And like everything else, we don’t yet know what we will be doing and where we will be going. After trabajos, we have another trip to Patagonia coming up (Jan 16 – Feb 1) and again we still don’t really know what will happen there. We at least have our plane tickets but I don’t think other essential logistics have been planned yet such as where we are staying, food, etc. After going to two meetings for this trip, one of which was about 5 hours long, all I really know is that Cole and I, and a bunch of other college-aged and slightly older people involved in the Manquehue Movement will be going to Patagonia and we will be split up into three groups, each living and working in a different small town. After that is over, Cole and I are hoping to stay on the farm that the Movement owns in Patagonia and then we would like to travel farther south, hopefully to Punta Arenas, Parque Torres del Paine (supposed to be the best national park in Chile) and Tierra del Fuego if possible. And by the time all that is done it will almost be March and the school year will start up again.

I cant believe it is already the middle of December. It gets pretty hot outside during midday and its really weird to see Christmas decorations (although there aren’t that many up yet) when the weather is like this. I have never been this tan in December. Its still a farmer’s tan but right now I am about as tan as I usually get during a Minnesota summer.

Giant Christmas Tree in downtown Santiago. Not bad, but its missing snow.

The big end of the year kindergarten production. I was chosen to play the role of a tree. I still have no idea what the 5 minute play was about. All the dialogue came from a song on a cd player and I couldnt understand any of it.

End of the year mass.

Andrea (7th grade) and I. I let the kids write all over my nice white t-shirt. Yes, I do wear a plain white t-shirt to work, almost everyday now. Its too hot for me to wear anything else.

Religion

2008-12-16T10:14:00.014-06:00

Here are a few events that took place a while ago that help to illustrate how Catholic a country Chile is.

Cardinal’s Birthday

I think it was during my first month here that we attended a mass given by one of the cardinals in Chile. It was his birthday so I guess he wanted to throw himself a big party. Anyway, after school one day we (the people who work at San Lorenzo) chartered a bus downtown to the cathedral that is located at the Plaza de Armas (the main square downtown). By the time we got there the cathedral was already packed and so Cole and I, along with a bunch of other people from San Lorenzo, San Benito and San Anselmo, stood on one side of the church. Of course, it took a long time for things to get going and during this time Cole and I both realized we needed to go to the bathroom. We were still pretty new to life in Chile then and of course we did not know where the bathrooms were located at the Santiago Cathedral (not that I know where they are now). So two kind high school kids from San Lorenzo took us to the nearest bathroom, which happened to be located in a mall, three blocks away, on the third floor. I found it hard to believe that this was the closest bathroom. The two kids let us know that this was a good place to pick up chicks and pointed out all the hot girls to us. On our way back to the cathedral I thought to myself that we probably missed some of the mass, since we were gone for so long. Then I remember that we were in Chile, and not a whole lot of things run on time, so we probably didn’t miss much at all. Sure enough when we walked in the front door, there was a huge procession of priests and the birthday boy himself (the cardinal) looked right at us. Other interesting facts about the mass are; the entire gospel was sung and there were two jumbotrons so that people with bad seats could see what was going on. Ok so they weren’t jumbotrons like at a stadium but they were pretty big.

A view of the Santiago Cathedral after the mass.

Procession of the Virgin

Yeah so I don’t remember a whole lot about this one. The Virgin of Carmen is like the patron mother of Chile or something and they had a big parade/procession through downtown on her feast day. Here are some pictures. There was a big float carried in the parade with the statue of the virgin and a whole mess of people followed it along its route from the cathedral at the Plaza de Armas, around downtown and back to the cathedral. All the Catholic schools were there too and so we hopped in with the people from San Lorenzo and the rest of the Manquehue schools.

The float

Some crazy dancing they had afterwards, it comes from the desert in the north of Chile.

Caminata

I went on a 27 km walk over a large hill with 80,000 other Chileans. Here is how it went down. It was a pilgrimage for Santa Theresa de los Andes who is one of the two saints in Chile. She died young and wrote a bunch of letters and the pilgrimage ends at the sanctuary that she used to live at. It started on the other side of a huge hill.

I woke up around 4:45 AM, ate some chocolate frosted flakes (first cereal I had eaten in a while) and we were out the door at 5:15 so that we would be ready for the bus that left San Lorenzo at 6 am. The bus ride was probably between 30 and 45 minutes and I passed the time talking with the 7th grade girls, waving to the people on the dozens of other busses going in the same direction (which the 7th grade girls found hilarious) and I even managed to fall asleep for a few minutes (despite the girls’ best efforts). The pilgrimage started on a road in a small town, kind of in the middle of nowhere, outside Santiago. We managed to find the rest of the people from Manquehue and the three schools (Lorenzo, Anselmo, Benito). There were vendors selling bags of tiny pieces of white paper (confetti actually) and so that stuff was everywhere and we stood in a huge line for twenty minutes and every once and while someone would throw a handful of confetti into someone else’s face. We finally got moving and for the first kilometer there was a guy walking next to us playing a guitar over some sort of portable PA system he rigged up. That got pretty annoying, but then we finally got ahead of him. The first 5 or so kilometers of the walk before the big hill were flat and there were still houses and farms along the way. So there were a lot of vendors along the road selling all sorts of food, including empanadas, which were really tempting me, but I didn’t buy one which was probably a good thing. I would have been moving pretty slow after an empanada. I did buy some delicious strawberries on the way up and shared them with some of the students I was walking with. (Oh yeah, a bunch of students from San Lorenzo came along). We got to the summit sometime in the afternoon and had lunch there. I enjoyed my packed lunch of two ham and cheese sandwiches (which were surprisingly good despite being left out all night long as well as baking the entire morning in my backpack), some delicious clementines and a few cookies. We got walking again after lunch and my legs were already pretty sore. Going downhill wasn’t much better than going uphill too.

The start

Going up.

Santa Theresa de Los Andes

There were a lot of people

Stopping for lunch at the summit

The view from the top, not bad

Carrying the San Lorenzo banner, with Elle.

Towards the end of the downhill section, with about 8 km or so to go, I noticed I was running low on water. I figured I could probably go the rest of the way and be fine but I was with some other students from San Lorenzo and we decided to stop at one of the water stations, which was just a huge truck with a water tank on it, like the kind you might see hosing down streets or watering public parks. So I waited in line with Elle, a 9th grade girl from San Lorenzo for about 30-40. The line seemed to be moving ok but when we finally got to the part of the line alongside the truck, it seemed like we were never going to make it to the end where the water was being dispensed. There were actually two lines. One was the real line that ran alongside the truck and the other was a – pardon my French – clusterf%&$ at the end of the real line right where the water was being distributed. The workers stopped pouring out water for a couple of minutes and rumors went around that there was no water left. Then the water came back on. Then it stopped again when I was really close to the end. Then all the water station workers yelled at us because a ton of people weren’t in line but were just clustered around the hose. Then they turned the water back on and there was a mad dash to of people trying to fill up their water bottles. I remained patient and calm on the outside of the scrum and waited for my turn. Then they turned the water off again and yelled at us. Then they turned the water back on but instead of pointing the large fire hose towards the ground and letting people fill their bottles, they decided to spray the water into the air and douse the crowd. Then they turned the water off again and told us that this station was now closed because none of us were in line (except for me, the other students from San Lorenzo and about 50 people behind us who had also patiently waited in line for over 30 minutes for the water that was promised to them when they sign up for the pilgrimage). They told us there would be other water stations on the way down with water, which turned out to not be true. I wanted to yell at the people working at the station “What would Jesus do?” but I had not yet mastered the conditional verb tense and I wasn’t sure how to translate it. I was just pissed.

About 1 km later I bought some Orange Crush and lemon soda and gave some to the students I was walking with. It didn’t do much to quench my thirst. Later on there was a house along the way giving out water with a hose. I thought it was a little shady but I got some anyway and drank it, figuring it was ok. I offered some to the girls I was with and they told me it was dirty and didn’t want to drink it. They also advised me not to drink it. I then realized it did taste and smell kinda funny, but by then it was too late. The last part of the walk was on one side of a highway that led to the town of Los Andes where the sanctuary is. I amused the junior high girls by asking every car and truck that passed by to honk their horn. There were also a bunch of kids behind us who heckled every car and truck that had Argentina license plates. The big Chilean win over the Argentina football team had just happened and so they all yelled “1-0” and held up fingers indicating what the score had been. We finally got the sanctuary in the middle of the mass that was going on. Afterwards everyone started celebrating and a small riot erupted in our group, led mostly by the students from San Lorenzo. They are a lot more fun than those rich kids from San Benito and San Anselmo. Everyone was jumping around, singing, dancing, throwing confetti in people’s faces and dousing each other with water. It was just nuts. All in all it was a great experience and despite walking 27 km over a huge hill in pretty hot weather, I had a great time. I felt like I got to know the kids from San Lorenzo a lot better and we really bonded. When I got home I ate dinner and a bunch of ice cream, took a much needed shower and realized that I had been in Chile for exactly 2 months.

The last leg of the journey

27 km in the Chilean sun took a toll on my hair.

The riot afterwards. I cant believe they had this much energy left

Cole and I with Mario, the dean of San Lorenzo, and some high school girls.

Immaculate Conception

Speaking of pilgrimages, there is an even bigger pilgrimage in Chile on the feast day of the Immaculate Conception, which just happened a little while ago. It isn’t organized like the Santa Theresa de Los Andes pilgrimage, but this year around 600,000 Chileans walked from their homes to a sanctuary where there is a shrine to the Virgin Mary. Cole and I weren’t up for this one. I cant remember where the sanctuary is but it’s a lot farther than 27km from Santiago. Instead we decided to go up Cerro San Cristobal (a big hill right next to our house with a statue of the Virgin at the top that looks over the entire city). We had heard that a lot of people go up there on the day of the Immaculate Conception so we figured we could check it out. Plus we didn’t have school that (it’s a national holiday in Chile – 3 day weekend). I think we were a little late getting up there; most of the people seemed to be coming down already. But it was still pretty cool. There were a lot of people up there and the views of the city, even though it was smoggy, were amazing.

The north side of the hill. This is the "Latin American" side of the hill, as I like to think of it. San Lorenzo, in the communa of Recoleta, is on this side of the hill

South side, Providencia (where I live), Vitacura, Las Condes and the other affluent communas. This is the "European" side. I think my house is somewhere right in the middle of this pic.

The statue of the Virgin at the top of the hill.

Confessions? No thanks. I didn't climb this hill so I could feel guilty

Priests only you say? Looks like I can't go this way. I have been throwing a lot of stuff out there about religion so I just thought I would emphasize this point.

Santiago, looking towards the west from the very top of Cerro San Cristobal. There are only some 6 million people in Santiago, but from the top of this hill, this city seems like it is the biggest city in the world. From up here all you can see is the city, until the mountains or the smog obstructs your view.

So basically the main point of all this, besides letting you know some of the stuff I have done here, is to illustrate how important religion is in the lives of the people here. And that’s not just the case because I was sent to live with a Lay, Catholic, Benedictine community. It seems like everyone in Chile is pretty serious about being Catholic.

Patagonia

2008-11-08T15:13:00.008-06:00

Here it is. The final days of my trip to Patagonia, that happened like 2 months ago. Sorry for the delay.

Some cows crossing the road outside of Cochrane. Check me out in the side view mirror.

Lago General Carrera

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 usually gregarious self at dinner and told us a bunch of stories.

Day 6

Day 6 in Patagonia was a lot like day 5. I woke up really tired and sore. I didn’t sleep much during the night and I have no idea why because I was thoroughly exhausted after working on that ditch. I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep for a few hours. Thoughts just kept racing thru my mind. We went back to work on the ditch in the afternoon. I wasn’t working as hard as the day before. Before we got started on the ditch however, we got to witness one of the gauchos killing a lamb. This was going to be the lamb that we would eat the next day for the big asado (bbq) to celebrate the Chilean independence day which was the next day. I am pretty sure this was my first time seeing an animal slaughtered and while it wasn’t gruesome it was a, for lack of a better word, interesting experience, which I will retell right now. Basically the gaucho laid the lamb down on the ground, placed a bowl under its next and then plunged a knife directly into its neck. This part, although somewhat shocking for me, wasn’t nearly the end. As the blood poured and then dripped out of the lamb’s neck and into the bowl, the animal continued to move around a little bit and one of its eyes seemed to be looking directly at us. After a few minutes, when it seemed to be over, the gaucho broke the neck of the animal. At this point I thought the lamb was dead, and maybe it was, I don’t know much about lambs or biology in general so I don’t really know how to explain what happened next. For about 10 or maybe even 15 minutes after the lamb’s neck was broken, its legs continue to move around while it lay on the ground. This was really weird. I kept thinking, “Ok, that thing has to be dead now”, but then it would twitch again. When we passed by the same place on our way back from work, the gaucho had already skinned, cleaned and removed all the organs from the lamb and the carcass (or whatever you call the meat and bones, basically all the stuff we would eat the next day) was hanging up in the barn.

Day 7

Dieciocho – The Chilean National Independence Day. So no work today. Basically all we did was have a huge, day long asado (BBQ). We went to a fire pit that was in between both of the house at around 10:30 for a mass. The local priest was nice enough to stop by to say the mass and after he left we pretty much just sat around the fire until sundown, eating and drinking. Seriously, that’s like all we did. I left once to go to the bathroom but I think there might have been some people that didn’t leave the firepit for like 8 hours. It was the people from my house (myself, Cole, Paul, Rodrigo and Jose Antonio) , Joselo, the tutors (Mono and Osito – that’s monkey and little bear for those of you who don’t “se habla espanol”, everyone here as a “sobre nombre” or nickname if you will), the 6 boys from San Benito (“Pajaro”, Miquel, Rafael, Felipe, “Rosy”, and Ignacio) and the two girls from San Benito (Alejandra and Sophia) as well as everyone else from the women’s house (I can’t remember all of their names). Here is a list of what was served.

· Meat – there was a lot of meat. First there was churripan (sausage and bread, like a really good hotdog) then big cuts of beef (pretty sure it was beef, I didn’t actually have any) and then finally towards the afternoon we all devoured the masterpiece that was the roasted lamb. This lamb was pretty much crucified and sat next to the fire for hours. Joselo rammed a steel rod right along the spine of the animal and then stretched the front and rear legs so that the crucifix itself looked like a capital I and the animal looked kind of like an X. This was then stuck into the ground and then rotated a few times during the day while Joselo doused it with something, oil or some other flavoring. When it was finally done they placed it on a huge wooden board that served as a table and went all just went at it like hungry dogs, even though we probably weren’t hungry at all because we had been eating for several hours at this point.
· Empanadas – these were one of the first things we ate. I think the women made them and then we heated them up on one of the grills near the fire. They were delicious.
· Bread – we had some regular rolls and then some fried bread that we ate with some delicious pebre (salsa)
· Cake or some sort of delicious dessert. All I know is that it has manjar in it and it was great.
· Wine – we started out with white wine that was poured into a huge tub along with several huge cans of duraznos (peaches). Later, we moved on to the vino tinto (red wine) that comes in cartons but is still really good.

I think those were all the things we ate. There might have been some other smaller things but this is the jist of it. We ate a lot. To pass the time while eating, someone had the idea to get everyone together and go touch the electric fence (keeps the cows in). So all the young people (tutors, students, Cole, Paul and myself) got in a long line with the last person placing their hand on the ground (this was necessary in order to be shocked). Then the person on the other end touched the fence and we all jumped up, even though it wasn’t that much of a shock. That’s what we did for fun in Patagonia. Also, after that we threw some cow pies at each other. Dry ones of course. We also sang a bunch of songs around the fire. They had a few books with song lyrics and even had some American songs. One of the guys, Esteban, was pretty good at playing guitar and could sing a lot of American songs, even though he didn’t speak any English. They had the lyrics for “Summer of 69” and I was trying to teach him the tune but he seemed more interested in sadder, dreary songs by Nirvana or other similar bands.

Joselo getting the lamb ready

The feast, or at least part of it. From the left; potatoes, empanadas, and a crucified lamb.

We devoured that thing.

Touching the electric fence.

Day 8

The day after Dieciohco was a lot like Dieciocho. There was no way we were going to work today, because if we were back in Santiago we wouldn’t have gone to work the day after the independence day, especially when the day after is a Friday. (Chileans are known to “make sandwiches” often when holidays come around, which means to take an extra day or two off work and sandwich them between the holiday and the weekend. I think the day after Dieciocho is national holiday anyway. (Chileans usually just call it Dieciocho, with no reference to the fact that it’s in September, similar to the way Americans sometimes call it “the 4th”))

We did do a little bit of work. Cole, Paul and I helped Jose Antonio feed the cows in the morning. The gauchos who usually did this were all gone since it was the holidays. So we loaded a bunch of bales of hay into the pick up then one person threw them off the truck as it drove around while the other people pulled the metal wire off the bale so that the cows could eat it. We got there a little late so the cows were pretty hungry. They would just stare at us. I think they knew that their food was coming. Then they would all slowly follow the truck around as it drove across the field. We also came them some delicious oats and salt.

So anyway, for the rest of the day we pretty much did the same thing we did the day before except we went to a spot on the Baker River to sit around all day and eat and drink, and we ate a little bit less than the day before. I ate some pebre out of the jar with the fork. That stuff is so good. I need to learn how to make it. The Baker River is beautiful and it was flowing incredibly fast. All the rivers we saw it Patagonia had this blue/green tint to them.

The Baker River

Day 9

After going without a shower for a few days I finally clean myself up, shaved, and put on some fairly clean clothes. Paul, Cole and I went for a horseback ride around the ranch with Joselo and Mono. It’s a pretty big ranch so we had plenty of places to go. This was only my second time riding a horse and I wasn’t really sure what I was doing at first. It also didn’t help that we started by going straight up a steep hill with Joselo and Mono way ahead of us. But after a while I got the hang of it and I think that I really bonded with my horse Bandit. I also got to wear some sweet authentic sheep skin chaps, like the guachos wear. These things come in handy when riding through Patagonia because every bush and plant on the ground is covered in thorns and we kept brushing up against stuff. Also, there are a lot of small trees and I had to keep putting up my hands to shield my face from all the low branches. And we were riding for several horses and after a while my legs, butt and back started to hurt. But nonetheless it was a great experience. We went up into the hills that surround the ranch and the view was amazing. We were in a huge valley with the Andes on three sides and large hills on the remaining side and a huge lake in the middle. The clouds were really low that day it seemed like there was a giant ceiling directly over our heads, trapping us in this isolated landscape where the only evidence of human beings were the fences and the five of us on horseback. The land itself was very foreign to me, with plants and trees that I had never seen before. At one point it seemed like we were riding through some sort of forbidden forest, like something out of a book. I kept expecting to see some rodents of unusual size lurking about. We stopped near the top of the hills and ate our lunch of lamb sandwiches (leftovers from Dieciocho), some churripan, manjar with crackers and a box of wine. After lunch we checked out the hidden lagoon that is up in the hills above the farm. When we got home I was exhausted once again and couldn’t wait to eat. During dinner Jose Antonio and Rodrigo wanted to know about some typical American desserts so we told them all about the wonders of Dairy Queen.

I have no idea what this dainty peacock is doing in a rough place like Patagonia. There are three of them on the farm, two males and one female. The guys just strut around all day with their feathers out trying to impress the girl.

A calf.

Cole on his horse before setting out.

Me on my horse, with the lake in the background.

The lagoon in the hills. Lago General Carrera is in the background.

Day 10

This Sunday was pretty chill, which was great because, working, eating, and riding horses was wearing me out. We woke up late and prayed Lauds at 10 am then had a nice breakfast of fresh bread, cream cheese, eggs, oatmeal and raspberry jam. We spent the rest of the day at the family house which is across the road, down the hill and sits alongside Lago General Carrera. This house is amazing and I can’t even imagine how hard it was to build since transportation and technology in Patagonia are pretty old school. Plus I think it was built just after WWI and there wasn’t much in Patagonia then. (There isn’t much in Patagonia now) When I say amazing I don’t mean its something out of MTV Cribs. It’s fairly big and well furnished but still very simple and doesn’t have electricity. What makes it amazing is that it is a beautiful house and it is right next to a huge, amazing lake that has towering snow covered mountains on the other side. And what makes the lake amazing is that it is not only enormous and beautiful (as well as totally calm the day we were there) but also when you are sitting in front of the house, looking out onto the lake, you can’t see any evidence of development or human beings except maybe the faintest hint of a dirt road on the other side of the lake. I have seen a lot of lakes in my day and I have never seen anything like this. If this lake was in America, there would probably be mansions and jet skis everywhere, or most likely it would be in a national park but there would still be development and people around. And not that development and recreation are bad (it depends) but there is seriously nothing on this lake and I was just in awe of that. I almost felt a little guilty being there (at the house on the lake and in Patagonia in general). Who am I to deserve seeing this beautiful place? My 23 years here on Earth haven’t been the most environmentally friendly when compared to the rest of the people on this planet. Why should I get to enjoy all this? Maybe the fact that barely anyone is here is a good thing. I don’t mean to be cynical but as humans we have a pretty good habit of destroying things and maybe Patagonia is something we should just leave alone. But I’m getting off topic. So we pretty much just sat around all day, which was great, especially in this majestic setting. We sat outside and read the rest of the Papal documents on environmental issues. Later on we busted out some fishing poles and I casted a few lines from the shore. I caught a rock. No joke. I seriously caught a rock. The shoreline in front of the house is just a bunch of smooth rocks and they told me it was a good place to fish and since I don’t know much about fishing I gave it a shot. The first time I casted out I hit some of the rocks but I eventually got my line back. I should have quit right there because later on I hit some more rocks but this time the line wouldn’t budge. I struggled with it for about 5 minutes then Jose Antonio helped me bring in the line and there was actually a rock stuck to the lure. I seriously caught a rock. I stopped fishing after that. We ate some dinner outside and then went for a little hike up to the top of a small hill that sits right next to the lake. From there we just sat for a few minutes, staring out at the crystal clear lake and the mountains beyond it. The view was amazing and I can’t really put it into words. I will put up some pictures but they won’t really do it any justice either. When we got back to the house the sun was setting and there this beautiful pinkish glow on the peaks of the Andes in the distance and then an amazing sunset that filled up the space in between two mountain peaks. But both of them only lasted for a few minutes before they faded away.

There is a big island in the middle of the lake that reminded me of somesort of mystical island you would read about in a book or something.

The hike.

The house.

It has a pretty nice backyard

The Andes reflecting off the lake.

Sunset.

Day 11

Monday; back to work. The high school students went to work on the irrigation ditch while Jose Antonio took Cole, Paul and I to find one of the gauchos so we could help him with some odd jobs. In the morning we were fixing one of the fences that separates the farm from the dirt road. A few of the wooden posts needed to be replaced so we had to pull them out of the ground, dig new holes and then secure the new posts in the new holes. It was actually pretty tough work and afterwards I had a much greater appreciation for all the fences with wire and wood posts that run along the few dirt roads that I saw in Patagonia. We went back to the house for lunch and then returned to work with the gaucho. (I can’t remember his name, it was something like Elizaho or something. I think it was the Spanish version of some prophet from the bible. He didn’t talk much. He had actually lived in the US for a few years, on a ranch in Colorado. But that’s about all I learned about him, other than the fact that he knew how to do pretty much anything; butcher sheep, tie any kind of knot, fix anything, ride a horse, etc.) Anyway, in the afternoon we had to move some oats and salt, feed for the cows, to another part of the farm. So we loaded up this old Toyota Land Cruiser truck and a trailer behind it with 100 lbs bags of salt and 60 lb bags of oats. The trailer didn’t have any sides to it, just a flat bed, and we had quite a few bags tied down onto it. We almost lost a few on the bumpy ride.

Day 12

More man work with the gauchos. We fed the cows in the morning. We had to load up one of the horse drawn carts with about 20 bales of hay from one of the barns. Orlando, one of the gauchos, took this hay to the cows in the nearby field, while we loaded up some more hay in the Land Cruiser (nicknamed Poderoso or Powerful) and drove it back to the cows near our house. (I can’t believe this truck is still working. They told me it was only from the 70’s but I found that hard to believe. I guess its not the years but the mileage. I rode in the bed a few times I thought it was going to collapse underneath me. The exhaust fumes started to get to me too.) So we dropped of the hay for the cows but we had to take their troughs that they eat their oats and salt from. The cows were going to be moving to a different pasture soon and we needed to bring the troughs there first. I didn’t really understand why we were doing this because these troughs were big hallowed out tree trunks and they were not the easiest things in the world to move. I thought it would just be easier to cut down some new trees and hallow those out instead of lifting these onto a trailer and driving them a few miles down the road. But anyway, that took us a while because we had to make like 3 trips. After that we went back to fixing the fence from yesterday. We had to replace a few more posts and make sure all the wire was connected. And my job was to take a huge knife, pretty much a machete, and hack down all the thorny plants that were growing anywhere near the fence. Now I am usually a peaceful person and I don’t like destroying nature, but it felt kind of good to chop down all these thorny bushes because they had been pissing me off all week, especially when we were riding horses. I got a little too into this job and eventually my right arm was lifeless and I got a blister on top of one of my other blisters on my right hand. I felt pretty tough after that and the ride back to the house was great. Just sitting in the bed of an old pickup truck, flying down a dirt road, with the Andes Mountains in the background.

Day 13

Last day in Patagonia. Woke up around 7 and had a quick breakfast. Said our goodbyes to Jose Antonio and the women. The bus ride to Balmaceda wasn’t bad at all. No stomach problems. We had the same driver as before so we got to hear all the same songs but I liked them a lot better this time. I saw some snow on the ride back when we were higher up in the mountains and it reminded me of Minnesota. I don’t think there will be much snow when I go back to Patagonia in January so that was probably the last time I will see snow in a while. Except for the peaks of the Andes around Santiago, but that doesn’t really count. We got the airport early and to pass the time we sat in the cafeteria and watched music videos from the 70’s and 80’s. They had some sort of music video megamix from both decades. They played all the classic songs but for only 10 or 15 seconds before moving on to the next one. I found it hilarious. I listened to some more American music on the plane ride back, much more recent of course. It made me a little homesick and nostalgic. I realized I hadn’t had any contact with anyone from home in a long time. When we got back to Santiago the city seemed even more foreign to me than when I first got there. Life in Patagonia reduces everything to its simplest terms. You start to understand what you really need to get by. So all the other crap that comes with living in the city seemed strange to me. But we when got back to the house it felt more like home.

Patagonia Sin y Con

In the spirit of the Patagonia Sin Represas (Patagonia without Dams) campaign, here is a list of things that Patagonia has and does not have. (is that proper grammar? I have no idea any more. English is so confusing, especially when I am trying to explain it to students.) This list is not definitive, merely an account of what I observed during my short time in a small part of Patagonia.

Patagonia Con…

· Shit…I mean poop, manure, both of the cow and horse variety. I swear, this stuff was all over the ranch, everywhere I went
· Mountains – they were pretty much all around us.
· Thorns – 90% of the plant life I encountered had nasty thorns. On a macro scale Patagonia is spectacular and beautiful, but on a micro scale, at least during the end of winter, when we were there, the land is rough and unforgiving.
· Clear waters – the rivers have a greenish blue tint but they are still crystal clear along with the lakes
· Lakes and Rivers – they are all over. The lake that the family house is on was incredibly calm one day. The whole lake, at least what I could see of it, was totally still.
· Sheep – the ranch has mainly cows but sheep are ubiquitous in Patagonia
· Gauchos – these guys have a lot of “man knowledge” and “man strength”. They are pretty quiet but fascinating.
· Mate – bitter herbal tea. You fill a small tea cup with this green herb, pour hot water over it and then drink it through a metal straw. It’s really popular with the gauchos. I tried it. It was ok. Really bitter, but I was starting to get used to it. I think it gets addicting.
· Stars – The most amazing stars I have ever seen. I thought Saint Johns had impressive stars when I arrived there from the city but Patagonia is probably way better than any place in America. There was a full moon when we were there but when the moon wasn’t out there weren’t any lights for miles and I have never seen so many stars in my life. You can actually see the Milky Way stretched out across the sky
· The Moon – I have never seen the moon this bright. It’s probably because I am in the Southern Hemisphere and the moon is much closer to the Earth. No but seriously, it was the brightest full moon ever and when I saw it rising over the hills it almost looked like the sun was coming up.
· Wine – we drank carton wine every night at dinner.

Patagonia Sin…

· Electricity – Obviously there is electricity in Patagonia and there is a line running along the road that cuts through the ranch. But the ranch isn’t plugged in and I think the electric fence is solar powered
· TV – I don’t even watch that much tv in Santiago so this wasn’t that big of a deal. I did see a little of the news when were at the restaurant in Cochrane. It was just weird being so isolated from the world.
· Refrigerator – butter, eggs, leftovers? Nah, don’t worry about it, just leave it out.
· Paved roads – There were a few paved roads on the drive in and the city streets of Puerto Guadal are mostly paved, but other than that it’s all dirt/gravel.
· People – not a lot of people in the entire region of Patagonia and they are usually pretty quiet and keep to themselves.
· Laundry – by the end of the trip I was out of clean boxers and socks so I was glad we were going home.
· Showering daily – after a while I realized I was living on a ranch in Patagonia and showering daily was no longer required
· Cars – only trucks. If you don’t have four wheel drive and a lot of ground clearance you are screwed down here. I did see on Subaru station wagon but that was it.
· Email – I had about 70 emails when I got home, about a dozen of which were important.
· Noise – ridiculously quiet
· Traffic – obviously. If you see more than two cars pass the other way on a road, that’s rush hour.

The house we stayed in.

Cole, Paul and I slept in this room.

This is not a joke!

Chile Gano

2008-10-16T12:41:00.003-05:00

I dont know how to write with accents, but what I mean to say is that Chile beat Argentina last night in one of the world cup qualifying matches. I dont know too much about South American football but I know that this is pretty big. Along with Brasil, Argentina is a traditional powerhouse in football and they tend to dominate Chile in other sports as well. Also, this might be the first time Chile has beaten Argentina in a world cup qualifying match. Cole and I watched the game with 4 other guys from our house last night and they were all just going nuts. One of the them barely sat down the entire time. This might be a good time to tell you that I live in a "new" house. Well, its the same house but there are a bunch of new people living there. After Paul (gringo from Missouri) went back home it was just me, Cole, Rodrigo, Vicho and Andres living in the house. So the movement decided to switch things up and sent Vicho and Andres to another house and we got 5 new guys. Two of them, Anthony and Jonathon, are British and have been in Chile and living with the movement for at least a decade now and the other three, Nicolas, Christian and Juan Pablo, are Chilean and are also oblates of the movement. So things were a bit crazy for the first few days but they have settled down since all 8 of us are rarely in the house at the same time.

Coming up next: the last 8 days of my trip to Patagonia and my struggles to understand what the hell people are saying down here. ¡Chao!

More Patagonia

2008-10-14T15:32:00.003-05:00

Day 3

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.

Back at San Lorenzo

2008-10-10T10:25:00.003-05:00

Alright, I realize I only wrote about 2 of 12 days in Patagonia. I am getting to the rest, I swear. But I figured I would keep the half dozen of you who read this up to date with the rest of what is going on, plus I already had this written. So here is what I am doing now that I am back in Santiago at Colegio San Lorenzo.

Upon returning to San Lorenzo after our trip to Patagonia Cole and I received a schedule for work and some projects that we needed to start. We have 7 main things that we are working on now.

Taller medio ambiente (Environmental Workshop)

One of the projects we will be working on is a workshop for the students to help improve the environment of school. I think this is going to mean several things. First, I think we are going to try and improve the recycling system that is in place at the school. They recycle some stuff but I haven’t seen any bins in the classrooms and haven’t actually seen anyone recycle glass, cans, or paper. We are also going to work to improve the actual appearance and landscape of the school. There are some trees and plants but the athletic fields are in rough shape and the patios are mostly dirt and dust. We also will probably include a little environmental education for the kids that want it.

Sports Teams

Cole is helping with the tennis classes twice and week and I am supposed to be helping out with football practice when it starts soon but we will see how that goes. As I have already mentioned I am not good at football and I am guessing that all the kids who I will be working with will be much better than me. I guess I can help them out with running and calisthenics or whatever. I am pretty sure that there is a guy who comes in a couple days a week and does some track and field stuff with the kids so maybe I will try to help out with that instead.

Baseball Classes

Last Wednesday Cole and I started our first baseball lesson for the boys in 7th and 8th grade. We didn’t have much to work with our first day: some cones for bases, a tennis ball, and two homemade bats. A few hours before we were going to start we realized that we didn’t have any bats but Jaime, a funny guy that works with us in Tutoria, explained to us, in Spanish, that we could find something. So we went over to the trash area/ mini junkyard and found a nice big wooden stick that we cut in two to make a couple of bats. The “class” went well and kids already had a pretty good understanding of the rules. The next day we put up a couple of signs with the names of all the positions and some simple rules in Spanish. I think we are going to wait until the kids get a better grasp of the fundamentals before we introduce more rules, like called strikes, force outs or the infield fly rule.

English Classes

I started working with the 7th and 8th grade English classes (boys and girls) last week. This is probably the simplest of our projects because we already know how to speak English and we don’t really have to prepare anything right now because we are just helping out the teacher. Although later on we will probably have more responsibilities. There are a few things that make English classes tough – 1) I still don’t speak Spanish that well and these kids don’t know that much English. 2) I’m pretty good at speaking English but I am terrible at explaining English. I have no idea why things are the way they are in the English language. 3) The kids aren’t very disciplined. They are always talking, getting out of their seats, and they don’t work very hard. During one class we went over the question words and the teacher had me write out questions and answers with who, what, when, etc. After I went over them the students were supposed to write down the five questions and answers in their copybooks and then think of 20 more questions. They had almost an hour to do this. Some of them didn’t even write down the 5 questions and answers. They seemed much more interested in talking with each other or asking me what the meanings were of the dirty words they knew in English.

Tutoria

We have tutoria with the 8th graders, kindergartners and pre-kindergartners, but like I said before, I still don’t really understand this. Tutoria with the 8th graders seems like its just getting them to calm down for the first 10 minutes and then playing football. And with the younger kids its pretty much the same. The other two guys we work with talk for about 15 minutes while the kids bounce off the walls, and then we go have recess.

Database Work

When the dean of the school asked me if I had any skills (aside from numchucks and bow-hunting) and I made the mistake of saying I knew a little bit about computers. So now I am supposed to work on some databases for the school. I haven’t started this yet but I actually don’t think it will be very hard. I think they use Microsoft Access, which I know nothing about, but I think I can figure it out.

Recreo Entretenido (Organized, Entertaining Recess)

Although its just for 15 minutes twice a week, (Tuesdays with 1º ciclo, younger kids, and Fridays with 2º ciclo, middle schoolers) this could be our toughest task. The whole point of recreo is that it is not organized and the kids can do whatever they want, so getting them to listen to us and follow directions for 15 minutes might be hit and miss. Anyway, what we are supposed to do is think of some games or activities to organize for the kids to play during the allotted time. We haven’t started this yet, but I was thinking something like the game stoplight, or maybe some human knots, fun relay races or even duck duck grey duck if it doesn’t get too out of control. If anyone out there has any good recess or phy ed games for kids that are simple, safe and don’t involve much equipment, please let me know.

So that’s pretty much what we are doing right now, in addition to prayer, lectio, and just hanging out and talking to the kids during recreo. Its not set in stone and other projects might come up as well. This may seem like a lot but we don’t have all of these things everyday so we still get some down time at the school which is nice.

Patagonia...finally

2008-10-09T16:10:00.005-05:00

Between September 12th and 24th Cole, Paul, Rodrigo and I went to Patagonia to stay in one of the retreat houses that the Manquehue Movement has on a farm/ranch in Patagonia. A group of 6 high school boys and 2 girls, as well as 2 older tutors went along as well. The following is a slightly better version of whatever I managed to scribble down in my journal while I was there. (no electricity so obviously no computer)

This is where I was (I hope this link works) The farm is huge, but the houses we stayed in are right near that 265 road sign near the smaller lake.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=aysen,+chile&sll=-45.566107,-72.071686&sspn=0.02698,0.054932&ie=UTF8&ll=-46.765265,-72.567444&spn=0.105593,0.219727&t=h&z=12

Day 1

We flew from Santiago to Puerto Montt and then on to Balmaceda. The airport at Balmaceda was easily the most isolated airport I have ever seen. The airport, and town, sit in the middle of the pampa (large open fields in Patagonia) and they are surrounded by hills and the Andes. This airport is seriously in the middle of nowhere. And I am pretty sure the only reason the town is there is because someone had the bright idea of building an airport in the middle of nowhere.

The weather was actually pretty nice when we got there. A little chilly but for someone from Minnesota is was fine. I was a little worried before going to Patagonia because I didn’t bring many warm clothes to Chile. I have a few long sleeve t-shirts and a fleece pullover as well as a rain coat (which I happened to leave at a friend’s house the day before we left for Patagonia. We were all watching the big football match there). I borrowed a big wool sweater from Vicho (guy we live with) and it reminded me of that scene in Wedding Crashers (“You know I’m not happy about this”). Anyway, it was nice out so Paul, Cole and I decided to walk around this very isolated yet vast and spectacular area of Chile. We had some time to kill anyway because we landed around noon and the bus that would take us to the farm wouldn’t be here until 3. So we had a lot of time because 3 o’clock Chilean time means more like 3:30 and 3 o’clock Patagonian time is like 4. So we decided to walk to Argentina. (I later found out it wasn’t really Argentina but until I get to Argentina for real I am going to count this) A little ways down the road from the airport was a border station and a gate crossing the road. There were signs saying Chilean border control or whatever so we figured we could explain to whoever was working that we wanted to cross the border and that we would be back in 5 minutes. However when we got there we couldn’t find anyone so we crossed the border, took some pictures and then left.

Me in "Argentina". Taken from the Argentina side, looking onto the Chilean border post and the rest of Chile.

¡Welcome to Chile!

When the bus finally got there we crammed all 14 of us and our bags into it. It wasn’t a very big bus and there were already people on it so every seat as filled as well as most of the aisle with all our bags. Despite being packed in like sardines, listening to the bus driver play the same music over and over, and feeling a little sick after driving 6 hours over bumpy gravel roads, the bus ride was pretty amazing. I figured I would fall asleep for most of the time but the amazing views of the mountains and valleys kept me awake the whole time. Plus I got used to the Spanish music and he even threw in some CCR and A-Ha (Take on Me obviously). We finally arrived at the farm around 11 or 12 at night and were greeted by the college-aged women who were on a semester long retreat there and Jose Antonio, the oblate who lives at the farm and would be living with us for the next 12 days. There was a full moon that night and a huge halo surrounded the moon. There are three houses on the farm; we went with Jose Antonio to our house (San Bonifacio) while the high school boys and tutors went to San Bede and the women stayed in a house on a little hill overlooking most of the farm. We had dinner with Jose Antonio by candlelight and then went right to bed.

One of several pictures I took during the bus ride.

Day 2

The farm in Patagonia is owned by the family of the wife of the founder of the Manquehue movement. It is located in the Aysen region of Patagonia, on the shore of Lago General Carrera, a huge lake that straddles the Chile/Argentina border. It’s a huge farm with a ton of cows and three gauchos (cowboys) who take care of them. We met one of the gauchos today while walking around the farm. JA (Jose Antonio) had driven us (Cole, Paul, Rodrigo and me) down the road and dropped us off a couple miles from the house so that we could take a walking tour of part of the farm. So we walked across fields with cattle grazing and hopped over the simple wood and wire fences. If you are picturing this ranch as a bunch of cows packed together onto a large, flat plain then you are way off. This isn’t your ordinary ranch, well it is for Patagonia, but from what I have seen back home its very different from American ranches. Its very simple and the land is still pretty untamed. The cows graze on huge expanses of land with grass, brush, trees and every kind of thorny bush imaginable. Plus the land is very hilly and there is a huge lake nearby with the Andes mountains in the background. I don’t know how they did it but the Andes managed to almost surround this place, they seemed to be on three sides with the forth being foothills. So basically it was like the most spectacular place I had ever been, let alone the most beautiful farm I had ever seen. So anyway, we’re walking across the fields and we end up at the puesto (little house) of one of the gauchos (Orlando). This guy had a great accent (which means I couldn’t understand a word he said) and he invited us into his place for a few minutes. He lives in this small simple house alone most of the year while he works on the ranch.

Orlando's puesto on the ranch

This is the view from right outside the house I stayed in.

Other Stuff

2008-10-06T15:56:00.002-05:00

Two things

1. Here is my address, in case anyone out there still uses snail mail or wants to send me a sweet postcard, or a 3lb jar of peanut butter...just kidding, but seriously though

Charlie Sawyer
c/o Rodrigo Vidal
Parque Antonio Rabat 6150
Vitacura Santiago, Chile

2. Here is some more stuff that I wrote. Enjoy.

Food

Since my last post introduced you to some Chilean foods this would probably be a good time to describe in more detail my experiences with eating here. The food I eat at the house is pretty simple and not too different from American food, with some exceptions. Breakfast is usually just oatmeal and bread. Bread is served with every meal in Chile or at least almost every meal I have eaten here at home or at work. People usually buy bread every day or at least several times a week at a Panaderia (I think that’s how you spell it). The bread we eat at the house comes in small pieces for one person and in three main varieties. There are the round English muffin-looking pieces. They don’t taste anything like English muffins, much denser and less flavourful. Then there are two types of baguette-like bread, which are much better. In addition to bread and oatmeal we have some hot beverages (coffee, tea, or hot chocolate), butter, jelly, and milk. On the weekends we occasionally have eggs but during the week breakfast is quick and simple. I don’t drink coffee but the only kind I have seen here is instant coffee, although I am sure there is a Starbucks around somewhere.

Lunch is pretty simple as well. We eat at the school in a separate room with the oblates and committed members of the movement. (The same people we do Lectio with – dean of the school, Andres the oblate we live with, the people from Tutoria, some of the guys from the business office, etc.) We always have bread and a simple salad and then some type of entrée, usually pasta with sauce, a stew or rice with some sort of meat. We eat a dessert at the end as well, jello or fruit usually. The interesting thing about lunch is that it starts at around 2:15. I don’t know if I will ever get used to this. We eat breakfast at the house between 6:30 and 7 am so when lunch finally rolls around I am starving. I started bringing an apple and a granola bar to eat around 10:30 but I still can’t get used to this eating schedule.

The five of us (Cole, Andres, Rodrigo, Vicho and me) eat dinner back at the house after we have all returned from work. Rodrigo works at San Benito and Vicho works at San Anselmo in addition to taking classes and Catholic University of Santiago. We usually don’t sit down for dinner until 8 or 8:30, which seemed pretty late to me at first. I don’t like eating a big meal right before bed but I guess that’s the custom here. Dinner is usually bread, salad and a main entrée. The entrees are simple and pretty good but for the most part they aren’t that different than food back home. A lot of rice, potatoes and pasta, or else some sort of casserole or hot dish type thing. Our maid prepares the entrée for us during the day so when we get home we just have to heat it up in the oven. My favorite dishes for dinner so far are

· lasagna, obviously and its almost as good as the Reef at SJU
· a meat pie-type dish with mashed potatoes on top and meat on the bottom
· crepes, but they are dinner crepes, hard to describe, I usually eat a whole mess of them (crepes are those really thin pancakes)
· we had lamb one night, it was duro (hard) and definitely para hombres (for men)

We have a dessert afterwards as well, most of them are really good, but some are a little different.

· Flan, can mean a lot of different desserts here, but the best we had so far had two layers with manjar (dulce de leche kind of, its delicious, that’s all you need to know) in the middle I think. I can’t really describe it but it was great and I wanted to polish off the rest of the pan but sadly I could not.
· Sopaipillas – it’s like a pancake but made out of donut stuff, and apparently some squash too. So it’s like a thick, sweet, delicious, small pancake. We pour hot cane sugar syrup over the top and then I eat like 8 of them and wake up the next morning with a shot put in my stomach.
· Flan and sopaipillas are the best desserts I can think of right now. We also have fruit (apples, kiwis, oranges – always fresh and delicious), an interesting type of pink mousse, and some other stuff I can’t remember.

So that’s what my daily food is like. Its usually pretty simple, yet delicious and satisfying. We have been out to eat a few times and so here are some other types of Chilean food I have tried so far.

· Empanadas – a fried bread pocket stuffed with meat, onions, olives, hard-boiled eggs, cheese, etc, then baked and served. Delicious. I have only had homemade ones, but I am going to give the street vendors a try soon.
· Pebre – delicious salsa, tomatoes, onions and I don’t know what else but its amazing, some of the best salsa I have ever had. They don’t call it salsa because I think the word salsa in Chile refers to any type of sauce, including the ketchup/mayo mixture that people dip their potato chips in.
· Churasco and Chacadero – not sure if I spelled these right or if I even know the difference between the two. Basically they are sandwiches. Sliced beef, tomatoes, lettuce, guacamole (they don’t call it guacamole, I can’t remember what they call it), ketchup, peppers, mayo, basically whatever you want. It’s impossible to eat without of bunch of crap falling out.
· Quesillo – it’s almost cheese but not quite because I guess they stop the process before it is finished. So it’s a lot softer and more moist, but still with a cheese like consistency.
· Ok there isn’t much else right now, partly because I can’t remember and partly because I haven’t been able to sample many foods…yet. You can be sure that I will be solving this problem in the very near future.

We also had a huge asado (bbq) in Patagonia when we were there for the Chilean Independence Day (18th of September) but I will go into all that stuff when I finally get around to writing about Patagonia.

I have managed to ramble on for quite some time about food, although I am sure you all expected nothing less from me. I will continue to post about my culinary experiences in the future.

Weather

In a nutshell, the weather here is pretty nice. It was a little cool when we first got here but for someone like me who thrives in cool climates and breaks into a sweat easily, it was great. The only problem was getting up in the morning and taking a shower. We don’t have central heating and the mornings were kind of cold so hopping out of the hot shower into a cold bathroom was a little annoying. Other than that almost everything about the weather has been great. Very little rain. Since it just changed to spring down here it has started to heat up and a few days when the sun has been out its gotten a little hot. I usually walk around school without my fleece pullover and sometimes I am in short sleeves and people always ask me if I am alright or if I am cold or if I need a jacket. I try to explain to them that I am from the northern part of the USA and if I was back home I would probably be wearing plaid shorts in this type of weather. Shorts are pretty uncommon in Chile, at least right now, people might wear them during the summer but I doubt it. I was walking around Santiago one of the first weekends I was here and I didn’t see anybody wearing any.

Dogs

I’d like to talk to you about a serious issue, packs of wild dogs that control most American cities.

Ok, it’s not that bad here, but I do see a lot of stray dogs wandering around the city, even in my neighbourhood. I experienced the same thing in China, except here in Chile there are a lot of big dogs wandering around as well, like German Shepards. I was a little concerned about this at first but I noticed that all these dogs do is mope around and sleep. They look very tired and usually hungry and I have yet to see them chasing after anything or anyone other than another dog. I am not sure how many of them are strays or how many of them actually have owners but have just wandered away for the day. Some of them obviously have no owner because they look like crap and someone has actually managed to put a cardboard box underneath them on the sidewalk. Others have probably just wandered away from home, especially in my neighbourhood, since we have a dog at the house that is not always around. His name is Fido and he has a habit of running away whenever we open the gate. There is a pretty nice restaurant two doors down from us and Fido is usually fed some leftovers. We sometimes joke that he eats better than we do. We he is back inside the gate he never comes in the house, always outside in the small yard we have around the house. I say small yard compared to a yard back home, but it’s probably pretty nice for Santiago. We have a patio on the side and in back, the rest is grass and a lot of plants, and it’s pretty nice. Anyway, Fido knows not to come into the house which makes me believe that people here treat their pets differently here than back home. I feel like dogs are treated more like dogs and less like humans as is usually the custom in America. I have yet to see any dogs wearing clothing here.

Metro

During our first few weeks here Cole and I were driving to work with Andres but in an effect to get home and little earlier and have some free time we have started taking the metro on the way home. We got a card (BIP, named after the beep sound it makes when you swipe it) for the transportation system (Transantiago, sometimes known as Transantiasco because of all the problems they have had). We can ride the metro or busses with it. It’s about a 1 kilometer (that’s right, I’m using the metric system) walk to the metro station from San Lorenzo. I’ll admit I was a little nervous walking thru Recoleta the first time (Recoleta is the community that San Lorenzo is in. It’s pretty poor with some sketchy houses, but it’s not a slum or a shanty town) However now I feel totally fine walking down the busy street that takes us to the metro. Its got the usual sites and sounds; liquor stores (no gun stores), bakeries, butcher shops, grocery stores, sidewalk vendors, broken sidewalks, dirt boulevards, trash in the street. There is a big street market on this same street every Tuesday. It was actually one of the first things I saw in Chile, after getting off the plane, going to the house and coming to San Lorenzo. I am going to try to check it out more. It’s like a flea market plus there are fruit and vegetable stands. I would love to take some pictures on the walk but right now I would rather not make it any more obvious that I am not only not from the area but also not even from the country. . Sometimes I feel like I can blend in since a lot of people here look very European. However my blond hair and blue eyes usually give me away, if my Spanish doesn’t.)

But anyway, back to the Metro…Cole and I have been taking it home nearly everyday after work now and it’s pretty nice. The stations downtown and near our house are a lot nicer than the ones in Recoleta near San Lorenzo, but overall it’s a pretty clean, safe and reliable system. We have to change lines once and the trains get pretty packed near downtown. And although it takes about an hour for the whole trip home we still get back a lot sooner.

Football

From here on out the word football on this blog will refer to the sport in America known as soccer. I can’t stay in the habit of calling it soccer here because I will look like an idiot. If I do refer to American football I will make sure to call it American football.

If Chile wasn’t such a predominantly Catholic country I am pretty sure that people here would worship football. I am sure that some people do take their affection for the Chilean team or their favorite local club to the level of worship. Basically football is pretty popular here and it’s obvious to me almost anywhere I go. Almost all the boys at San Lorenzo play football, where in the middle of the patios at recess, on the tennis/basketball courts (this is called baby football) or an actual game on the football fields nearby. A lot of the kids ask me what my favorite football team is back home. I try to explain to them that I don’t have a favorite football team back home because football is not a very popular professional sport in America. I haven’t watched a lot of TV here. (We watched the news a few days ago after the stock market fiasco and Cole and I also watched a little bit of Flashdance (dubbed in Spanish) with Rodrigo and Andres before we went out last Saturday. I had never seen Flashdance but if I had to pick a movie to watch with two oblates of a religious movement, Flashdance would probably not be one of them.) But the first two times I did watch TV was when Chile was playing in the latest World Cup qualifying games. The first game we watched was against Brazil (they lost) and we saw it at home. The second game was against Columbia (pretty sure) and we went over to Carla´s (girl from work) house after work and watched the game in her small living room with about a dozen other people. We (Chile) won 4-0 so we are still in the mix for the World Cup, I think. (I don’t really know how the qualifying works or when it ends)

I played a little football already as well. Cole and I played some baby football on the basketball court with some other students a few weeks ago. It was five on five and there were 4 teams that rotated in whenever a goal was scored. I am pretty terrible at football and the only way I can contribute at all is if I can run around a lot and rely on my fitness and defensive skills. However, since we were playing on a basketball this was not an option and although I like to think I held my own, I was embarrassed pretty badly a few times. These kids, who were about 16 years old, could do some ridiculous things with their feet. Our team’s strategy was to have Cole play goalie (because he’s tall and filled most of the net, and he also has experience playing goalie) I played defense with one other kid and then the two all-stars on our team just hung around the opposing net most of the time. We would kick it in their general direction and they would somehow control and keep it away from three other players and then put it into the net. Unreal.

Lastly, there are three big football teams here – Colo Colo, U de Chile (University of Chile) and Catolica (Catholic University). Colo Colo is like the Yankees of Chilean Football. They are huge and they almost always win. And unlike the Yankees almost everyone seems to love them. U de Chile and Catolica, even though they bear the names of universities, are actually professional teams. This was really confusing for me at first. It turns out they just practice at the schools and are not actually made up of university students. I think at one point they were more affiliated with the schools but now they just bear the name.

I promise next time I will post all the stuff I wrote in my journal while in Patagonia

Peace

Finally

2008-10-01T09:30:00.004-05:00

Alright, this is going to be a long post but I have a lot of stuff to cover. I will try to keep it organized and provide a short title to each separate topic so that you can pick and choose what you want to read. I know that if someone told me to read their blog and then they posted a novel, I wouldn’t be too interested. So pick and choose what you want to read, but please, unless you are incredibly bored with lots of time on your hands, don’t try to read this all at once.

Why am I here?

That’s a very good question. During my senior year I didn’t know what I want to do after I graduated. I looked into and applied to several things; graduate school in engineering, Teach for America, going back to China and teaching English, and of course the Saint John’s Benedictine Volunteer Corps (BVC from here on out). I got into a couple of graduate schools but I wasn’t sure that engineering was what I wanted to do and I didn’t want to spend two more years in school if my heart wasn’t totally in it. Going back to China was appealing but when I found out that I had gotten into the BVC and that Cole and I would be the first members to volunteer in Chile I figured it was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.
I didn’t know much about Chile before coming here and I knew even less about the community I would be living and working with, the Manquehue Apostolic Movement. The BVC usually spends people to live and work in Benedictine monasteries (becoming a monk or even being Catholic is not a requirement). However, as I will explain a little further on, the Manquehue Movement is not a monastery but a lay Benedictine community. Last year a couple of monks from Saint John’s came down to Santiago for a Benedictine education conference put on by the movement and both parties decided it would be a good idea to add Chile to the destinations for BVC volunteers.

The Manquehue Movement

The Manquehue Movement was started in 1977 by a man named Jose Manuel Eguiguren Guzman. During his mid-twenties Jose Manuel (whom I have met and he is an amazing person) began studying the bible with a monk and he eventually was put in charge of a confirmation group. Jose Manuel taught this group to read the bible in the same way this monk had taught him. The whole point was to discover how God spoke to them through the bible. An intense friendship formed within the group and they all wanted to get out and change the world so they formed this movement and named it Manquehue, which is a large hill in Santiago and means “place of the condor” in the native Indian language. Today Manquehue runs three schools, a women’s shelter, and a library all in Santiago as well as a retreat center in Patagonia. There are more than 900 people in the movement from various walks of life and in various forms of commitment. At the center of the movement are the oblates that have made a stable commitment to the movement. The Manquehue movement prays the Divine Office (the usual pray schedule in Benedictine monasteries) and follows the rule of Saint Benedict (they don’t exactly follow it because no one does that anymore). Also, within education, they are very involved in Tutoria and Lectio Divina, which I will explain.

Lection Divina

Lectio Divina is a kind of bible study that Manquehue does. I have been doing it for a while now but I still haven’t really gotten the hang of it, so I will probably go into more detail with it later. Basically we get together everyday at San Lorenzo, the school I work at, and we do Lectio for about 45 minutes. We refers to me, Cole, and about a dozen other people from the movement who work at San Lorenzo. A bible passage is read aloud, in Spanish obviously, and then each person reads it over a few times themselves and reads the notes and similar passages. This process is called scrutinizing the reading. The whole point of Lectio, at least I think, is to figure out what the bible is saying to you and how it applies to your life at this time. We then pair up and people give echos to each other, where they basically explain how they see the passage and what it means to them. Although I have an English bible, Lectio has been tough because I have to translate my echos and I am finding it hard right now to apply the readings to my life. But I am realizing that the bible is a pretty cool book, even if we are reading St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians, which is not too exciting.

Tutoria

I am not exactly sure what tutoria is all about right now either. I work in the office with all the other people who do tutoria, but right now its not my main job. A lot of ex-alumnos (alumni) of San Lorenzo work in tutoria. Basically they go into each class for about an hour each week and teach the kids about the bible and religion. I have “helped” with the tutoria sessions for kindergartners and jr high students, but I still don’t really understand it. Kindergarten sessions seem to consist of the kids running wild and jr high sessions are mostly playing football with the kids.

The Schools of the Manquehue Movement

The movement runs three schools here in Santiago – Colegio San Lorenzo, Colegio San Benito and Colegio San Anselmo. All of them are K-12.

Colegio San Anselmo

Cole and I visited San Anselmo for three days during our second week here, as part of our process of getting to know the movement, their work and their schools. San Anselmo is out in the suburbs of Santiago and is a very nice looking school. I think it must have the most space of all the three schools and has some beautiful hills in the background. It’s the newest of the three schools and was built in 1995. It’s a private school and while I don’t know how much tuition is I think most of the students who go there are pretty well off. While at San Anselmo Cole and I sat in on some English classes, one of which was with an intense guy from Canada whose form of discipline was making the boys leave class, run out to the football (soccer) fields and back (all the classes have boys and girls separate until high school) It seems like there is little discipline and respect for rules in the classes but this guys tactics seemed a little too harsh. Cole and I also helped out with the school’s track team. We ran a couple laps around the fields with the little kids, did some hurdle drills with the older students and even ran a couple of 400´s with one of the sprinters (I threw down a 75 second 400 and while I wasn’t that exhausted afterwards, I realized that I was no longer in the shape I was during track in college). The female coach of the track team happened to be the Chilean pole vault record holder and just missed qualifying for the Olympics this year. However, I didn’t know this until after I had left the school. One day after work at San Anselmo Rodrigo took us home the long way through some beautiful hills outside Santiago and through some nice suburban areas that looked almost American except for the lack of large lawns and the fences completely surrounding the houses.

San Benito

San Benito is the oldest of the three schools, built in 1982. It is located in Vitacura, another nice neighbourhood, right next to Providencia. (the neighbourhood I live in) Cole and I didn’t have much to do at San Benito so we pretty much just hung out in Tutoria with Louis. We did go to one religion class and an English class where we accompanied the students to the library where they were doing research for a paper. We also “helped out” with the schools track team. I was the first one to show up for practice and I had a little communication problem with one of the coaches. I kept trying to tell him that I was there to help with practice but he thought that I was asking him to help me train. So he kept telling me to do a few warm up laps and then he was going to make me run some 200´s. I kept asking him where the other students were that I was going to be running with and he just kept telling me to go run. Finally one of the other coaches helped me out and explained to him that I did not need a coach. I helped out by running a few four hundreds with one of the middle distance runners.

San Lorenzo

San Lorenzo is by far the school most in need of help out of the three. It is located in Recoleta, which is a rougher neighbourhood outside of downtown Santiago. It is a very poor area while I haven’t seen any crime or felt unsafe at any time in the area; I have been told that Recoleta can be a little rough at night. All three schools are private but while San Benito and San Anselmo rely on tuition money, San Lorenzo is financed by the movement and by government assistance. The school itself is pretty nice but the facilities are not nearly as nice as the other schools. There is an athletic field, a tennis/basketball court, church, library, cafeteria, etc. From above the school probably looks somewhat like a big “E”, with elementary school, jr high, and high school classrooms divided into three different areas, more or less. Its actually primero ciclo (1st- 4th grade), segundo ciclo (5th – 8th grade) and medio (high school). In between the three rows of classrooms are patios that the kids have their recess on. The students have a short (15 minute) recess every 2 hours or so. Its nice because all the students stay in the same room for the entire day so it lets them get outside and burn off some energy (which they have a lot of) every so often. Because Santiago is in such a nice climate, their aren’t any hallways and the classrooms just open up to the outside. Football (soccer) seems to be a pretty popular activity during recreo (recess), but more about football later. I hope my lame attempt at describing what the school looks like helps.
Although the students are very poor and have a lot of social and economic problems to deal with, especially at home, they are happy and loving and full of energy. Even though I knew I was going to be working at San Lorenzo and despite the fact that the other two schools are much nicer, I knew right away after touring all three schools that San Lorenzo was my favorite. It was the only school where the little kids (especially the kindergartners) would run up to me, hug me, and call me Tio (uncle).

Casa de Gringos (my house)

I live in a sort of guesthouse of the Manquehue Movement. Living in the house right now are
· Rodrigo – the guest master for Manquehue and our contact person here, is the head of the house
· Andres – an oblate of the movement who works at San Lorenzo
· Vicente (Vicho) – a college student who is an alumni of one of the Manquehue schools and I believe is now in the process of becoming an oblate
· Cole
· Me
There were also some other gringos living at the house when Cole and I arrived but since I am posting this so late, they have all left by now, but they were –
· James – an “old boy” of Ampleforth.* I didn’t get to know James too well because he left a couple of days after I returned to Cambridge where he is studying natural science. *Ampleforth is an abbey and high school in England and they have had a relationship with Manquehue for many years now. There are several committed members of the movement who have come from Ampleforth and students from the school come to Chile to volunteer during their “off year” between high school and “uni” (college). Old boy is the British way of saying alumni.
· Rupert – another old boy of Ampleforth, he left a week or so after I got here to start college at Durham in England. He worked at San Anselmo and Cole and I hung out with him during our three days there. He was quite the character and loved to talk.
· Louis – also an old boy of Ampleforth, he is French but went to school in England. He worked at San Benito and left a little while after Rupert
· Paul – the only other American in the house, Paul worked at San Lorenzo with us and was great in showing us around the school when we first got here. He is from St. Louis and went to Priory High School, which is run by a Benedictine monastery and also has a relationship with Manquehue. He left just a few days ago to go back home and return to college in Tennessee.

We live in Providencia, a very nice part of Santiago right outside the downtown area. We live right at the intersection of two streets called Pedro de Valdivia Norte and Los Conquistadores. Pedro de Valdivia was the Spanish guy who founded Santiago and Los Conquistadores is pretty self explanatory. So I think its pretty ironic that Cole and I and the other gringos live at the intersection of these two streets. (at least I think that’s irony, I never really understood the literary definition when we talked about it in jr high English class, and that Alanis Morisette song didn’t seem to help things) The neighbourhood itself looks somewhat European except for the fact that all the houses in the area either have fences or walls completely surrounding them. In fact, every house I have seen in Santiago is this way. The house is located between the Mapucho River and San Cristobal Hill. The river itself isn’t much to look at, just some muddy water flowing through an artificial concrete canal (there is a big project underway to clean up the river) but there are nice green parkways on either side. San Cristobal Hill is pretty big, although nothing compared to the Andes in the background, and from the top you can see pretty much all of Santiago. I ran to the top of the hill a couple of weeks after getting here and although the 25 minutes or so of going straight uphill were tough (especially since I haven’t been running that much here) the view from the top while the sun was setting over the city was amazing. You can walk, bike, drive or take a cable car to the top of the hill so there were a lot of other people up there enjoying the view. I hope to go back up soon and get some pictures to post here, although they probably won’t do the view any justice.
The house itself is quite nice. Its got the usual; living room, dining room, kitchen, bedrooms, bathrooms, and the somewhat unusual; a room to pray in, no central heating, one TV which we rarely watch, although after over a month here these things no longer seem unusual at all. Cole and I share one of the bedrooms. It’s not very big but since we pretty much only sleep in there its just fine. Our bedroom opens up onto a little patio in the backyard. We cook our own breakfast in the morning (more about the food later) and the meals on the weekend but we have a maid who makes our dinners so we just put the dish that she made for the night into the oven when we get home. She also cleans, does the laundry (jackpot!) and makes the beds! I guess it’s fairly common for Chilean homes to have maids. (I’ll say a little more about this later)

Retreat Weekend

The first weekend we were here Cole and I were invited to a retreat for all the ex-alumnos of the schools of Manquehue. (San Lorenzo, San Benito and San Anselmo) Chileans refer to students as alumnos and to former students (what Americans would call alumni) as ex-alumnos, which was confusing for me at first. So anyway Rodrigo took Cole and I, and the other Gringos (who were all still here at the time) to a retreat place/resort thing on the Pacific Ocean for a retreat with at least 100 college students and other members of the movement. We got there at night and so I didn’t realize until morning when I was walking around that we were actually right next to the ocean.

Lake Superior is neat, but the ocean is way bigger. Enjoy this picture because it is the only one you will see on this blog for a while. It took forever to upload.

The retreat itself isn’t that interesting to describe. It was a lot of bible study (Lectio), prayer, church and talks in Spanish that I didn’t understand. There was one talk that I unfortunately was struggling to stay awake in and afterwards we broke off into our groups to do some activities about what we had just heard. Since everything was in Spanish I had no idea what was going on and when we separated from our groups to answer some questions individually I struggled to understand the questions and then just sat there until everyone came back. Rupert, who was in my group, asked me if I at least understood the questions and I told him I didn’t understand anything – questions, the talk, the group activities. He just shook his head and laughed.
I know it may sound like I am just bitching, but the retreat was actually fun and interesting, despite all the Spanish and church stuff. I got to meet and talk to a lot of Chilean people my age who were all very nice and interesting and seemed to all have this deep desire to get something more out of life. I was able to go for a nice run along the ocean. I mostly stayed near the beach but at one point I cut thru a lawn and onto the dirt roads of the streets which would have been great to run on except that there were about half a dozen stray dogs wandering around. I also realized I didn’t know where I was going so I decided to avoid that altogether and return to the beach.
We also had a little party/celebration on the last night of the retreat. About 10 hours after lunch (I’ll get to the crazy eating times later, at least they are crazy to me) we went into the main building where most of the talks were and there were Chilean flags everywhere and tables set up with wine, salsa and bread. We eventually ate some empanadas (fried bread pocket stuffed with meat, onions, eggs, etc. Kind of like Hot Pocket only much much better) and watched some skits that were put on by the various groups of ex-alumnos. Some queca dancing followed and the whole thing didn’t get over until around 1 am, at which point they busted out the prayer books and we recited Compline (the last prayer of the day). At first I was confused at this but then I realized that this whole retreat was about getting closer to the word of God and that we had spent most of our waking hours in the church and I realized that this was not out of the ordinary at all.

Second Weekend in Santiago

Our second Friday here in Santiago happened to coincide with Paul’s birthday and although Cole and I weren’t around for the festivities that happened at San Lorenzo, because we were touring San Benito that day, we were able to surprise him by taking him out to dinner that night. We all tricked him into thinking we were going to volunteer that night. We got him good! So all of us (Rodrigo, Andres, etc) went to a pizza place called Los Insaciables. (the insatiables), an all you can eat pizza restaurant. The servers come around every so often with a new pizza and although it was thin crust and tiny, and with some interesting toppings (fish, vegetables, etc.) and you pretty much had to eat whatever they were serving at the time (not really a problem for me) it was pizza baby! And all you can eat, and we even got a couple of beers to wash it down with. Plus they played some great 80´s music and I started to feel a little homesick.
The next day, Saturday, Rodrigo took Cole and me on a little tour of downtown Santiago. We took the metro (our first experience on it, everything went fine) to Santa Lucia hill, an old fort right near downtown with some good views of the city. We also checked out Plaza de Armas, the main square right in downtown. The old part of the city obviously has a lot of Spanish-influenced architecture and so it looks a lot more “Latin American” than the part of the city that we live in.
On Sunday we had a little bbq at the house because Rupert would be leaving us soon. We had some other people in the movement come over and we roasted some large cuts of meat on the grill. We also had some pebre (salsa), churripan (hot dogs kind of) and some chicha (kind of like a hard apple cider).

Some things I miss

· American music – I don’t listen to much music right now. Pretty much all I have is what we sing and play during prayer and mass, and whatever may be playing on the radio or one of the computers in Tutoria – which is usually Raggaeton (not sure if I spelled that right) which is like Latin American dance/techno/club music
· Peanut Butter
· Milk – they have milk here but it’s different.
· Running – I am still running and trying to get back into the habit of running everyday, but I miss everyone on the cross country and track team and the regularity of practice everyday at 4.
· College
· Family
· Friends

Some things that are sweet

· Having my laundry done for me
· Sopaipillas – it’s like a pancake but made out of a donut, and you can put cane sugar syrup on top, amazing. But if you eat too many you wake up feeling like a bomb went off in your stomach
· Pebre – delicious salsa, I ate it out of a jar with a fork once
· Manjar – I guess it’s like dulce de leche, but since I have never tried that I don’t know. Anyway, its delicious
· Not having to do homework anymore
· The kids at San Lorenzo – I swear these kids have an unlimited supply of energy and are almost always happy
· Not having a lot of stuff and living a simple life
· Not watching TV – this is kinda sweet. I am glad I am no longer a slave to cable TV and all the crappy movies they play that I have already seen a dozen times but still want to waste my time watching. I do miss some of the good TV shows like Family Guy, South Park, The Daily Show, and being able to see the news in English. But its been nice to have a break from TV for a while

Some things that are different

· Eating meals 6-7 hours apart
· PDA – I see a lot of couples getting close on the grass next to the river
· Houses with walls and fences around them
· Mountain bikes – my neighborhood is a little upscale and on the weekends I see a lot of people in outdoor performance clothing riding around on big fancy mountain bikes. I haven’t really figured this out yet. It seems a little strange coming from the US where people usually ride road bikes or fixed gear bikes in the city. The pathways along the river parkways are dirt but they are pretty flat and packed down, and there is the big hill near my house, San Cristobal, but the only time I see bikers on the hill is when they are flying down the paved road that runs from the top to the bottom. So far I haven’t seen any terrain that would necessitate a dual suspension bike, unless they were going to take it off some sweet jumps and get like three feet of air.
· Pace of life – I don’t know if the stereotypes of South American life are true, but from what I have heard, at least from Chileans, it seems like Chile doesn’t exactly fit the mold of the rest of South America. However, I have noticed that the pace of life is much slower here and schedules are not strictly followed like back home. Our first couple of weeks here if Cole and I had to be anywhere, we would arrive a few minutes early. We did this because 1) it seemed like the polite thing to do and we didn’t want to be late 2) we are accustomed to being on time or even a bit early to things and 3) we didn’t really have anything better to do. However, we soon found out that being early wasn’t necessary. We then started showing up on time to things and still this was not all that necessary. It was only until we started showing up a few minutes late did we realize that things rarely start on time. And they rarely finish on time as well. Right now it seems like Chilean people like nothing more than to sit around and chat with each other, which is great but sometimes I just want to get things done. I should mention that this isn’t really a problem for me. It’s nice having a more relaxed schedule. I am by no means whining. I am merely pointing out what I have observed. I will probably discuss this more when I get a better feel for how things work here.

Coming up next...Food, the weather, and maybe even some stories from my trip to Patagonia and my new projects at San Lorenzo. (all these things have already happened, I am just way behind)

Fun at Colegio San Lorenzo

2008-09-05T16:28:00.005-05:00

Alright, I know should explain what I have been doing the past three weeks and eventually I will write a long post explaining things, but some fun things happened today at school and I wanted to write about them while they were fresh in my mind.
First, I should mention that I learned to dance "cueca" yesterday. Here is some more information about it - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cueca. Cueca is the national dance of Chile and the national independence day is coming up so a lot of school children are learning the dance. So yesterday afternoon Cole and I were ushered into the school cafeteria for a dance lesson with some of the other teachers. I am not a very good dancer, especially when it comes to dances with certain steps and movements. After a while I was starting to get it but I was still terrible. Cueca is supposed to mimic a rooster courting a hen. So the men typically wear spurs and shake hankerchiefs around to draw attention to themselves and the women are supposed to remain elusive and play hard to get. But in the end the man wins the woman over and the two dancers come together.
Today after Lectio (I will explain what that is in another post) some 5th grade girls cornered me and asked me to speak some English for them. They found it hilarious and then started to ask me, in Spanish, the usual questions, like why are you here which is a difficult enough question as it is to answer in English, let alone in Spanish to a bunch of grade school students. Anyway, the bell rang for class and they all insisted that I sit in on their math class. So 7 or 8 girls dragged me over to their classroom and sat me down in the front of the room where an even larger crowd gathered to ask me even more questions, such as do you like "High School Musical" and "Hannah Montana". They were somewhat disappointed to find out I did not like either of those things.
The girls had told me they had a "prueba" that day during class, but for some reason I thought the word prueba meant event and so I figured they were going to the cafeteria for a presentation or some cueca dancing or something. But it turns out the word prueba actually means test but I was still oblivious to this. So the teacher comes in and at this point almost all the girls in class are giddy and loud. I try to ask the teacher if I can sit in on the class and she tries to tell me they have a test but neither one of us understands each other. Finally, another girl that works in Tutoria (I will explain this too) with me comes in to rescue me.
Throughtout the day I kept running into the same 5th grade girls. I was on my way to midday prayer during recess when a pack of them stopped me for more questioning (I had no idea what they were asking me). They held me up for a few minutes until I finally convinced them that I had to get to church (nessicito ir a la iglesia). So I walk into the side chapel throughly embarrassed because I am late (which isnt really a big deal here) and everyone in church sees a pack of pre-teen girls running away and giggling when I open the door to the church. They caught me again a little while later on the way to lunch and insisted that I accompany them on the retreat that they were leaving for in an hour.
The rest of the afternoon was pretty low key. I found a few kids throwing rocks at each other and tried to convince them to stop. They ignored me and then a couple of them gave me the finger which they all thought was hilarious. Eventually Cole and I found some nice kids to play games with. We tried to teach how to play baseball with an old 2x4 and a ball made of paper and tape but they kept trying to play by their own rules. We decided it would just be simpler to play hide and seek so we did that until they had to leave.
If you have read this far you are probably thinking to yourself "What the hell is he doing in Chile? Playing kids games and breaking young girls hearts?" I will be honest, we dont have much work to do right now. We are just kind of hanging around the school and getting to know the kids. The dean of the school says he has a lot of work for us to do but he hasnt given us anything yet. But dont worry. We will starting working really hard, really soon. Things move kinda slow down here.
Well I gotta go, one of the cardinals here in Chile is saying mass on his birthday later on. Should be a pretty sweet Friday night.

Finally

2008-09-01T15:42:00.010-05:00

Hey everybody. I am in Chile and I am doing fine. I dont have internet access at home but I can use the computers at the school I am working at. However, posts will probably be long and infrequent so I will do my best to keep them organized and interesting.
I should probably back up and explain what I am doing in Chile. For the next year or so I will be part of the Saint Johns Benedictine Volunteer Corps (SJBVC). The program was started several years ago to send recent SJU grads to various Benedictine Monasteries around the world to live and volunteer. Cole Woodward (SJU 08) and I were selected to be the first SJBVC members to travel to Chile and work with the Manquehue Movement in Santiago. Manquehue is not a monastic community but a lay Catholic community that lives and works in a Benedictine way. They operated three schools (San Lorenzo, San Anselmo and San Benito) as well as a womens shelter and they also have retreat house at their community of San Jose in Patagonia. Cole and I will mostly be working at San Lorenzo, which is located in the Recoleta area of Santiago and is a free, private school in a very poor part of the city.
Right now we arent exactly sure what we will be doing in the school. We will probably be working on something in either or all of the following areas: recycling program/environmental education, helping with sports teams, or tutoring students in english class. Its funny, but also sad in a way, I am a young and energetic person, with a college diploma and I have lived in an advanced society my entire life. Yet I feel like I have no skills and nothing that I have know of that could be of assistance here. It was easy for me to sit in the comfort of the United States and think of all the good that could be done in the world, but when I got here I realized that its not that easy. There are a lot of barriers to overcome; resources, cultural differences, language (I am not doing so well with the Spanish down here). Thats not to say that San Lorenzo is struggling. This school is very well run and has done so amazing things for the poor in the area. Its just been hard for me to figure how to combine what I can do with what they need.
Anyway. We will also be travelling to Patagonia, in September for 10 days and again from January until March. We are living in the guesthouse of the community (Casa de Gringos as it is sometimes called) which is located in Providencia, a nice neighborhood close to downtown Santiago. Thats all for now. Feel free to comment on anything or suggest a name for this blog. I will try to write a better post later and explain all that has happened in the past two weeks.

Paz
Charlie

uhh

2008-06-05T12:09:00.003-05:00

Well I figured it's the 21^st century and everyone else has a blog, so I better get one. Plus, I am going to Chile in August and I would like to let everyone know what I am up to and how I am doing while I am down there.

Yours Truly,
Chuck