My Three Month Anniversary in Chile

Family! You’ve all been showing up in my dreams the past few weeks and I want to say a quick hello. With pictures!

My three month anniversary of arriving in Chile has passed; I have a month and a half remaining in my program. The past two months (when I last “officially” communicated via email) have been up and down. The first week of April, Mom and Dad visited and we flew to the south of Chile – my first experience in the campo! The south is so different from Valparaíso, and definitely where I would live in Chile. It’s calm; everyone talks slower; everything is green. After living in a city for the first time in my life, anything green gets me very excited. Highlights include:

1. Kayaking down a teal river and feeling like I was in The Lord of the Rings

2. Empanadas and fruit juice

3. My surprise early birthday party, complete with The Little Mermaid decorations

4. Visiting the island of Chiloé, the “mythical” island off the coast of Chile which remained highly resistant to outside influence until the 1980s

5. Realizing that I can actually communicate in Spanish! Who knew?

6. Watching Mom and Dad be cute on vacation

Mom, Dad and I then traveled back up the coast to Valparaíso, where they got a feel for my Chilean city and met my host family.

My host mom, la Chicha, initially told me that meeting my parents would be “fome,” or really dull. Needless to say, we proved her wrong. I interpreted, but it was the family dynamic that was really successful. My two dads are both kind, quiet, meat-eaters. My two moms are both talkative and wide-living. Highlight: during the two meals that we shared together, the moms cried both times. Here we are with my two host sisters, Coté and Daniela, with Chicha.

The rest of April was a little quieter until Easter weekend. Good Friday is national holiday in Chile, so when I got home from my internship on Thursday, la Chicha announced that we were going to the campo (read: communication in advance is NOT my family’s strong suit). We spent the weekend in the “country,” or really a suburban neighborhood that feels like the country after being a city-dweller. Though some parts of the weekend were fun – like sneaking away to do some hiking! – it was tough. There was little privacy and everything made me think of Legacy Point. Additionally, the Chilean lifestyle and I can only go so far. On the most beautiful day I’d seen in months, my host family only wanted to eat and sit. After twenty years of living with my mom, I’m too well conditioned towards moving to be content with that. All in all, the weekend prompted a little bout of homesickness.

I can’t believe that May is almost over. It’s been a good month overall. The first major event was hiking La Campana, a mountain out in the country. And when I say “hike a mountain” I’m being quite literal. That was a real struggle, especially because the night before my family took me to the casino (capitalism!) and I had a major allergy attack from the smoke. But the view was incredible; as we had just entered the fall, the mountain was covered with New England foliage, an oh-so-welcome surprise.

I continued my nature extravaganza the next weekend, when everyone from my program gathered in Santiago for our one official get-together. We headed of to Cajón de Maipo, a mountainous region to the west of the city. The breadth of the Chilean natural landscape might be my favorite part about this country, from salt plains to the Andes.

On May 17 I celebrated my one and only Chilean birthday. We had a small party at my house with my gringo and Chilean friends. It was wonderful for everyone to meet. Highlights include:

1. Flowers showing up from Mom, Dad, Deej and Remus!

2. Seeing Alvaro, the Chilean student who lived with my cousins in Maine for a year from 2006 to 2007

3. My Chilean mom deciding to do tequila shots (I did not see that one coming...)

Now I’m immersed in my real Chilean life, which consists of classes and my internship. While the academic system here is really disappointing (and I’ve totally lost my Kenyon work ethic), I can say with confidence that my Spanish is enormously better. The week is always a little trying, especially because of my internship. I’m working with an English teacher in a low-income area in Viña del Mar; I travel with her to the second, fourth, fifth, seventh and eight grades. The best thing that I can say about this experience is that I have never seen with my own eyes how lucky I am to have received such a good education. In la Escuela UNESCO, maybe five out of thirty students are paying attention at once. There is always yelling and I break up a fight once a day. The students throw chairs and scissors. After seven years of English classes, the eighth graders do not recognize the word “the.” It’s enormously depressing, and made even worse because the teacher I’m shadowing does not love her job. She has given up on a number of her students, fudging their grades so that they’ll pass nevertheless. And yet. It is an experience that I would not throw away, and I hope that I’m doing the even the littlest bit of good.

So there’s my progress report! I’m enormously excited to come home and see all of you again. Right now I’m trying to put together some travel plans to the north of Chile (Atacama Desert) and to Machu Picchu, but we’ll see what happens – everyone here has the “flojo” bug, or just the Chilean tendency to withhold from commitment. Hopefully something will workout and I’ll have one more adventure before I return home to all of you!

Love, love love,

Susan