The Week the week

Temperature: (feels like) 0 degrees centigrade. Don’t know actual temperature.

I have had a highly educational and serious week, so I will take this moment to be a spoiled American and complain. IT IS SO COLD! I’m guessing that it’s really only about 6 degrees here, but there isn’t any indoor heating so my Colombian feet are always chilly.

Okay, enough silly talk. This last week has been filled with lectures and trips about the social history of Chile. Since so much has happened, I divided my adventures up into parts to make this post seem shorter. Feel free to skip.

Note: In the past week I’ve felt as though I haven’t actually been IN Chile because we’ve spent most of our time listening to lectures, or traveling from place to place in a group of 20 Americans. So now I think that I KNOW a lot about Chile, but truly experiencing it – understanding it - will come later.

Lecture #1: This guy was amazing. I apologize for not remembering any of our lectures names, but there were soo many. Anyway, this first professor lectured on the history of Chile through the eyes of the largest group of indigenous people of Chile, the Mapuche Indians. The lecturer was engaging and passionate about working with people and speaking ‘the human language.’ What I found most exciting was his commitment to humanity through a Marxist lens; always noting the conflict and giving due attention to the proletariat. He was by far the best lecturer.

Lecture #2: This was by a dynamic woman who lectured on the history of Chilean literature. Since my interest in social inequality exceeds my interest in literature, I found one of her comments particularly interesting. She said that Chileans don’t see race, they see class. Though I wanted to believe her, I had doubts that the economic stratification was not at all related to race. Even in a society that is 90% Meztizo, the spectrum from indigenous to European, if you will, is significant in a land colonized by Europeans.

Lecture #I don’t remember: This guy talked about the recent social history of Chile related to economic inequality. The plan was for us to go visit one of the poorest poblaciones (poor neighborhoods) after his lecture. He warned us that the people in the neighborhood would know that we were rich and probably from a wealthy neighborhood because we were white (well, the rest of the Tufts people are white, I don’t know what they thought about me. Probably that I was from Brazil or something). And that is when I became confused about their racial issues. I thought Chileans didn’t see race? As Professor Peter Winn (our orientation and program director) cleared up for over our third glass of wine on our group trip to a fancy winery, Chile does have racial issues. He made an analogy to American culture, which suggested that Chileans don’t acknowledge race as a part of their economic inequalities as Americans don’t acknowledge class as a part of their racial inequalities. It must be more complicated than this analogy, for both race and class are socially constructed, and thus differ depending on the society. Sounds like something I might go explore…

Trip!: We have gone to two poblaciones in the last week, and both times we all felt a little weird. We show up in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Chile in our tourist bus, walk around like the herd of apologetic foreigners that we are, and try not to look too nervous about our Anthropologists-in-Africa like presence. Despite my criticism, I believe that seeing these neighborhoods is a very important part of our orientation, for even if we have to look awkward for 30 minutes, we should not be allowed to ignore the poor people of this country.

Lecture/Trip: This was the most emotional day of orientation so far. It was the human rights day. We started in the morning with a lecture on the torture camps during the Pinochet dictatorship. Pedro, our lecturer had a large model on the floor of Villa Grimaldi, a large torture camp at the edge of Santiago. He described each horrifying form of torture, and used the model to show us where it all took place. It wasn’t until later that Pedro told us that he had been in Villa Grimaldi and two other torture camps, enduring torture for over a year. After his lecture, we went to Villa Grimaldi which has now been converted in a memorial site. Although almost all of the buildings are gone, Pedro showed us exactly where each torture method took place. It was eerie to watch him describe each building, knowing that he had been there years ago. What was most difficult for me was to watch him tear up as he told us stories about his experiences in the exact spots that we were standing in. I, too, could only cry at the sight of such a strong person standing before me. That he would share a memory so terrifying as how he learned to make himself fall asleep in order to not endure the physical pain, horrible smells, and the sounds of his friends being tortured, was almost unbelievable to me. This man was truly amazing, not only in his ability to re-tell his story to countless people, but in his commitment to social justice. Before being put through torture camps, he was a law student, a strong supporter of Salvador Allende, and one who worked for social equality.

Heard on the Street: Boy stands at wishing well with adult male and female figures. He holds a coin in his hand and glances up at the male (his father, I assume) as he speaks. [In Spanish] “I wish…that Christmas is tomorrow!” Female gives him another coin. “I wish…that the baby dinosaurs I saw in the movie are in my fathers bed!” And I thought only American children wished for things like that…

For some pictures, check out my friend Katrina's blog destinationchilefranceusa.blogspot.com

More soon,

KT