San Pedro de Atacama

Atacama

“In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim of precedence.  The very clarity of these articles belied their familiarity, for the eye predicates the whole on some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kindships” [my emphasis] (McCarthy, Blood Meridian). 

“The desert says nothing.  Completely passive, acted upon but never acting, the desert lies there like a bare skeleton of Being, spare, sparse, austere, utterly worthless, inviting not love but contemplation.  In its simplicity and order it suggests the classical, except the desert is a realm beyond the human and in the classicist view only the human is regarded as significant or even recognized as real” (Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire).

"When you are silent and you listen, you can hear the salt cracking in the afternoon sun" (Cristobal, our guide through the Valle de la Luna).

Last week, we headed up north to the Atacama Desert.  We flew into Calama, a mining town about which many uncharitable things have been said, and took a van to San Pedro de Atacama;  with a small commercial district that could easily fit into the space of downtown Athens, San Pedro has the feel of a hippy college town without the college.  This little hamlet exists because of its situation (the Spanish word is "ubicación") at the epicenter of an array of freakish geological phenomena in the driest desert in the world. 

Erica has much better pictures of San Pedro.  In the morning,
the streets are empty and surprisingly serene.

A bus drive away from San Pedro, there are thermal baths of Puritama:

The moonscape of the Valle de la Luna:

The 185-degree waters of El Taito Geysers:

The pre-Columbian ruins at Tulor (accessible by bike):

And all kinds of good restaurants and interesting people to meet.  In fact, on the first night in San Pedro we were walking down the main street and we hear "Zach!  Zach!"  Two boys from St. Paul's--another Paul and older brother Claus--are hailing our son enthusiastically from amidst the Fiestas Patrias crowds.  Their parents, Jensen and Marcela, were incredibly generous to let us tag along on their adventures.

The cliché about the desert is the quality of the light.

The desert is beautiful in its own way.  It is not my landscape; both Erica and I craved green after a short few days.  I felt like an alien in the desert. But there is a reminder of the immensity of time and one's own relation to dust, which is a good thing to be reminded, however humbling.

There's a gringo in the house tonight . . .

Zachary's experience in Chile, I think, has been as rich as mine and Erica's.  He's attending St. Paul's School, a Chilean school with a British connection, an English-Spanish emphasis, and an ecumenical orientation. This is a pretty common combination of attributes for the private schools in this area (and perhaps for Chile in general).  Yes, private.

We were told by almost everyone that we needed to send Zachary to a private school because the public school system is underfunded and lacks "an environment conducive to learning." We took the advice and now we have a son who says he wishes he could transplant his Chilean school back home (Yes, we feel a bit guilty about the decision, and I've met one other Fulbrighter who decided to send his kids to public school.  We erred on the side of caution, thinking that for Zachary the adjustments he was going to face didn't necessarily need the variable of a challenging school environment.  Still . . . ).  

Before Erica and Zachary arrived, I toured St. Paul's and Mackay, a school in Reñaca, the town up the coast a bit but the opposite direction from Valparaíso.  Mackay is prestigious and very British.  The three pillars of the institution are academics, English, and Rugby . . . ok, ok, the website says "deporte" (sport), but adds "especially Rugby.

On the wall at Mackay: the scrummag

Old Mackay in the foreground.  The Cranbrook of Chile?

St. Paul's is on the southern side of the Marca Marca--away from the more tourist/beach section we live in, but an easy commute in the morning.

Colegio St. Paul's, Merced Oriente near Aqua Santa.  Vina del Mar

For a lot of reasons, including the fact that Mackay's is all boys, we chose St. Paul's.  And I think that the fact that St. Paul's is co-ed has been an important part of Zachary's experience because Zachary is very, very popular with las chicas.

Erica tells the tale of them visiting St. Paul's soon after their arrival.

They were sitting on the steps by the covered basketball/soccer/handball/cueca court.  A bell rang and kids swarmed out.  Zachary was instantly surrounded by Chilean school girls asking him a range of questions--"Who are you?" "Where are you from?" "Are you going to attend this school?"  "What grade are you in?"  "Do you know One Direction?" Zachary:  deer in headlights.

So, last night was a fundraiser party.  A dance.  From 8pm-midnight for 6th-12th graders at the school.  Zachary was nervous (in his own "it's cool.  I'm not nervous" way).  He wanted to know how he looked.  He wanted to know exactly what Erica had heard about what kids could and couldn't wear.  He wanted me to smell his face . . . .

Z in his new, self-selected shirt

 When we got to St. Paul's, he chattered away and we heard Iyaz's "Replay." I told him that Erica and I had decided to go to the party too and that we were going to dance in the middle of the room.  He said that wasn't even funny.  Nor was my question of whether he wanted me to sing "Replay."  We started up the stairs with him, but he was greeted by a bouncing young lady who said his name and who was soon joined by other young ladies.  Zachary was enveloped in a ring of lovely Chilean girls and led into the festivities.  He did not look back.  He did not say good-bye.  He was gone.  A picture posted on Instragram shows him as the social animal that he is.

He wanted to have us on-call in case he wanted to bail during the night, but we didn't hear anything.  We headed back up Aqua Santa in time to pick him up at midnight.  When we met him coming down the stairs, he didn't have anything to say.  He was a bit flushed.  He was also wiped out from a long day.  A long, very good day of growing into his own skin.  Of having a life apart from us and somewhat unknown to us, though an innocent enough life given the nature of the school.  He's a kid whom other kids, not just girls but also boys, like and respect.  He's a cool kid.  And I think this experience in Chile will prepare him to face new and unfamiliar situations with a confidence in who he is and how to communicate with others.  That's worth the stay down here all by itself.

Chile's 9/11

This week Chile celebrates independence from Spain with three days of Fiestas Patrias, though there was evidence late last week that lots of folks got an early start.  Chilean flags are everywhere, and activities abound.  There was a little cognitive dissonance the week before because Fiestas Patrias comes right after the commemoration of their own 9/11.  In fact, Chile just commemorated the 40th anniversary of the overthrown of the Allende government by the Chilean military.

Poster for 9/11/13 Demonstration in Valparaíso

What followed was 17 years of the Pinochet dictatorship that was characterized by well-known oppression and less talked-about economic development.  That dichotomy marks the ambivalence that of the 9/11 commemoration.  As explained to me by the one person I go for explaining all thing Chilean, the Allende government was trying to do too much too fast without enough support.  While the overthrow was unjustified, there were serious issues that led to coup, so says my friend.  What happened as a result of the coup was unequivocally horrible: general oppression, detentions, torture, disappearances, and . . .  killings.  Then, in 1989, there was a vote, yes a VOTE ("forced" by  international pressure), which compelled Pinochet to step down even though he stayed in the government.

Photo from an exhibit at PUC-V on 9/10/13 showing
a  demonstration to encourage people tovote "NO"
on whether the Pinochet regime should be
given more years in power.  

Chile went the path of South Africa, and decided not to pursue war crimes perpetrators. Amnesty. And some of those "forgiven" are still in the government.  My friend, with evident pain on his face, asked me to imagine a grandfather sitting with his grandchild at a restaurant and seeing the man who detained and tortured him at the table across the room with his grandchild.  That's the residual pain that is at the heart, it seems to me, of the Chilean commendation of September 11, 1973.

Chileans are confronting their past.  As I have already mentioned, there is a very fine Museum of Memory in Santiago that is dedicated not only to the coup and its aftermath but also, more generally, to the topic of international human rights.  This balance of the general and the particular is just one of the things about the museum that it truly striking.  Another is the use of video from that day showing the coverage of the coup. Most inconceivable, at least to me, is the video of Chilean jets bombing the Chilean presidential building, La Moneda, in the center of Santiago.

Another picture from PUC-V exhibit.  The coup was televised.

At another station, a visitor can hear Salvador Allende's final message to the Chilean people as heard on the radio.  

One small detail from that day that I have since learned is that Allende ultimately shot himself with a gun that was a gift from Fidel Castro.  

Chile has come a long way since those dark days of 9/11/73 and the 17 years of Pinochet's facism, and they have come out the other side with a distinct and palpable national pride.   There seems to be a more clear-eyed and nuanced understanding of their past than we have in the States, but that may be because I admire the hard-working but graciously modest people whom I have encountered since arriving in mid-July.

From PUC-V exhibit, a poster reminding people of
the "disappeared" during Pinochet's reign. I learned
of Pinochet from the Sting song "The Dance Alone"

I hope I have not misrepresented Chile's past in this post, but I have found it very moving to be here during this time.  While the events of 9/11/73 and its aftermath still affect Chile, I find Chileans deeply proud of their country as evidenced by the preponderance of tri-color flags adorning the country.  So I end by saying "¡Vive Chile!"  y "Felices Fiestas Patrias!"

Tempus fugit!

Time indeed flees.

I could feel guilty about not posting more, though "guilty" isn't the right word.  Perhaps "undisciplined" is a better one.  But, I've decided that blogging is something that I do when I have time.  As Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay "The American Scholar," "Books are for the scholar's idle times."  Perhaps blogging is too. Because during the last few weeks there has been precious few idle times.

So many things have happened that I feel like this is kind of a "catch-up" posting, but so many things have happened that I feel such an entry would be merely listing.

For instance, one man that I encountered on the street in Viña de Mar deserves his own blog post.  I encountered him on my walk from the hospital (more on that later) to work on Avenida Libertad.  He was a too common type on the street:  a scraggly charismatic type who seemed to be hawking something for a meager payout, like many of the "independent entrepreneurs" who sell random things off a blanket on the sidewalk or who entertain drivers stopped at traffic lights with juggling or break dancing.  Because Chilean "Español de la calle" is still a mystery to me, I couldn't quite understand what his intention was when he held up two long, galvanized nails in his hands in front of any random person he encountered.  Being the good gringo that I was, I didn't stop to find out or much less make eye contact.  But fate brought him to me.  Stopped at the light on the corner of Libertad and 1 Norte, I felt a person brush pass me and stand in front of the unsuspecting young couple next to me.  The man in question held up the two nails, one in each hand, and said something.  He then proceeded to insert one of the nails into his nostril in a perpendicular fashion.  He wasn't so much inserting the nail up his nose as into his skull.  This is the sort of thing from which I can't ignore nor turn away.  But he still had the other nail, right?  That one followed the first one.  There stands the man, two nails sticking out of his nostril while a wide grin spreads below them.  I felt like the best thing for me to do at that point was simply to hand him a 500 peso coin and proceed across the bridge.

That's what I mean.  That was just a random episode.  While more colorful than most, it is representative of the surprise that I encounter every day.   Fortunately, the vast majority of those surprises are delightful and edifying.

Such was the case of the the four days I had in Santiago meeting with and getting to know the other 11 Fulbright Scholars in Chile for this semester.

Fulbright Scholars with some family and Fulbright Chile staff at Concho y Toro Vineyards

 After having the pleasure of sitting on a selection committee with Fulbright Chile Executive Director, Antionio Campaña (first row, furthest left) and Cultural Agregada from the US Embassy, Mary Sue Fields (not pictured), I got to enjoy hearing what the other Fulbrighters are doing in Chile this term.  Humbling, as in "how in the hell did I get in a group like this?" Then there was a family day where folks joined together for a trip the Maipo Valley to visit the Concho y Toro vineyards and to eat at a traditional restaurant.  Great experience and so interesting to return to Santiago after a few weeks in Viña.  I think this is the first time in my travels that I've ever returned to a city that I had visited before;  unlike Copenhagen or Amsterdam or any of the other cool places I've had the privilege of visiting once and not yet returning, I re-entered Santiago with a confidence that made the trip relaxing.

As it turns out, the week that I was in Santiago was the same time that some of Erica's family had planned to visit in order to go skiing, so Zachary and Erica were up in the Andes while I was in Santiago.

That's when things took a turn.  Erica got a nasty infection, cellulitus, and had to be hospitalized.  Our first foray was into the Urgenia at Universidad Catolica in Santiago followed by an admission to Clinica Cuidad del Mar in Viña.   Despite the sunny disposition evident in this photo:

this was a very hard week for Erica.  Z and I had to step up and find a way to function without our fearless leader.    All is well and Erica is back at home recovering nicely, but, damn, what a week.

So I close with a picture from before the whirlwind of the last couple of weeks.  Before Santiago and our adventures in the Chilean health care system (which was excellent, by the way), we had a great day exploring Valparaiso with Erica's family.  This is probably going to be the family Christmas picture, but I also hope that it is a positive harbinger of good times to come for us as we enter our second month of our sojourn in this great country.