"Una Isla es un parte de tierra rodeada de agua"

"An Island is a piece of land surrounded by Water" my Spanish teacher began chanting this by way of explanation and then apologized...saying he went to school during "la dictadura" and so his education involved a lot of rote memorization. Later that day, a teacher talked about living as a refugee in the 1980's. He was my age. It wasn't so much strange that he had lived under the dictatorship or had found himself a refugee, but in the casual way he said it. It was in the context of explaining how Chile's attempt at communism meant a lot to a lot of eastern Europeans. Which he met while living as a refugee in Chile.

Another SIT staffer talked about how when she was a little girl she didn't know why she was so afraid when her father came home after curfew, but she was always terrified. Words disappeared from vocabularies. People who I now know have bodies that are covered with scars. People who, when the "golpe" happened couldn't have been much older that I am now. It's hard to think about how profoundly the dictatorship impacted everyone. Kids who chanted in school. Little girls who feared for their fathers' lives without quite knowing why. Young men who lived in another country in their early 20's not to learn something new, but for fear for their lives. Old women's bodies covered with scars.

It's hard for me to wrap my head around here. I don't know how anyone manages to avoid being extremely bitter about what happened.

Tonight begins September 11. Thirty Seven years ago today, the Chilean military attacked the Chilean government. Funded, trained, and armed by the US government, the leaders of the Coup set up a reign of terror that would last for more than two decades. I've known this for a long time. I know that there exist in this world dictatorships backed by my government. I hadn't seen the scars until this week.

After this weekend, I'll be more cheerful, promise. I am loving Chile...