10/21/10
So, after a little more than a month hiatus, the blog is back! Today nine of us moved south for our fist nations excursion, so it’s been a very long day! My day began (as all days do) Skyping with a fabulous friend from home, and bidding farewell to good access to internet, at least for a while. Then I had about two and a half hours of sleep before getting up to get ready to travel to Temuco. This involved saying goodbye to my host mom and brother (my hermano had not yet gone to bed when I left at 4:30 this morning), jumping in the car with a friend and her host family (ten minutes), catching a bus to Santiago (an hour and a half), flying to the city of Temuco (one hour) driving to the house of the Southern Excursion Coodrinator (five minutes) and finally getting dropped off at the house of our new host family, and then sitting down to breakfast. It’s safe to say it was a long day!
Temuco, or I should say the rural region around Temuco is ah-mazing. I always sort of thought of myself as a city kid who just happened to live in Burns, but when we got to our host family’s small farm , I realized how much I missed the country. Spokane is good for having a bit of culture but fast access to nature, Viña del mar, no tan mucho. But it’s beautiful here. We live with a school cook named Myriam (she’s the only cook for the school in the village, serving breakfast and lunch to 90 children a day by herself), her small time farmer/stay at home husband Osvaldo, their son Miguel, 17 (although he lives in Temuco during the week to go to school) and their “Gua-gua” daughter Rian (5 months). The family also has a fourteen year old daughter, Daniela, who lives with her grandparents close by. Rian es TAN preciosa (incredibly cute). She’s perhaps the largest child I have ever seen (way bigger than one Micah Curtis) she actually had to go to the doctor today to evaluate her nutrition so she doesn’t become an obese child, but she’s got an enormous smile and is a complete sweetheart.
It’s a lot more rustic here than it is in Viña; we don’t have running water and our toilet is outside, but it’s well worth the switch. There are a lot of things that I will miss terribly about the Viña/Valpo area, but this place is incredible and I’m so glad that I’m here.
After we were greeted with an amazing breakfast and a tour of the granja, we settled down for a nap and when we awoke, it was time to milk the cow. Right now, the family gets milk from just one cow because the other is pregnant (remember, it’s spring here) so my roommate Nina and I got to learn how to milk Mariposa, the heifer that resembled a butterfly about as much as my sopapillas resemble actual sopapillas (a story for another day). It was kind of amazing how much milk came from that one cow! Thanks to Mariposa, we had fresh, delicious, unprocessed milk for dinner and will have it for breakfast and dinner tomorrow as well. After the lack of milk in the city, this is a really big deal to me!
It’s getting late and we have a full day tomorrow, so I’m off for now.
10/22/10
Today our excursion coordinator explained to us how every day he says “tomorrow will be different and better than today” and that’s certainly ringing true. Yesterday was amazing, but today was even better. In the morning, we walked to the community school where Myriam works, and had a lesson in Mapuche music and dance. Then we played futbol, at which I was terrible. Despite the fact that I let two goals by while I was goalie, my team managed to win 4-3, thanks to the army of Chilean niños we had playing for us, and absolutely no thanks to the gringas. J It was good to just chill with kids for a while, I’ve missed that here in Chile.
After lunch, we had a little break in which we introduced out Academic Director, Sergio, to his new nickname: Mama Oso (Mother bear) He received it because he’s always so worried about everything and is our mother for this leg of the journey. He took it with grace, and even said that his ositas (bear cubs) were adorable, so that’s a start…
When the break ended, it was off to first Anthropology and then Mapudungun lessons. Mapudungun is the language of the Mapuche people, Chile’s largest remaining indigenous group. While it’s still a surviving language, it’s no one’s only language and is not spoken as a primary language anywhere except among the oldest Mapuches. For this reason, the language is dying out quite quickly, and I’m afraid our ragtag class did little to help preserve it. While we did learn the sounds each letter makes (mas o menos) and how to count to ten, after that we sort of hit our wall, and struggled to write down the random vocabulary that the class was asking about. It’s sometimes a little frustrating here how disjointed the whole educational process is. I understand that everyone comes from somewhere different and that in a program this varied you have to accommodate different interests, but it all feels sort of disjointed, even the lessons on the different aspects of Mapuche culture. It just feels very disjointed.
After class, I got to help in the kitchen, which was quite exciting! First I “helped” peel potatoes; Tia Myriam got about six done in the time it took me to peel one! Then, we made sopapillas, an amazing sort of deep fried bread that is very common here in Chile. First, you take the dough and roll small pieces into balls. I kept getting the sizing wrong, so Myriam broke off the pieces and I just rolled them into balls. After, you pinch them flat(ish) with your hands, which I was actually pretty good at. Then, you roll them out about as flat as a pie crust for frying. They’re supposed to be disks, but mine were absolutely anything but! Myriam and Nina were very nice about being quiet about laughing at my attempt.
The people of the outlying Temuco area are very proud of how much happier their lives are than the lives of the people in the city. I can’t judge, and it’s certainly a less luxurious life out here, but they’re proud of their simplicity, not in the hipster way that a lot of American “live simply” and not for anyone else. They prize their less complicated lives because it’s better for them. Certainly, there is poverty out here, but a lot of what we’re seeing isn’t so much poverty as it is a different worldview and a different way of life.
It’s also a much more understated culture than in more northern and urban Valparaiso. There’s a lot less talking and a lot more comfortable silence. It’s been a really nice change for me, freedom from the obligation to talk all the time, to make a big deal about everything that I like (granted, I have been making a big deal about a lot of things here, but because I’m genuinely excited about them) It feels a lot more genuine and a lot less forced than the extreme (for me) enthusiasm necessary to be polite. It’s a lot less work for me! There’s a fine line between making judgments and expressing preferences, but I can safely say that, for me, it’s a lot less work to live in a more understate culture. Thank you Harney County. ;)
Once again, it’s very late and I’m getting narcoleptic, so I’d better sign off.
10/23/10
Today was probably the most interesting day that I’ve spent in Chile so far. Not that other stuff hasn’t been interesting, but today was amazing. We got on a bus and headed to Lago Buti, South America’s only salt lake. We took pictures with some famous Chilean Statues (Including this Gem with “Mama Oso y los ositos”)
and then we got back on the bus and drove to a Mapuche hostel on this breathtakingly beautiful hill. Our location is actually the picture that SIT uses to advertise its Chile programs, so that was pretty cool. We had a Mapuche Philosophy class outside, and it was probably the most interesting thing I’ve done in Chile. Even the name of the people comes from two Mapudungun words Mapu, meaning land and Che meaning people. Instead of considering themselves outside nature, acting and being acted upon by nature, they very much consider themselves a part of la naturaleza. We learned about the Mapuche origin story, faith, relationship with life and death, and idea of duality. Safe to say it was a packed three hours- but it definitely didn’t seem that long.
Things are crazy here, so I’ll have to sign off…hopefully I’ll find an Internet café to upload soon!
