So much to tell, ask me for details 'cause I can't write it all

I was in Colorado on crack. I was not on crack, the mountains were. When the wind shifted and made the grass in the field shine and reflect the sun, I caught a breath of familiarity. When the flies and birds harmonized just so with the river singing in the background, or when the sun highlighted the mountains orange at the end of the day -- just for a split second I knew where I was. Then, instead of an abrupt noise, an insistent silence broke my thoughts. I was in Belén, a pretty little ghost of a town, home to almost fifty, where a smattering of houses and a fertile valley rise steeply into dry mountains -- more drastic than I’ve ever seen. At least I think I was there. Now it feels more likely that I was living in an alternate plane that only appears in dreams.

Things that may or may not have been real:

Ë The drive to Belén. Two by two, we were dropped off in different villages hours apart for our indigenous homestay on a windy dirt road. When I wasn’t sleeping, I was thinking we were probably going to go careening over the edge.

v My hostess. At first Señora Natalia, a little old lady whose head doesn’t even reach my shoulders, seemed shy. But she did not stop talking in her cute little voice since five minutes into my stay there. History, stories, gossip -- I wish I had caught every single word she said because they were all so entertaining! She lives alone and still farms her plots of land down the road. Although this was my indigenous homestay, my hostess claims that her family is not Aymaran, they’re Spanish.

Leading me to the field

Digging for potatoes

    Ë Belén itself. 

        It’s soooo small, so quiet.

Belén in its entirety 

v The mix of old and new. Houses built out of adobe the way they have been for years and years; novellas (soap operas) on tv at night. Aymaran rituals for harvesting; Catholic church with kitschy statues of Jesus, Mary, and random saints. An old kitchen, separated from the rest of the house, with walls stained black from the woodburning stove; instant Ensure for breakfast every morning.

Ë Our bus breaking down. In the middle of nowhere. In the driest desert in the world. After four days of the homestay a couple tour buses came to pick each of us up in our little villages. In my bus we were excitedly talking about our different experiences when we stopped and the driver hopped off only to come back on announcing he was going to walk 10k to somewhere (the somewhere was unclear) to get help because the axel was broken. So there we were, seven kids alone in the scene of a horror movie. Luckily we had plenty of water and many of us were stocked with homemade goat cheese and fried bread. Two hours passed quickly as we sang Joni Mitchell at the top of our lungs, listening to the echo in the vast nothingness, nothingness, nothingness…and a cop came rolling around the corner with our bus driver. The seven of us, plus the cop and driver, plus all our luggage, squeezed into the truck, and we were driven to a restaurant in the middle of nowhere, where we waited for another bus to come and take us to Arica.

After all the adventures in the north, I am now back in Valparaiso, ready to start the next chapter of the SIT program --- the independent project. Actually, I’m ready to rest for a day or two --- and then start the project. 

Sending love!

The North

I can't really breathe. My head spins when I stand up. I'm really tired. But as we've started saying here, it's completely vale la pena, worth the pain, to see the things I've seen at 11,000+ ft!

                                                                             ****

On Monday our group split into two, half of us going to the south of Chile and half of us going north. Us northerners flew to Arica from Santiago. Surrounded by sand, sand, sand, Arica sits on the coast and has a beautiful stretch of beach but is also known as one of the driest cities in the world. Here we stayed for a couple nights at a hotel, with seminars in the morning --- about the social movements of the indigenous Aymaran population, their cosmovision, the history of Afro-descendants in the region, and their present-day situation -- and a theatre workshop in the afternoons. That's right, yours truly is a star in a play. Not the star, but an actual star in the sky from a traditional Aymaran story that the group is attempting to act out. Led by two lively directors, we are tapping into a form of creativity that, by the looks of it, none of us have ever tapped into before. However, it's pretty fun! Why a play? The play, and the act of doing it, combines a couple different aspects that we're learning about. First, in the traditional Aymaran culture gracias does not exist. Instead, everything is reciprocated, so in order to reciprocate our welcome in the little mountain town of Putre (where we are now), we are presenting the play to little kids. Also, both the directors have participated in a local organization in Putre called Kimsakalko. Kimsakalko organizes theatre, murals, and dance in the village to revitalize the Aymaran culture...

In Arica, we also met a group of urban Aymaras at the local Lyons Club building for some lively dancing, some overeating, and also to take part in a ceremony in which a man and a woman ask permission from Pacha Mama (mother earth) and Tata Inti (sun). It was quite the mixture of tradition and modernity -- men and women swirled around in their customary dress while everyone, including the Aymaras, took pictures. We ate the traditional llama jerky while everyone exchanged email addresses. Then the gringos joined in the dancing, with confetti sprinkling our heads and the floor.

Mom, her name's Sara!

On a completely different note, the next night we rode across the city to a poor neighborhood to meet a group of women contaminated by toxins from nearby factories. This was one of the heaviest experiences of my time in Chile. We all sat in awe as a woman explained how the families in this neighborhood had cherished living in their own homes, humble as they were, until they realized that they are being poisoned by the ground their children play on, the materials they live within, the water that flows by their houses, and the air that hovers over them. Although they connected outbreaks of various illnesses with the toxic contaminants, like arsenic, the government refuses to acknowledge the problem. When a woman, who had been sitting bundled up in the corner with earphones in, started talking to us I realized how real the problem is. This woman had been living homeless on the beach before she realized her dreams and moved into a house that was hers, that she owned. Years later, just a whisper of a person, she has lost 4 children to diseases related to arsenic and she herself has cancer. I didn't catch everything she said in her quiet, shaking voice, but I did understand, I'm dying. Now this group of women is fighting to be have their voices heard by the government.

The next morning we headed in a tour bus (for those of you who were with me in Costa Rica, reminiscent of Scooby) out of Arica and into the mountains.

                                                                               ****

And the show goes on at 3,600 meters (11,800 feet) in the cute mountain pueblo, Putre. Despite everyone being hit by puna, altitude sickness, we keep rehearsing for our little theatrical debut (which is tomorrow), we keep eating entirely too much food, we keep laughing and bonding as a group (we're gettin pretty weird), and we continue seeing things that do not fail to amaze me. Yesterday we walked around and saw all the murals done by Kimsakalko and heard the Aymaran stories associated with each one. And today we toured around and had our minds blown by the incredible scenery even higher up than Putre at one of the highest lakes in the world, Chungara, and some hot springs called Jurasi.

On Monday I'll leave our nice little hotel in Putre to live with an Aymaran family in a pueblo even smaller for a couple nights!!!

Photos taken by the lovely Kandice Stover
                                              

La Memoria

Heartbeats. Fast, aching, thudding, fluttering, skipping. This last week was my most intense, a fusion of experience and emotion. During classes, we were reminded of the deep, bleeding pain that Chile carries, and we ended the week with an excursion to Santiago where we walked through some scars of the dictatorship. Afterwards, I could not have switched gears more drastically as a gaggle of us put on our dancing pants for a whole weekend of Chile's first full-scale international music festival, Lollapalooza.

La Memoria:
The collective memory of the dictatorship in Chile is delicate and strong.* It laces its way through the population, itching some and gripping others. Multiple times since being here I have heard, "We don't want to forget, but we want to move on." And even with my Spanish, I have caught an undertone of, We want to forget, and we want to move on. Many others find an importance in remembering, recording, recounting, and do so in order to ensure the same atrocities never happen again.

I met a man who paints. Graffiti and canvas. Block letters surround his figures and many times, if you piece them together they say Memoria. He says memory takes on many meanings in Spanish -- individual, collective, story, history, identity, culture.

Inti

This past week we saw many grim memories in different forms. We watched them and heard them and felt a miniscule fraction of them. Although as a gringa I will never fully understand the intricate combination of Chile's past and present and the feelings attached to both, I got a valuable reminder of how recently Chile has experienced mass restriction, murder, torture, and disappearance. Whether a Chilean will not talk about it, will talk if asked, or will volunteer information freely, s/he lives in it's heritage.

You might recall my recent documentary addiction. Last week this addiction was fed in class with a heavy spoonful of history. La Ciudad de los Fotógrafos was really moving and about a group of photographers that documented the streets and protests during the dictatorship. I definitely recommend it if you can find it. My heart pounded while watching a group of photographers swooping over a boy whose eye just got bashed out by a policeman. My heart ached while watching an old woman light candles on a shrine made for her children that had disappeared in the 1970's. Forever remaining in their 20's on their mourning mother's mantles, their bones might never be found.

Machuca

La Ciudad de los Fotógrafos

          


We also watched the Chilean classic, Machuca, about two boys of different classes becoming friends right before the military coup. Watch it and cry. And learn a lot too.

On Friday, we went to Santiago. We arrived at a beautiful gated park in the city and broke into excited English in little clusters as if we hadn't just all ridden one and a half hours together. Suddenly the mood changed as one of our leaders, usually the jokester, told us sternly and earnestly, "No English here, please"* and gathered us to explain where we were. We, or at least I, had not realized the intensity of our excursion before arriving. Villa Grimaldi, which is now a memorial park, had been a main interrogation and torture center during Pinochet's dictatorship. For the next couple hours we walked around mostly quiet, shaking our heads, crossing our arms in discomfort, eyes wide as we learned what had happened on the grounds we were walking on. The most incredible part of the experience was that a woman -- the woman that had organized our day with the Mapuches and had been around Casa SIT -- unexpectedly came in front of us and without wavering, shared her story of being detained there at Villa Grimaldi. In realative terms, she is lucky to not have ended up in the bottom of the ocean and to have not become a desaparecida. Even so, my heart squirmed and threatened to jump out of my chest, or sink into my stomach, when she spoke about being shoved into a tiny closet-sized "house" with four other women for three days while children of soldiers played in a pool across the yard, about horribly invading electrocutions, about her companions hanged from trees.

Before leaving, we were told that if anyone claimed that the torture of the dictatorship was a figment of the left's imagination, we knew differently. It is a true memory.




*I know I'm a history major, but I don't have it in me to describe all of Chile's, so if you're not familiar with it, you gotta open up another window in wikipedia
*You'd think this would be a given considering it's a Spanish program....but it's really hard to not speak English with 20 students who not only speak English but get along so well that they always want to chat chat chat