Por Fin, En Chile!

Hola, todos! I am blogging now from a very colorful hotel room in Algarrobo, Chile, a small town about an hour outside of Santiago. We are right on the Pacific ocean, and the beach is beautiful…but the weather is way colder than I thought it would be. According to my Celsius-Fahrenheit converter it is currently 73.4 degrees outside, but that is a lie. It feels like it’s about 50, and we’re all bundled up in sweaters and hats and crowded around a space heater. But regardless, things here are great, and I am very happy I chose to spend my semester here in Chile.


I am going to backtrack for a bit and talk about the process of actually getting here. After spending all day Tuesday trying not to vomit from nervousness, I woke up on Wednesday morning incredibly excited to leave. With one notable exception with a bank issue and a near-breakdown mid-afternoon, I was ready to go, ready to get on the ten-hour plane, and ready to begin this semester-long adventure. Essentially I was sick of the nerves, and knew that as soon as I got here they would go away.

As soon as I got to the gate, I began chatting with two other girls from the program and the Miss Universe contestant from Tanzania (who is not on our program, but was waiting for a plane at our gate). All three were very nice and easy to talk to! It turned out that the other two girls (as well as most of the people on the program) have the same worries I do, which was comforting. The two (Lizzie and Kim) were actually two of the only people from the program who I had really spoken to before, so it was funny that we were all on the same plane.

The actual plane ride wasn't horrible, but it was ten hours overnight and I didn't exactly sleep. But I did watch Grease in Spanish, which was fantastic--although the songs were in English, which was disappointing.

The past two days have been filled with orientation and getting-to-know-you activities. It's really fascinating, because even though everyone involved in the program is interested in the themes of education and social change, our specific interests lie in completely different areas. One girl is interested in bilingual education and speech pathology, and another is studying peace studies and thinks that education is a clear route to peace, and another is interested in human rights in indigenous communities. We’ve been speaking a lot of Spanish during orientation, although we’re still speaking English to each other. My Spanish is better than I thought, but still not great, so I’m excited for that to begin improving. And the food is delicious!


Interesting Facts I Have Learned about Chile in the Past Two Days:

• Chile has fifteen separate regions, two of which are very new.
• Chile is one of the most developed and one of the wealthiest countries in South America; however the rich/poor divide is among the worst in the world (it comes in 10th place). It is as follows:
  
  • The richest 20% of the country has 64% of the country’s wealth
  • The poorest 20% of the country has 3.2% of the country’s wealth
  • The poorest 40% of the country has only 9.6% of the country’s wealth.
• Chile is the world’s largest producer of copper
• 10% of the current Chilean population is Mapuche, an indigenous people who live in a region in Northern Chile
• Under Allende, Chile was a socialist country, and offered many socialized programs. But after the coup de 1973, Pinochet changed the Chilean constitution to change the role of the state to a subsidiary of programs (such as educational programs) rather than a provider.
• Chilean gas is imported from Bolivia, via Argentina—so it is very, very expensive.
• The Jewish community in Chile is one of the largest in Latin America, but it's very much unseen. Chile isn't very religious in general; although it is technically a Catholic country, the majority of the people--particularly those in Santiago--observe Catholicism as tradition rather than belief.
  
• The concept of sexual harassment is very new in Chile—the only law in place in the country was instituted in 2005, and only deals with boss/employee relations. (Can you tell we had a discussion about sexual harassment and machismo?)
• Chileans speak very quickly.

After orientation, the group took a trip to Pablo Neruda’s house. It was amazing for two main reasons: first being the obvious, it was incredible to see where he sat and wrote his poetry and came up with his ideas; and the second was because he was absolutely insane and collected everything. We have a store in the town where I grew up called the Eclectic Collector—and I swear it must have been inspired by Neruda. He collected, among other things: masks, pipes, miniature models of guitars, alcohol bottles, ships-in-bottles, and seashells.


Tomorrow we will meet our homestay families, and I am very excited. Right now I have very little information about my family, so I will post about them when I know more. Hasta luego!