Hodgepodge

22/11/08
A war is about to be waged on the port. I can feel the tension mounting everyday in the air. I often wake up and look out my window. The ocean and port are obscured by a thick layer of clouds that begin about 50 feet above the level of the plan. From my vantage point I can almost see over them to the horizon and mountains in the distance. The clouds form an oppressive cover over the entire city and push up against the tips of the cerros. As the sun gets higher in the sky the clouds begin to burn off and the vast Pacific comes into view. Around midmorning the temperature is still mildly cool, but the sun beats down with such unrelenting force that it feels like you are standing next to a large bonfire. However, and the attack that it unleashes is partially hidden by the cool ocean air. By the time the afternoon comes around the wind has begun its assault. It comes whipping up across the ocean and from above the cerros following the roads twisting and meandering the slopes picking up dust as it goes along. You can almost feel it pushing its way through the streets like a wave, forcing itself along with no thought to anything that which might lay in its path claiming many a hat and candy wrapper along the way. Amidst all this, a formidable enemy lays offshore waiting. Unseen from my window, but from other points across town its presence is easily seen in the distance. Just at the edge of the horizon, a massive wall of clouds rises out from the ocean thousands of feet in the air forming what appears to be a perfect edge that follows the rim of the horizon for all you can see cutting short the blue of the ocean. The steep edge continues for miles uninterrupted and unrelenting, but at the same time unable to progress inward to shore to envelope and wreak havoc on the city. It bides its time waiting for the day when it can move inward and sweep over the land leaving nothing in its wake. Until that time comes, though, I guess I can deal with the attack of the sun everyday and the mild temperatures.

Politics here in Chile are far from perfect (now that Obama is going to be president I don’t have to say the same for the U.S.). I would say the vast majority of policies are still heavily influenced or the same as the policies implemented by Pinochet during the dictatorship. The economy is still a neo-liberal system, meaning that it is super capitalist. Almost everything is privatized, and those that are from the government suffer. Two quick examples, education and healthcare. Both these aspects have a public system and private system, which sounds very similar to the way the U.S. works, except that the government puts the bare minimum into the public system. If you want to go to a university here you almost have to had gone to a private school. If you want to receive good health care you have to go to a private hospital or to a hospital located in a rich community. Following this train of thought, the government pays its workers almost nothing. In the clinic I go to for my project, the doctors are paid 900,000 pesos a month, which is equivalent to about $1,500-$1,800 or about $20,000 a year. However, that salary still would put you in the top income bracket in Chile, to give a concept of how poor the majority of the people in the country are – 90% of the population earns less than this amount. The bottom 10% of the population earns 150,000 pesos a month or a little less than $3,600 a year. The global economic crisis hasn’t been helping either, as inflation here is skyrocketing. It is also the time of the year in which the congress votes on the budget for the next year. All these factors combined leads to a strike. This past week, 7 days in all, 90% of the public work force was on strike. No schools open, no customs, no trash pickup, no government buildings/municipalities, only emergency services – no hospital care, and no public transport out of the country – to list a few. The country was effectively paralyzed, and also very smelly. Ships began to mount up in the port waiting to unload or receive shipments of products. Trash began to pile up at every single street corner bursting out of containers and spilling out into the road. Kids roamed the streets taking advantage of a week of vacation. People couldn’t receive any type of medical care except for emergency services. It was very impressive to see the mass organization that it took across all public sectors (excluding police who wouldn’t been fired if they had protested but were happy to walk amiably alongside the protesters in the marches). The congress is located here in Valparaíso so the city was inundated with tens of thousands of protestors walking through the streets chanting and waving flags. Finally both sides came to an agreement that didn’t quite reach what the workers had initially been demanding, but from the outside seems like at least a step in the right direction. However, given the politics that exist here in Chile, most likely they will have to fight again next November to receive a salary that increases with the rising cost of living in this world.

25/11/08
It seems that this blog is somewhat sputtering and breaking down at the end, but I guess that I could only put the blame on myself for that one. I have approximately two weeks left in the semester and things are pretty hectic. I’m shooting for about one more blog entry next week, a kind of farewell to Chile, and then one after my trip to Peru. On the 9th I fly out to Lima, stay in Peru until the 14th, then am back in Chile until the 17th at which point I return back to the U.S. I am beginning the end stages of my project and now have the mountainous task ahead of writing up and putting everything together for next week, and all in Spanish. This will by far be the longest paper I have written in my entire life (I’m a science major) on top of that it won’t be in English. Needless to say it is going to be some work, but I’m 17 pages in so far and things aren’t too bad. This last month hasn’t really been blog-worthy in terms of excitability for other people, but at least for me it has been very fun albeit stressful. I’ve really had to develop new skills to deal with the task of conducting a study in a foreign country in a language that isn’t my own. For example, this morning I went to a new clinic in a new community and spoke with the head doctor for an hour. After I finished talking with him I literally went patient to patient in the waiting room (wouldn’t be possible in the U.S.) and interviewed them about the health system. I know that isn’t as exciting as traveling around and enjoying weird cultural eccentricities, but now that I think about it, it is pretty cool to see the point at which I have gotten to. I couldn’t imagine doing anything remotely like that if you had asked me three months ago. To wrap up this post, a quick anecdote from yesterday.

I have a contact in a community with one of the community leaders and she had told me I could go there to interview residents about the health system. She informed me there would be a workshop on Monday night at aisdifaidsfa Avenida Rodelillo (that being what I heard on the phone and too proud to tell her I didn’t understand – so that being what I knew). I got my things together that night, asked my mom here if she knew where I could pick up a colectivo and headed off. She directed me to one block away from a plaza close to where I live. I got there, flagged down a colectivo, and explained to the man all that I knew. He told me not to worry and off we went. Up and up and up and up. Finally, he stops the car, gets out and asks the colectivo driver in the car behind. Gets back in, tells me he knows where I need to go and we continue up a little bit more. We “arrive” and he directs me to a building across from where a woman is standing in the street. I thank him and continue to the next part of my journey. I go over to the building but it is a church, not what I need. Instead, I ask the woman if she knows about a workshop happening or anything about a woman named Rosalba (the community leader). She says she knows where I need to go and has to go by there anyway, so we begin to walk. After about 15 minutes we arrive at a rundown building and go in. There are only two guys about my age in there, and no Rosalba. After they are informed about why I am there, one of them tells me he knows where she lives and that he can take me to her house. So we begin to walk again and after about 15 more minutes we arrive at an old house and he begins to yell at her name. She answers the door and we go in.