¡I'm Back!

19/10/08 - 4/11/08
Hola! I’m back (home?) in Valparaíso from my excursion to the South. There is a lot to write about, and since I wasn’t traveling with my laptop, I haven’t kept a faithful account of the events of the past two weeks. I have managed to write some stuff down on paper, so I will do my best to give a summary of what I have been up to recently. To make up for that, I will include some very pretty pictures of the country that I will hopefully upload within the next few days. Not possible right now cause I need to sort through them and get better internet access.

Sunday: I flew from Santiago to Temuco today. We arrived in the city and drove out to the country. Everything here is green, almost like someone painted the countryside but could only use different shades of green. Went to a “ruka” first, which is a large wood hut that serves as the traditional Mapuche meeting place for the community. Mapuche culture dictates that everybody sit in a circle around a fire and introduce themselves counter-clockwise. Our host parents had come to the ruka to meet us, and even though we hadn’t been told who we would be living with, I knew almost immediately cause on woman kept looking at me (easy to single me out here as the only guy in our group of 13). We then had a small meal in the ruka with foods I had never had before but were delicious, then all split our separate ways. We grabbed our bags, then my dad pointed us to our transportation. Some families took horse-drawn wagons, my family had brought its large truck it uses to take cattle to the market. Riding across the countryside watching the rolling fields of green go by, the Andes just visible on the horizon and the crisp spring air mixing with the smell of cow droppings, I stood in the back of the truck with several other students and my host mom here wondering when the next time in my life after this trip would I find myself in this situation.


The Countryside

Now jumping to a week later…
Currently I am sitting in the central plaza of Nueva Imperial, a small city about a half hour outside of Temuco. Before I get to the now, I am going to start with a summary of the past week. Up until Monday, I had been living with a Mapuche family out in the countryside. I stayed there with two other girls in the program. Our family was composed of the mom, Maria, who is incredibly sweet and also very easy going. The dad, Emisterio, who was not the most talkative person, but had a dry sense of humor that when we were able to actually catch it, was quite amusing. They have a daughter, Mariela, who is currently studying commercial engineering at the university in Temuco and, lastly, they have a younger son, Ricardo, who is seven years old and attends the bilingual (Spanish/Mapudungun) local school. We spent most of our free time at the house running around outdoors herding cattle, playing Frisbee, or just hanging out. Because I haven’t had a chance to write much, I am going to give a list of a few of the activities we did over the past week.


Other members of the family.

The first day in the region as part of SIT we went to Lago Budi, a lake that was pinched off from the ocean by an earthquake. Our mom sent us with an empty 2 liter bottle to fill with water and sand to be used at a later time as a remedy. Back at the house, we had several meals that were interrupted because the cows had wandered into the front yard and needed to be chased off. Most meals, however, consisted only of bread with different spreads. This wasn’t much of a problem though because all bread was made by the mom from grains grown at the house. Occasionally we would have eggs, which were delicious, for breakfast from their own chickens (I counted at least 20 running around the yard). Meat was only served twice at the house, and each time it tasted like walking by a cow and taking a bite of its shoulder. Sometimes Ricardo would capture a baby chick from its mother (lots of clucking involved) and bring it to the dinner table to share with us.
Meals in Chile are always one of the more challenging aspects of the day because the correct manners are still hard to discern. For example, I’ve finally gotten used to having the mom serve everybody and have everybody start eating while she is still preparing more food. Also, knowing when it is okay to get up is also always dicey, which usually leads to just waiting for the family to get up from the table. Lastly, I never want to offend anyone here, so I always eat everything put before me, which has led my mom in Valparaiso to serve me mountains of food for every meal. If she weren’t so incredibly nice, I would think she is trying to kill me through pure volume of food.
We left the family with many fond memories, and also a permanent mark, because they were putting in a cement walkway and we got to write stuff in the wet cement. Even after just a week it was hard to leave because we all already felt incredibly close and had formed relationships with each member of the family.
Yesterday they assigned us each a partner, a city, and a theme and told us to go do a ministudy. After finding the bus terminal in Temuco, my partner and I hopped on a bus and rode it out to our pueblo, Nueva Imperial. Knowing absolutely nothing, we asked to be let off in the center of the city, found our way to the police station, and then asked for a hostel recommendation. Instead of a recommendation, we piled into a big police van with 3 other officers and they droves us over to a hostel and negotiated with the owner to get us a room for the night. After getting situated we wandered over to the hospital and asked around for someone to help us out with our study. One doctor obliged and told us to come back the next morning. We returned to the hospital and found a different person waiting for us. He ended up taking us on a 3 hour tour of the hospital. The hospital itself is very interesting because part is western medicine and part is Mapuche. The western part looks exactly like any hospital in the states and is very modern, which was surprising give then size of the town and lack of development, but the Mapuche side was way cool. The waiting room was filled with Mapuches, large murals and wooden sculptures decorated the walls, and people were drinking mate, a tea native to the region. The pharmacy was dispensing remedies, large 2 liter soda bottles filled with different colored liquids, and given by workers wearing white lab coats with a Mapuche pattern in dark blue printed on the collars. The hospital has 3 Machis that work at the same time, and these women dress in Mapuche clothes and make herbal remedies/creams.
After the mini project we were on the move for the next 4 or 5 days or so, hopping from one hotel to the other getting a feel for more of the region. We got a free day in Pucon, a very touristy resort town that looks exactly like Colorado if Colorado operated in Spanish, which involved spending 3 hours in natural hot springs, and another day on an all day nature hike. Other than that, I’m sad to say that I don’t have many more details about the end part of the trip as of now, but I do have a bunch of pictures to put up of all the stuff we saw. I start my independent project now here in Valparaíso and will be working on it for the rest of the semester. It is exciting and scary at the same time to think that I will only be in Chile for a little over a month – I don’t know exactly how to feel about it right now, whether a month is a long time or no time at all. From here on out, though, updates should be regular – depending, of course, on whether I am doing anything interesting or not.


Hiking around Pucon.




Pigs.