Orientation

Orientation week was a delightful blur. We went straight from the airport to Hostal Sammy, where we stayed for the first week. There are really only three things you need to know about Hostal Sammy:

1. They serve free homemade apple and banana pancakes every morning (a plus).
2. Every inch of the place is covered in dirt that looks like it’s been there for a least 100 years (a big minus).
3. It has community showers, meaning two shower heads with no curtain in between them (minus).

Yes, it was the first time I showered with other girls, but the showers were hot and it really wasn’t so bad having company in the shower after awhile (just as long as you kept your eyes forward). There was terror in my eyes the first time I realized I was going to have to be naked or half-naked in front of all my classmates (six of us girls shared a room and we all saw each other in various states of undress), but once I realized they had no problem with it, I decided it was best that I have no problem with it. I’m sort of still working on that…

Orientation week was filled with charlas, or workshops, on various topics from recent political history of Chile to the rights of children and the educational system of Chile. All the charlas were given in Spanish, which was definitely a good thing, except for when the person giving the charla was a Chilean. To give you an idea of how impossible it is to understand Chilean Spanish, we had an entire charla about Chilean slang and several pages in our volunteer handbook dedicated to deciphering it. Making matters worse is the ever-popular arbitrary abandonment of “S’s” in words, for example: “ecuela” of escuela, “noma” in stead of no mas, “entonce” instead of entonces…you get the picture. And how could I forget the placement of “po” as a punctuation of almost every sentence, with “po” meaning pues, or well? Chileans also have their own words for everything, so avocado is “palta” instead of aguacate and peanuts are “maní” instead of cacahuates. There’s a million more where that came from, but basically it’s very annoying because not only do I not really understand the language as much as I thought, but I find it next to impossible to decipher the Chilean accent. I was hoping to learn Spanish similar to what I might use back in the States, but looks like I’m going to have to kiss that wish goodbye and embrace the Chileanisms that permeate all too many phrases. (At some point I know I’ll lose my frustration with the accent, but for now it’s super fome—Chilean slang for lame.)

One of the first (and most memorable) orientation week activities we embarked on was a city-wide scavenger hunt. We basically broke off into two groups and went to a bunch of famous sites throughout Santiago. We went to the top of Santa Lucia hill, which is where Santiago was founded. We went to the Mercado Central, which is supposed to be a great place to eat fish but, really, it just smelled awful. And then we had to complete tasks like selling a single egg to passersby in the street and getting a bunch of Chileans to take a picture with us in a park. Along the way, we made a couple of Chilean friends, one of whom told us that we had to go to this very typical Chilean bar called the Piojera. We had our first pisco sours there, officially turning my drink of choice from the vodka tonic to the pisco sour. Pisco is kind of like tequila but definitely much less tasty then tequila. Yet, somehow, when you mix pisco, powdered sugar and lemon it makes this amazing and delicious drink called the pisco sour. Kind of like a margarita but sooo much better. We ended up being the winners of the scavenger hunt, which was a great bonding experience with my classmates.

Me looking over Santiago from Santa Lucia hill

Drinking pisco sours and Escudo as part of a scavenger hunt task!

As part of our orientation we also went to Parque por la Paz, a memorial park that is on the grounds of Villa Grimaldi, a detention and torture center that operated from 1973-79. During the regime of Pinochet thousands of people were tortured and disappeared for speaking out against his government or holding Leftist views. At Villa Grimaldi alone, 4,500 people were tortured and 226 disappeared or were executed. Villa Grimaldi was at a perfect location for making people “disappear” because of its proximity to a nearby airfield. Detainees were tranquilized, tied to rails of old railway tracks and flown to the ocean. Their bodies were then dropped in the ocean, with the rails ensuring that their bodies would not resurface. These atrocities did not happen very long ago—Pinochet was in power from 1973-89—but according to a recent survey discussed by one of our Chilean lecturers, many of today’s young teens really don’t know who Pinochet or Allende were. Surprising—and yet the Pinochet years are not totally forgotten. September 11 is not just a tragic day for the U.S., it is also the anniversary of the Pinochet’s military coup, which brings about yearly protests and mini riots throughout Santiago. We have been told not to go out on that day because it could be dangerous and I even have that day off work. Chileans are apparently infamous for thinking that everything is dangerous, so we will see if their fears are well-founded or exaggerated.

In the rose garden of Parque por la Paz (notice the name on the memorial placard)

Another thing that struck me about Chile after a week of being there was the political protests. The VE Global office is near Plaza Italia, a part of town where many protests are held. A volunteer said that a wave of tear gas wafted through the VE building once during a protest, and we actually saw a small protest being held during orientation week, although I’m not quite sure what it was about. There was also a mini riot near Hostal Sammy while we were staying there and we’ve heard that 9/11 can get ugly, as aforementioned. And recently, in 2006, there was a very large protest called the Revolución Penguina which was a student movement aimed at increasing the quality of Chilean education.

After collecting these snippets of information in my mind, it seemed to me that there is a sort of culture of protesting here in Chile. But, interestingly, when I asked one of our Chilean lecturers why this was, he said that Chileans really aren’t a protesting people. He said that protesting had gone way down in recent years and that compared to the surrounding countries, Chile is mild. This is interesting. Why would he want to downplay this aspect of his culture? Maybe the weird thing (to him) is not that Chile has protests but that the U.S. doesn’t. Of course we have protests, but, at least in Phoenix, they seem few and far between. I wonder if protests are just a natural part of Latin American culture. Or are the absence of protests an unnatural part of the U.S. lifestyle? Do our people find more mild-mannered ways to get their voices heard by our government or do they just not really care about getting their voices heard? I hope in my time here that I gain some insight into how Chile’s political system works and the extent to which Chileans participate in civic life.