One adventure ends so another can finally begin

The last few weeks have been, to say the very least, hectic, although, for the most part, wonderful. After being sequestered in the lush, lovely mapuche village of Chapod, about a half hour bus ride on mud and gravel roads from Temuco, for nine days as part of the independent study project that every student in my program completed during the month of May, I returned to Santiago to work and work and work, eventually writing a 39-page paper in Spanish and then giving a presentation this past weekend on my investigation.

All of that means that now I´ve finished with the studying portion of my experience abroad and now I´m down in southern Chile starting my solitary traveling adventures. I´m writing this sitting in a "cyber" in the little town of Pucón, which is a bustling center of outdoor sports in the summer (the Chilean summer, that is) but is little more than a quiet, very windy group of streets right now. However, the calm is rather nice, especially after the last hectic days of my study abroad program, and, moreover, considering that this is a town bordered on two sides by gorgeous lakes, on another by the strange towers of the Andes, and on the last side by Volcán Villarrica. Villarrica is considered one of the most active volcanoes in Chile (there was a small eruption early this year that shut down this area in the middle of tourist season) and is one of four volcanoes in the world known to have a lava lake in its crater. Even now, looking up at it´s snow-crowned peak towering over Pucón, I´ve been able to see a slow trail of smoke rolling off the top throughout the day. (It´s definitely worth taking a look at pictures of the volcano online).

Because of bad weather predicted on the other side of the volcanoe later this week, I´m unfortunately not heading to the gorgeous forests and mountains between Villarrica and its two sister volcanoes that stretch in a line to the Argentinean border; instead, I head out tomorrow morning to spend three days in Parque Nacional Huerque, an amazing stretch of unique forest that climbs up into the mountians and is known for its pristine lakes and incredible flora and fauna (and for its ever-present vistas of Villarrica).

So, until I get back in reach of internet and then head out backpacking in Patagonia, here´s to a lovely semester that has, in some ways, come to a welcome end, and to the relaxed start of a 5-week adventure (and to the start of the World Cup in less than 3 days).

Población La Victoria: 52 años de la lucha

Less than two years ago, one of Chile's most iconic poblaciones (the common term for poor neighborhoods or barrios) marked it's first half-century - 50 years since the very early morning of when a thousands of residents of the most destitute parts of southern Santiago moved to take an overgrown fairground that the government had slated for the construction of a wealthy housing community. The dawn of October 30, 1957, found over 3,000 people already setting up tents and organizing resources after having crept past the cordon of policemen charged with keeping these very pobladores from realizing this populist project, which had been brewing for over a year as the conditions in the city's poorest communities deteriorated rapidly.

Nearly 52 years later, the residents of the Población La Victoria - named for "la victoria contra la miseria" ["the victory over misery"] - still frame their history and their present identity in terms of "la lucha", or "the fight". There is an enormous pride that comes from living in this barrio, despite it's economic poverty - an enormous pride to being a "victoriano", which, besides signifying someone from La Victoria, translates roughly to "victor" - "one who is victorious". Murals plaster the walls of the población, documenting the community's vicious fight against the dictatorship of Pinochet and its militant leftist leanings, and the barrio is also home to South America's first community TV station, which runs a pirate signal with programs and documentaries about the history of La Victoria, the resistance during the dictatorship, and political events and movements today, in addition to running a small community communications night-school which focuses on training young victorianos how to tell the stories of their community and how to keep memories alive.

I've been lucky enough to spend almost all of the past week in this incredible community, observing and participating in the elementary school that the victorianos founded two years after the creation of La Victoria. Despite its nationalized curriculum and all of the red tape required by the state to run the school and receive the money for its operations, this school manages to retain the sense of being "victoriana": the kids are proud to be from this community, and moreover, the gate to the school is almost always open. Parents move freely throughout the school, kids run in and out of the director's office all day, and the community itself still takes enormous pride in what the school signifies for La Victoria and in the principles it was founded upon - the idea that education is in itself a part of the fight against the forces that drove the pobladores to organize and create this community 52 years ago - a fight that reached its peak under the dictatorship but which continues to be relevant in a country with one of the highest indices of economic inequality in the world.

The Warmup: Parque Nacional La Campana - Sector Granizo

When Charles Darwin landed in Valparaíso on the coast of Chile in 1834, he headed inland to a bell-shaped summit that, at 1,880 m (or some 6,200 ft.), jutted up from the ridges of the Andes that make their way from the border with Argentina towards the coast. From the top of this mountain, Cerro La Campana, he said that you could see Chile "as in a map", so it was to the park built around this peak, Parque Nacional La Campana, that I headed with a friend to finally take a serious trip into the Andes and break in all my new gear before I set out traveling and backpacking for 5 weeks when my program ends June 8.

From Santiago, the park's gateway town, Olmué, which is a lovely little place in it's own right, is only a 2-hour bus ride that costs about $10 round trip. From there, after some empanadas and fresh fruit juice (I decided to go for the "tuna", a sweet cactus fruit with a flavor kind of similar to honeydew), you can catch a smaller bus (60 cents) to within a kilometer of the entrances to 2 of the 3 sectors of the park: Sector Cajón Grande and Sector Granizo. After an accidental detour to the Cajón Grande entrance, we headed to Sector Granizo, planning to camp Sunday night and possibly head up La Campana on Monday until we found out that the last third of that particular trail was closed because of the earthquake. Still, we set up our tent and explored a little before cooking up a delicious dinner of curried rice with mushrooms and sautéd onions and bell pepper and hitting the sleeping bags.

I have to hand it to CONAF, the Chilean government's parks and conservation branch: they've done a wonderful job with this park. The campsites in Sector Granizo are strung out along a series of trails and usually built in rough terraces so that they're spacious without intruding too much on the landscape, and the actual trails achieve a similar effect: well-kept and well-planned without feeling too touristy or too intrusive. And between the wildlife - we saw a giant, tarantula-like spider, some wild cows, and a variety of hawks - and the incredible views, you could really spend a few days here even though the trail system isn't all that extensive. But since the route up La Campana was closed, we headed up Sendero Portezuelo, where the trails from all 3 sectors of the park meet in a saddle right below a huge, rocky peak, offering incredible views back towards the east and into and past the valley of Sector Ocoa (see picture above), one of the two places left in the country where you can see wild Chilean palms.

Unfortunately, we were a little pressed for time and had to bound back down the way we came, but with the park opening up to ridge after ridge of dry, arid mountains, I'm hoping to make every effort to make my way back before I head back to the States. For now, I'm back in Santiago with happily backpack-bruised hips and a small taste of what I'm in for when I head out on my own a month from now.

¿Camping?

[So the picture here is entirely irrelevant, I just like it. It was on the wall in the radio station that I talked about in my last post. I guess in some way, the poster is somewhat related to what I'm writing about, but we'll see how it turns out.]

Unfortunately, preparing for a camping trip here in Chile (or at least in Santiago) isn't quite as easy as making the hop over to LL Bean or, in Asheville, as dropping by Diamond Brand, Black Dome, or even Mast General Store to pick up a large spoon to cook with or a canister of white gas. "Outdoors" stores here are "[insert a general topic] and Camping". "Deportes y Camping" [Sports and Camping] or "Armería y Camping" [Firearms and Camping]. In the last 5 hours, I've been in 2 fishing stores, 2 firearms stores, and a host of general athletics stores only to realize that the stoves and faded sleeping bags stuffed into the corners of their displays are the only "camping" equipment that they carried.

That said, walking back from the grocery store, where I managed to find a spatula and the ingredients to make brownies for my host mom's birthday tomorrow (she's been asking me to make them ever since I got here), I was thoroughly frustrated. The display in a pharmacy caught my eye - kitchenware - so I slowed my angry power-walk a little, went inside, and headed toward the back, where I managed to find absolutely nothing that I needed. It was only about 5 minutes after I had left the store when I realized the ridiculousness of what I had been doing and started to laugh: there I was, a pale, crazy-haired gringo (I hadn't showered yet) in the kitchenware section of this cramped pharmacy towering about a foot (at least) over clustered chilean women who were just trying to buy some silverware or pick out a good kitchen set while I was scrambling through every corner trying to find a large spoon, with my backpack, heavy with the brownie-fixins, swinging around and probably connecting with a few unfortunate ladies.

So, now that I'm happy again and laughing at myself, I'm going to put off working on my independent study project and go rummage through a bunch of shady auto-parts stores to try to find some white gas for my camp stove.

Siempre hacia la victoria

In the US, it seems that Buenos Aires has an almost mythical draw and is often postured as a cultured, European city in one of the only developed (more or less) countries in a continent that is still struggling to catch up to countries who have had so much influence over the region since its "discovery". You could spend hours or days pulling apart that characterization of the city and of the continent, but I can definitely say that BA is one of the most vibrant and interesting, and modern, cultural centers of South America, although great poverty exists in plain site as soon as you move away from the center of the city and the wealthier, more fashionable neighborhoods of Barrio Norte and into areas filled with victims of South America's great economic inequality and Argentina's financial meltdown in 2001 and 2002, which left almost 60% of the country below the state's (already low) poverty line.

That said, something of an educational revival is happening in certain parts of these stricken areas - a revival with notable community-driven projects that are completely unique in their approaches to education. One of the most powerful examples of these new ideas about education comes from the barrio of Barracas, a working-class neighborhood in the southeast of Buenos Aires. Formed in 2004, la Escuela de Recuperación de Enseñanza Media de Barracas is a school dedicated to the education of students who have dropped out of school for more than four months and want to return to finish "high school". The school is located in a fábrica gráfica - essentially a factory for printing - that was taken by the workers during the financial crisis almost ten years ago, and there has not been enough time or money to change the austere feel of the classrooms, but this location offers the opportunities that make this school so unique. The factory still functions (large windows inside the school overlook the operation) and collaborates with the students to create a magazine every year, with the hope of adding more projects in the coming years. Even more interesting is the community radio that operates out of the top floor of the building, just above the school, which offers workshops to the students and broadcasts oral projects created by certain classes every year. (A few dedicated students also work in the station before or after school.) Finally, a medical center occupies the building next to this school, and despite early apprehension, the two institutions have begun to collaborate, creating a learning environment entirely inseparable from its spacial context and the resources offered by the community on this small city block. This is a school that fiercely and openly challenges the all-too-apparent realities of public education in the poorer parts of Buenos Aires - a school that, as graffiti on the walls pronounces, is looking "siempre hacia la victoria": "always towards victory".

"Bienvenidos a la fiesta
fiesta de chileno roto
que después del terremoto
se despertó de la siesta..."

Thanks to this little arts-school "marching band" that passed by our house a couple of days ago, I have something small to write about. As for my other experiences in the past month, including a week living with an indigenous Mapuche family outside of Temuco, that'll have to wait a few days (and hopefully not weeks). As for now, I'm off to Buenos Aires.

La Fería

Between the buses that careen around the city, the children, the street dogs, and everything else that happens in cities these days, Santiago is a place full of noise - probably not the bustle of New York or Boston, but it's by no means a quiet place, and, on Saturday and Sunday, the city gets louder (and probably a bit bigger) when huge open-air markets sprout up in plazas or commandeer entire roads. This is not your dirt-cheap-t-shirts-brand-name-knock-offs-kitschy-snow-globe-filled tourist trap, but a veritable supermarket spilled out into the street. Micheal Pollen's most vivid wet dreams have nothing on this collection of fresh, local, dirt cheap veggies and fruit. There are, of course, the odd stalls selling baby toys or women's underwear, and the vendors on the outskirts who have strange assortments of simple-but-lovely hand-made jewelry, books (the Kama Sutra sidling up to motivational books that have made friends with their neighbor, Pablo Neruda), and garage-sale-worthy knick-knacks. These ferías have become neighborhood institutions, and I've heard people argue the merits of one over the other, but wherever you are in Santiago, it seems like the entire community makes it out over the weekend to buy a week's worth of colorful, mouth-watering produce that ranges from avocados and peaches to giant orange-green vegetables and vibrantly violet beans I have never seen before. However, the strangest part has to be the fish stalls that are usually nestled in the center of the fería and are impossible to miss, if only because you can smell them from a block away. The variety of seafood isn't anything like what's on offer in the side-corridors of Mercado Central, where you can buy sea-urchins to compliment your squid (beak included) and meter-long eels, the sight of these fishmongers selling off yesterday's large, slippery catch to the small crowd packed around the small booths is itself a reason to rush to your closest fería this weekend. While in the US, those who can afford it are trying to buy local and fresh and are finding it hard to keep track of the carbon footprint on those organic apples that were actually imported from a South American mega-orchard (probably via China, like everything else these days), Santiagüinos have got it figured out: buy food for a couple of days at a time, buy a little meat from the butcher around the corner, and stock up on Saturday with a week's worth of local, in-season produce.