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.

Solidaridad

Sitting with my family at the table after dinner this evening, drinking tea and mopping up a puree of avocado with a piece of bread, I watched as the country's exiting president, Michelle Bachelet, gave her last address to the nation ahead of tomorrow's change of government. Bachelet's past is almost inconceivable - her father, a general in the Air Force and a member of Salvador Allende's cabinet dead in Villa Grimaldi, one of Pinochet's major torture centers and holding pens, before she and her mother were tortured in the same compound, only to join in the resistance against the dictatorship after their release. Moreover, as an agnostic, single mom of 3 children from two different fathers, her political prospects in the US would amount to almost nothing. However, she is leaving office with a personal approval rating of upwards of 85%, an astounding, almost inconceivable figure, and in her final address, she spoke of one word that characterized the nation's response to February's earthquake and which seems to me to speak to what Bachelet embodies to most Chileans: "Solidaridad". Solidarity.

When given the chance, Chileans will emphasize how united their country is, and the earthquake and its aftermath has given them a chance to express this sentiment in very real terms. I was lucky enough to volunteer at a chapter of the Chilean Red Cross here in Santiago last Friday, and they literally cannot handle enormous number of clothes that had been donated in the week following the quake: they are now only accepting donations of certain non-perishable foods to send to the more affected regions further south. That same night, at 10pm, a 24-hour campaign began to raise money to help shelter the hundreds of thousands of displaced Chileans - most figures are above 1 million, this in a country with a population of only 17 million. The next day, street corners in certain parts of town were filled with young volunteers dressed up in circus-like garbs, faces painted, waving enormous Chilean flags and collecting donations for this effort: Chile ayuda a Chile ("Chile helps Chile"). By the end of the night on Saturday, after an endless procession of companies, families, workers' unions donating thousands of dollars each on a continuous telethon broadcast on nearly every television station, the "Chile ayuda a Chile" effort had collected more than double its goal of 15 mil millones de pesos, or a little more than US$30 million. I woke up the next morning to find that in all, the Chilean people had raised an amount equivalent to between 60 and 70 million US dollars in only 24 hours.

The earthquake has begun to fade from the news, and has all but disappeared from international and American news sources, but that has certainly not diminished the country's recognition of the difficulties faced by those most affected by this disaster. With the country's first conservative government since the end of Pinochet's dictatorship set to take power tomorrow, the process of recovery could not have came at a more strenuous time, as many people seem to be waiting apprehensively, hoping that the country doesn't back away from the progress it's made in the past 20 years. However, it is also very true that much of the credit for the recovery efforts can go to Chileans, independent of what happens with the country's new president.

Pictures From Mi Barrio

In Chile, Life...

In addition to this gaping hole, the quake did serious damage to this aging church, only a block from where I attend classes.

For a good, brief look at where things stand here in Santiago, and in Chile as a whole, here's a great editorial from Chilean author Alberto Fuguet which appeared in The New York Times today:
"In Chile, Life Between the Tremors"