¡Que fome!

Passport situation resolved.

After about a month of sending emails without replies and listening to answering machines, I finally found a telephone number for the US embassy in Santiago that doesn't lead you through a bunch of recordings (it was a number to get a temporary passport). Instead, I talked to a real person who told me that they actually do have my passport ready, I just have to pick it up. I suppose this proves that the embassy isn't weaselly or incompetent; they just don't handle email very well. In any case I'm very glad that I'm going to be able to return to the US after all.

It's sort of ironic that the thief who made off with my backpack won't get any value whatsoever out of the passport, but so far it's cost me about $350 to replace the thing.

La Isla

One final trip in Chile.

I just got back from a week traveling in Chiloé, an island about five hours south of Valdivia. Great trip: beautiful rainforest, ocean, cliffs, beaches, interesting architecture, and warm hospitality. We spent five nights in the tent and three nights in hostels. The hostels in Chiloé, like much of Southern Chile, are essentially private homes with a few extra bedrooms. For $20-$30 you get a room for the night, use of the family kitchen, breakfast the next morning, and good company. Chiloé is famous for its palofitos, houses that extend over the estuary on stilts, and its wooden churches. We saw both in Castro, and they were fairly interesting, but they didn't hold my attention for long (about 35 minutes). Both myself and Jessie aren't the sort of people who do tourism very well, and we quickly realized that Castro didn't hold much appeal for us, so we decided to cut our stay short and head for the wilderness as soon as possible. To be honest, I had the most fun in the cities watching futbol in resto-bars and hanging out in the kitchen of the hostels talking with the families and cooking US comfort food (we're getting started on the transition process).

The national park was difficult to get to (1.5 hours in big bus, 1.5 hours in rural bus, 4 km walking/hitching gravel road, 9 km hiking along the beach, 5 km hiking on horse trail) but worth the effort. The beaches were lovely. At the first one, near the indigenous community of Cole Cole, we found a CONAF shelter and met a couple from the US and another couple from Europe (not sure which country). Aside from a couple of Huilliche fisherman we had met just before entering the park, they were the only people we saw. It was interesting that we didn't meet any foreigners in the hostels and we didn't meet any Chileans in the park. The next day we bushwacked through 6 km of very rough trail through the rainforest to arrive at another beach where the Río Anay empties into the sea. This one we had completely to ourselves; the two days we stayed there we didn't see another human. Uncharacteristically for Chiloé, we had perfect weather for all three days on the beach.

After hiking out we stayed in a campsite near the park headquarters. A group of CONAF rangers had ordered a curanto from the restaurant/common area of the campsite. Curanto is kind of like a clam bake but with chicken, pork, lots of different types of shellfish, and lots of potatoes. We had stopped by the restaurant because the owner had offered us real coffee (extremely uncommon in Chile). However, since the rangers had a lot left over, they ended up giving us a heaping platter of the stuff along with fresh bread and good wine. It was good, but I had lost my appetite for shellfish by the end. (Another food highlight of the trip was milcao, a meat filled potato pancake with the same grease content as a stick of butter deep fried in lard. I liked it. It proves that Chile is one of the exceedingly rare countries with a culinary tradition less healthy than that of the USA.*)

We also visited the Northern sector of the park, near the tiny town of Chepu, with a stopoff to shower and restock food in Ancud. We found a boat to take us across the river and then hiked about two hours to reach a penguin colony. They were cute, and the coast along the north of the park was gorgeous. We stayed at a campground with a bunch of gringos (my first time speaking English with someone who isn't part of my immediate family in five months!) and went kayaking at dawn (on the water at 5:15 am) the next morning in a dead forest. The earthquake of 1960 had sunk the entire area and what once was forest is now a collection of dead trees in a tidal estuary. We hitchhiked back to Ancud in the afternoon and stayed with a couple of old ladies we had met our last stay in Ancud (they baked excellent bread for breakfast). The next morning (this morning) we hopped on a bus (and a ferry because Chiloé is an island) for Valdivia.

I bought my ticket for Santiago today, so tomorrow is my last day in Valdivia. I still don't have a passport, and the embassy won't answer their phones or return my emails, so at this point I have no idea if I'll be able to get back into the US or not. In any case, I'll have two days in Santiago to figure things out.

I'll try to throw up some pictures when I get them, but there are a lot of other things to do right now (like packing).

*For further proof of this assertion, see the completo.

Leso

Why is it that only after five months of living in Chile I finally think to take two minutes to switch my keyboard to the international setting?

Seriously. I've been typing tildes the hard way for five months. I probably could have saved myself an aggregate of half a day's worth of time by just thinking about what I was doing at the beginning of the semester instead of two days from the end.

Two days. It's scary.

I took my last exam today, and met with my economics professor to review a draft of my last essay.

The weather has been beautiful all week, but I've been glued to the keyboard churning out academic drivel (high quality academic drivel let it be known). Two papers turned in, one finished, and the last one halfway there. There was a span of two days were I don't think that I set foot outside of the house. But soon all this will end, and I'll have ten days on the myth-filled island of Chiloé (that tilde was so easy to type!): more rain forests, more beaches, more curious and unknown foodstuffs, and, in all likelihood, more rain.

¡Vivan los novios!

Time to celebrate.

Last night was the wedding of Lesli, the daughter of my host family, and Enrique, her (former) fiancee (obviously), and I was invited to the ceremony, and the party afterwards. The civil wedding had taken place last week. I was the "official" photographer for the pre-wedding wedding, and we had a party afterwards at Enrique's parents' house. We stayed up late eating and taking turns singing. I sang some bluegrass to represent Kentucky.

The church wedding was short and sweet. The catholic bits were exactly the same as what I know from the US, only in Spanish. Then everyone lined up to congratulate the novios, who subsequently departed in an antique Fiat to do a photo tour of Valdivia in wedding attire. Everyone else loaded up and headed for the ballroom in the centro that had been rented for the fiesta. There was champagne, lots of toasts, embarrassing baby pictures, steak, lots of alcohol, and lots and lots of dancing. Jessie didn't attend the wedding, but she showed up for the celebration afterwards, and we spend the whole night eating, drinking, dancing, and making merry. At about 3 am we had a surprise visit from a group of bateristas, a band of drummers who danced and played and were a lot of fun. The novios were both excellent dancers and danced all night long. Myself and Jessie left shortly after the cake was finally cut at 4:30am, and I got to bed just as dawn started to break.

Today I have to finish up a 16 page paper and a 10 page history project. Such is life.

(There are lots of pictures, but I don't have any of them yet.)

Investigación

Reading and writing.

My classes are starting to wrap up, so the next few days will be filled with the writing of research papers. Most of the topics are interesting, so that much is good. On the other hand I have to deal with UACh's library, which is not so good.

I'm spoiled by Kenyon's library system, where you can check out as many books as you want, enter and exit freely, renew books online, take your backpack into the library, and where the operating hours reflect the studying schedules of undergrad students. At Austral on the other hand, things are a bit more complicated.

To enter the library you have to have a student ID, which takes several weeks to process, and a barcode, which takes another day or two. You have to swipe the card to get into the library and again to get out. You can't take your bookbag into the sections of the library where the shelves are located. You have to exchange your national ID card for a key to a locker and stow your backpack before entering the collection. Then you have to present your student ID again to check out books, and you are only allowed four at a time. If you want to check out a high-demand book, you have to schedule a borrowing window beforehand on the library's website. (Unfortunately my login information to access the webpage mysteriously stopped working several months ago, and I haven't been able to figure out why or how to fix it.) If you want use a computer, there are about twenty, for a school with over 10,000 students. If you want to make a photocopy, you have to leave the library, stand in line for upwards of 15 minutes, and shell out 15 pesos per page. It's a hassle.

We're having warm weather at last. Yesterday Jessie and I decided to try swimming in one of the rivers that surround Isla Teja. In spite of the sunshine, the water was breathsuckingly frigid. We swam just long enough to justify the hike.

Cochamó

My first trip to Patagonia.

I just got back from four days in Valle de Cochamo, a glacier carved valley some three hours Southeast of Puerto Montt, in the Northern extreme of Patagonia. We woke up at 3:00 am to walk to the bus terminal because our bus to Puerto Montt left at 3:50. The sky was mottled with clouds, and as dawn broke we had a good view from the bus of two impressive volcanoes: Osorno and Calbuco. Puerto Montt is similar in appearance to Valdivia except that it is larger and has an ocean instead of a river beside it. We spent an hour waiting in the bus port there for the rural bus to the town of Cochamo. Jessie fell asleep on the bus, but I had a good time admiring the views of Lago Llanquihue, which is enormous, and Llanquihue national park. After a couple of hours the bus started traveling alongside the Reloncavi estuary, a very scenic fjord with snow capped mountains on both sides. We passed through Cochamo, a tiny town most noted for its

wood-shingled chapel, and got off the bus at the bridge over the Rio Cochamo, a few kilometers to the South. From there we hiked six kilometers East along a small, gravel road into the valley itself. There were a few houses along the road and a couple of people harvesting firewood. We saw two vehicles, and one of them stopped to offer us a ride, but we declined.

We stopped for lunch along the road. Across the valley, we had a good view of a double waterfall. Jessie commented that in Maine, people would build trails and found state parks for a waterfall like that, but here it's more or less ordinary.

At the end of the road, we found the trailhead starting with a horse bridge over a small river.

The first couple of kilometers had fences on both sides to keep cows in and hikers out. There was some mud, a few more waterfalls, and no other hikers. Then the fences stopped, and we had to ford a larger river full of glass-clear water running over a white granite bed. After that we started entering into more mature forest.

Cochamo is home to one of the few remaining examples of temperate rainforest. There is water everywhere, and everything is green. The trees were enormous and every available surface was covered in plantlife: vines, moss, lichen, ferns, and the like. Each large tree was like its own mini-forest with all sorts of plants, including other trees, growing out of the cracks and crevices in its bark.

Every now and then a break in the canopy would reveal multi-level waterfalls coursing down the sides of the valley. We walked slowly, partly to admire the constantly astonishing scenery and partly because of the rough nature of the trail. The path was often steep and was composed of never-ending puddles of mud and trenches worn up to two meters deep by the passing of countless horses.

About four kilometers into the trail we started seeing areas where the path was paved with alerce and coihue logs, a reminder of the times in which the trail was used to drive cattle from Argentina to the fjord with access to the Pacific.

Sometimes the trail would run though deep forest. Sometimes it ran alongside the river. The river was rough, at one point we passed about two kilometers of continuous, big rapids. The water is very clear up close and from father away has a sort of electric blue-green color. We climbed down from the path to explore part of the river.

Eight kilometers into the hike, we arrived at a clearing with our first good view of the interior of the valley. Bald granite peaks on both sides were covered with rainforest below, snow on top, and countless waterfalls in between.

We had to stop for about half an hour to take it all it (and eat GORP). After another hour of slogging through mud and enjoying the views we arrived at the campground, La Junta. We set up our cheap, Wal-Mart tent and decided to take a nap. The campground manager came by while we were getting settled in we chatted a while. His name was Daniel, and he turned out to be a North American transplant who lightly poked fun at us for speaking with him in Spanish. He recommended a trail for us for the next day, collected our camping fee, and invited us to stop by the Refugio (lodge) later to look at maps and get descriptions of other trails. We decided to visit the Refugio after a nap (it was about 7:30pm, and we started this trip at 3:00 that morning). Unfortunately we didn't set an alarm and instead of taking a nap we ended up sleeping through the night.

The next morning we climbed Cerro Arco Iris, following the directions Daniel had given us the day before. The trail was steep and muddy, and it had started to rain before we left the tent (I was very happy to have an opportunity to use my brand new--and very expensive-- raingear). We took a slight detour to look for water and filled up right below an incredible waterfall that Daniel had neglected to mention.

The trail up the mountain was steep and muddy and passed through more incredible, old-growth rainforest. After gaining a considerable amount of elevation, we passed into alerce forest. Even though neither of us had seen an alerce before, we instantly recognized it when we saw it. They're often called the Sequoias of South America and with good reason. The trees are enormous in girth (though they don't nearly rival sequoias in height), and some of the trees we saw were well over a thousand years old. The canopy opened up too, affording intermittent views of the craggy domes of Cochamo, looming out of the fog and clouds.

We couldn't see as much of the mountains as on a clear day, but the mist lent an atmosphere of mystery to the landscape that was equally impressive. The combination of giant trees, swirling fog, and soaring granite cliffs was like an image struck directly from my conception of an exotic, wild South America.

About three hours into the climb, we came to a section of the trail where the path went from steep, to almost vertical, and we had to progress by scaling exposed roots and scrambling up cracks in the boulders. Jessie said it reminded her of the movie Avatar; I concurred. At one point the trail dead-ended with a cliff on one side, and a very, very long drop on the other. Someone had installed fixed ropes up the cliff, and the only way to keep going was to hand over hand climb more or less directly up.

(What you don't see in this picture is the 1,000+ ft drop on the other side of the camera.)

After the climbing section, we passed through more alerce forest. Over a certain altitude, we started hiking through a cloud, and the view was all the more restricted until the world beyond the mountainside was a pure sheet of white. Before we reached the summit, we met with the snowline and had to turn around.

By the time we made it back to camp, we were both thoroughly soaked. We met some climbers from Osorno in the fogon, a communal shelter with a firepit, and they shared some soup with us while we tried to dry out our gear a bit. We also met a couple from Belgium who had also climbed Cerro Arco Iris. They were even wetter than we were. Later than evening we went to the Refugio to get directions for our next hike.

The next morning, we were planning on climbing the other side of the valley, but when we woke it was raining as steadily as ever, so things looked sketchy. Our tent, by some miracle, never failed us, and we were dry and warm both nights. With two full days of rain, hiking uphill was a slippery proposition, and descending was more like skating than walking. With this in mind, and considering all our gear was soaked from the day before, we opted to explore around the base of the valley in the morning, and spend the afternoon relaxing in the Refugio. The plus of all that rain was the spectacular condition of the waterfalls. The waterfall we had filled our bottles from the day before (pictured above) had at least twice the volume, a thundering torrent that had to be seen to be believed. In addition, hundreds of new falls appeared down the sides of the granite domes.

The Refugio was located on the other side of the river, and to get there you have to cross in a cable car.

The lodge itself is a charming wood building with a wrap-around porch affording a wonderful view of the valley. We had reserved a private room there for our last night in Cochamo. We arrived shortly after noon, and I spent the afternoon playing guitar, reading Garcia Marquez with Jessie, and chatting with the hosts. The staff consisted of Moni, an older Argentinian lady, Jupi, a girl a few years older than me (also from Argentina), and Daniel, the US expat. It was very pleasant to pass the day in the kitchen, next to the woodfired stove, drinking tea and talking with Jupi and Moni as they prepared dinner (really excellent pizza).

The next morning we woke up early to follow a "you can't leave without trying this" recommendation from Daniel: the Toboggan. To get there, we ran to the Rio Cochamo and cabled across. Then we had to ford another, smaller river on foot, which turned out to be quite a challenge. It was above my knees and moving very fast. Another ten minutes of following the smaller river (Rio la Junta) through the rainforest found us at the Toboggan, a waterfall over a smooth, granite slope. We didn't bring the camera because we didn't want to risk losing it while fording the river, so we didn't take any pictures, but here's one of the Toboggan in the summer that I stole from the Refugio's website:

Due to the heavy rainfall, it was much less like a waterslide and much more like a waterfall when we got there (imagine a lot more water than you see in the picture). It's a snowmelt fed river, so it was pretty darned cold too. We had borrowed a 5mm wetsuit for Jessie, but they didn't have any in my size, so I opted for just swearing loudly to deal with the temperature. The first time I tried to cross to get to the falls, I slipped, fell in, and got swept about 30m downstream before I could escape from the current. We eventually found a safer way across, and jumped down the waterfall two or three times before I felt like I was dying from the cold.

We hiked back to the Refugio, dried off, warmed up, packed up, and started down. We thought the bus for Puerto Varas would pass at 4:00pm, and we left at 11:30 am, so we were trucking it to make it out in time. It turned out that the bus didn't come until 5:00, so we had time to eat most of our leftover food at the side of the highway.

Fell asleep on the bus. Found a little Peruvian restaurant in Puerto Varas, ran into the Belgians from Cochamo in the busport, and slept again on the bus to Valdivia. It was raining in Valdivia when we arrived at midnight, so we splurged on a taxi ($3) instead of hoofing it back to Isla Teja.

Unas alas enormes

Never have five weeks looked so short.

I only have five weeks left in Chile. Five whole months and suddenly all that's left is five weeks. My feelings are conflicted. In some ways it feels like I just arrived. At the same time it feels like that day I got off the plane was so long ago I can hardly remember it. I have so much left that I want to do (and four research papers besides). However I am also anxious to get back to the real world of responsibility and productivity. That's not to say that my time here has not been productive, but most of my accomplishments have been personal in nature. I am unhappy with the level of work I've found here that benefits something bigger than me. It's difficult to put words to the feeling.

I'm planning a trip to Valle de Cochamo this weekend. I'm told it's similar in appearance to Yosemite. However, there aren't any roads leading into the valley; you have to trek in on foot or on horseback. It's supposed to rain this weekend, and I still haven't found a replacement for my stolen rain gear. I've been frequenting second hand clothes shops, but no luck so far.

Pancito

An unstructured ode.

Culinary colosus, staple and standard, omnipresent companion of every meal,

Flattened fist of flour and water,

You taste of nothing, but on you all things are tasted.

Manjar and mantequilla your trusted aides,

Salsa, mermelada, huevo frito, huevo duro,

Palta, tomate, jamón, and queso all rest

On you and your kind, their doughey retinue.

Our deliverer from slow waiters,

Our tea time champion,

Alpha and omega,

All comidas begin and end with you.

Fruit of sun and factory,

In every barrio they raise a shrine

To you, life-giving bearer of miel.

Every day you are destroyed and every morning recreated,

Reborn as if Monday passed to Monday without passing.

Though I have never seen you,

I know you well.

Supreme weapon of nutrition,

Fighting poverty with obesity,

They always poke holes on top,

But heaven knows why.

Concretely:

We eat a lot of bread in Chile. We call it pancito. It's round, flat, and tasteless. They sell it in little shops called panaderías, which are situated approximately every 300m in the city. It's good; you should try it some time.

Normalización

There are students in the university!

Two weeks ago the students of Austral voted to return to classes for an abbreviated second semester. On campus, the change is just shy of astounding. When I first arrived in August, one might see a couple of grad students wandering around, professors working, or high school students taking a shortcut. A few clubs and student organizations were functioning, but really there just weren't any people. It felt more like a park than a school. About a month ago, the consejo general of the student organization voted to finish up the first semester that had originally been interrupted by the protests last autumn (April/May). The week that followed we had more students. People sat in desks in classrooms, sat for exams, studied (ostensibly), and brought a little more life to the place, but it still felt empty.

Now that the second semester has started, however, the university actually feels like a university. There are so many people yelling, laughing, reading, going to classes, etc. that I am starting to appreciate how much I've missed out on during out little, ad hoc academic program that's been taking place in the limbo period of paro nacional. I feel like there is so much going on and so many people to meet and yet I have so little time left that I feel like it's too late to get involved in anything new. It's frustrating. At the same time, I have a strong desire to enjoy to the fullest that which I have already found and gotten involved in here in the five weeks I have left in Chile.

New blogging strategy: write with more brevity and greater frequency. I think that's how it's supposed to work anyways. My apologies for venting frustration. The next post will be more concrete and informative.

Turismo mortuorio

A long overdue post.

I just got back from a four day weekend in Santiago. The day after the US celebrates Halloween, Chile gets the day off for All Saints Day. The day before is also a national holiday for something to do with protestantism because Chile is an equal opportunity holiday celebrator, provided it's a Christian holiday. In any case, this translates into a five-day weekend for me because I don't have classes on Wednesdays. Thus it was the perfect opportunity to explore Argentina or some other distant clime. Unfortunately I still had the issue of a lost passport looming, so I decided to go to Santiago to deal with paperwork.

Bus seats were scarce and tickets were expensive due to the super-long weekend, so I had to delay my trip by one day and shell out nearly 25,000 pesos ($50). Bus seats come in many varieties: normal, with legroom designed for quadruple-amputee midgets; long space, which would nearly have enough legroom for me if the bus companies didn't bolt a useless plastic panel behind the seats; semi-bed, which would definitely be long enough if not for a useless leg-resting device; and full bed, which caters to the rich-but-not-quite-rich-enough-to-go-by-plane. I bought a long space seat and slept a couple of hours on the 12 hour trip in spite of the on-board movie (The Fast and the Furious 5) being played twice.

Arriving in Santiago, Camilo, an old friend from UWC, came to pick me up in the busport. He just got his driver's license last week and was still a little shaky on using some of the features of the modern automobile, such as the brakes. We were blessed, however, with practically non-existent Sunday morning traffic and didn't have any problems getting back to his house in Recoleta, a neighborhood in the North of Santiago.

I got to meet Camilo's grandmother who had been in Brazil that last time I visited. She's 91 years old and doesn't hear all that well, but her memory is clear as can be, and she's full of stories about her travels in Brazil. She is also a very gracious host and made it her personal mission to see to it that I was well fed during my stay.

It was nice to be able to kick back for a weekend, watch television, read economics, talk about old times, and generally hang out. I also went shopping a couple of times. After my aborted attempt to find a copy of Cien años de soledad in Valdivia, I went hunting again in Santiago. This time I had a guide. Camilo's uncle Lionel, an air traffic controller who- by pure coincidence- was also a childhood friend of my host family in Valdivia, accompanied me to the Persa Bio-Bio. Think of a flea market. Now think of a flea market that sells absolutely everything and spans an entire sector of the city. That's the Persa Bio-Bio. We eventually found a copy for 3 luca ($6). It was pretty awful quality and rather expensive, but the experience of finding it was definitely worth the price.

I also went looking for a new disc (my last one being stolen at knife point) with Camilo in the malls of Las Condes, one of the richer parts of the city. The malls were enormous temples to consumerism, an incredible contrast from the market of the day before. We found lots of nice, and extremely costly, wilderness gear, but didn't find what we were looking for. To my knowledge, the only regulation ultimate disc in Chile is the one I left in the hands of some juvenile delinquent in Valparaiso.

On Wednesday morning I had an appointment in the American embassy for an "interview" for my stolen passport. The embassy was big and opulent. The security check was a metal detector that didn't pick up my belt, keys, spare change or cell phone. The interview consisted of turning in the paperwork I had already filled out, promising that I didn't make anything up on it, and paying the $135. The staff was very friendly and efficient (in direct contrast to all of my other dealings with the US federal government). It turns out that my Chilean national ID has the wrong date of birth. Apparently the JAN on my passport looked more like junio than enero to the civil registry official. Luckily I had brought my Ohio driver's license just in case, and didn't have any further problems.

I had the afternoon free on Wednesday, so first I took care of some schoolwork. I needed to interview someone involved with the student movement. Somebody told me that the central house of the University of Chile was in toma, that is to say taken over by the students, so I headed over there to try to find someone. There was a fair-like atmosphere outside of the central house, which is located very close to the Moneda (the headquarters of the government). Inside was practically deserted. I introduced myself to a couple of students I found, told them I was an American exchange student working on an ethnography, and eventually I found someone who was willing to do an interview. We recorded it in the middle of a huge, interior plaza that was almost eerily empty. Afterwards, waiting for Camilo in front of the University, I ran into one of my professors from Valdivia, tallying up another odd coincidence for the weekend.

Later in the afternoon I went with Camilo to tour Santiago's Cementerio General. This place was fascinating, a veritable city within a city, a labyrinthine sprawl of every conceivable type of tomb. The cemetery is divided into different neighborhoods, each with unique characteristics. The richer areas sport mausoleums of every shape, size and architectural style. There are classical temples, post-modern cubes, Egyptian pyramids, Gothic behemoths, skyscraper type mausoleums reaching eight or nine stories high, and everything in between. We must have seen the tombs of half of Chile's presidents in our brief sweep and lots of other names I knew from my Chilean history class. Salvador Allende's tomb was particularly touching. Inside it has a granite slab with a quotation from his final speech, given by radio from beneath his desk as the Moneda was being bombed. Someone had placed a flower across the top of the inscription, and it had just started to wilt.

The middle-class sections of the cemetery look more like warehouses or Hollywood studio buildings with the sides covered in niches where the names of the interred are written. In the poorest of neighborhoods are row upon row of graves packed side by side in the ground. We visited on the day after All Saints' Day, so these areas were absolutely covered in flowers, plastic twirly things, futbol club flags and the like. Everyone had done their visiting the day before, so despite all the decorations, there were almost no other visitors.

We also saw a very moving memorial at the site of the mass grave were the victims of the 1973 coup were buried, Site Number 29.

I had bought a kilogram of strawberries before going to the cemetery, and they were probably the best purchase I've made in Chile. They also provided a nice contrast to our mortuary choice of tourism spot. There's nothing more symbolic of life than eating ripe, juicy strawberries until your hands are stained pink.

I have learned most of the tricks for sleeping on buses now, and so I slept a good bit on the ride back. The problem with overnight buses is that you have to get off the bus and go right to work, class, or whatnot, which leaves you with the feeling that you need another weekend right after your weekend. Good thing I only had to wait two days for the next weekend to arrive.

No pictures this week because my camera went to Bariloche, Argentina with Jessie.

Cansado

Things are winding.

Thursdays are for protesting. Normally we have a big march and then 40-80 encapuchados, kids with their faces covered, stick around trading rocks for tear gas all afternoon. This happens every Thursday as regular as violent clockwork. Things are winding down though. Today, for the first time in a long while, we only had a march. It was pretty anemic at that. I passed them on the bridge on my way home from downtown. They had a couple of kids with a trumpet and a snare drum who seemed like the only ones serious about sticking it to the man. Everyone else just looked bored.

It's been a long lack of semester.

On Tuesday the students of my univserity will vote on whether or not to end the strike and start the second semester. A lot of schools across the country are having similar votes. Many are already back in the classroom.

I've finally got all of my paperwork in order to replace my stolen passport. I have to go to Santiago for an interview at the embassy. It's a ten hour bus ride, but I'll get to visit some old friends in Santiago, so on the whole it's a plus. I'll go down to the bus station tomorrow to look for tickets. It's kind of nice not having many responsibilities and being able to just get on a bus and go anywhere in the country on any given weekend. On the other hand, I'm running low on cash.

Something is messed up with the photo uploading mechanism. I took some pictures today of a high school that's still in toma. I'll try to post them tomorrow.

Also, here's the Economist's take: http://www.economist.com/node/21534785.

Aún más

Everyday ups and downs.

I went to the Cine club last night with Jessie. After misreading the schedule online, I arrived expecting Midnight in Paris, a romantic comedy featuring Owen Wilson. What they were actually showing was Ajami, a gritty, faux-documentary about urban violence in Jaffa, Israel. It was stark, bloody, melodramatic, and infinitely better than sitting through two hours of Owen Wilson prancing around in France.

At the movie, we met a couple of grad students from Mexico and Honduras, a Romanian expat, and her Valdivian pololo. We went out for drinks afterwards, and I realized how extremely pleasant it is to speak Spanish with people I can understand without difficulty. That is not to say that the Mexican or Honduran (or Romanian) accent is necessarily clearer than the Chilean accent. In truth, I think that socio-economic status makes more difference than nationality with respect to proximity to "standard" Spanish. Most importantly, perhaps, these were cosmopolitan folks. All of them had lived and studied in foreign climes and, hence, had developed the sensibilities (and patience) peculiar to international socializing. We had an interesting conversation with them, exchanged contact information, bid them goodnight, and returned to the frustrating world of everyday, nigh-indecipherable Chilenismos.

In other news, I was extremely disappointed to learn that I slept through the rugby world cup final (the time difference with New Zealand is problematic). What a shame to miss out on the grand French defeat. No matter; the two local teams will be facing off today in the field behind my house, and I definitely won't miss that game.

Here's another chunk in my continuing series on the student protests:

Chunk 3: Frustration.

So what exactly are the problems compelling the students to mobilize, strike, seize their schools, throw rocks, burn buses, and the like? As we saw in the last chunk, income inequality is a big problem in Chile. Education is commonly seen as the best way to combat said inequality (although whether or not this belief has anything to do with reality has yet to be conclusively demonstrated). Imagine the frustration, then, when the tool to fight inequality is beset by problems of inequality. Here's a quick rundown of issues:

• The biggest problem is cost. Chileans think university education is too expensive. Students can graduate with debt of the same order of magnitude as the price of a new house. Families typically assume the costs of education and go into debt as well.
• There are also problems in the credit market for students. I've heard lots of people complain that interest rates are too high, and it's too hard for students to get loans.
• There is a big problem with what economists call asymmetric information. Private universities are big, profitable business in Chile. Lots of new schools are popping up, especially in Santiago, without bothering with things like accreditation. Some well known schools offer majors that don't have any application in the job market. Students and families don't know which is which. Thus students go into debt studying at these institutions, thinking they will be able to land a job after graduating, only to find their degree is next to useless.

Note that none of these problems affects the wealthier families. So there you have it: essentially another narrative about the rich staying rich, the poor staying poor, and some people getting rich by swindling the more vulnerable parts of society.

End of Chunk 3

Diario

Tidings.

Looking over my previous post, I realized it's what a Chilean would call pesado, which translates approximately to "heavy", "boring", "obnoxious", or "tiresome". So, for those interested, here are some lighter bits of news, observations, and goings on.

My classes are interesting and very diverse, both in subject matter and pedagogy. I'm studying silviculture in native forests in a class that meets rarely, packs in lots of information, visits plantations, and has reasonably hard quizzes. I'm in a literature class where we don't read very much literature and the lectures range, seemingly at random, across a broad selection of social, artistic, and historical topics. I'm taking a microeconomics course in which I am the only student. It's very demanding, but at the same time I have lots of opportunities to investigate the practical examples of the material that interests me. The most regular and organized course is History of Chile with the other members of my program. We're all quite fond of the professor and grateful to have a class that meets regularly and covers interesting material in a systematic manner.

Every week brings new challenges. This week's has been bomb threats in the University. The students are completing make up classes and quizzes to finally finish the semester they should have finished six months ago, and some students still don't want any academic activity whatsoever until the movement's demands are met. So they've hit upon a new strategy, which is to call in phony bomb threats, which force the police the evacuate the entire facility and thus interrupt any quizzes or classes in session. I've had three classes interrupted in the past week due to bomb threats. In two cases we simply canceled, and in the third case we went to a nearby gas station and finished the class at their fast food tables.

On a lighter note, here's a kitty:

This is Mime (Mee-May); she's the pet of Carla, my host family's youngest daughter. Mime's hobbies include capsizing the trash can and trying to sneak into the house. Unaware of my cat allergy, she often attempts to climb through my second-story window when I leave it open too wide.

It's been sunny for the past couple of weeks, and occasionally it's been possible to walk outside without a jacket. Spring has arrived. Today I think I'll go to the city park with Jessie to visit the firewood festival.

Desarrollo

More details about the student mobilizations.

Quite some time ago, I wrote that I would try to explain my view of what is going on in Chile with respect to the student movement. I said I would break it into chunks to keep the size manageable, I wrote the first chunk, and then I promptly forgot about the project. However, since the paro (strike) has now entered its sixth month in many schools, I figure it's high time to revisit the subject. As the last chunk was posted over a month ago, I'll repost it below before moving on.

Note: I will try to approach this issue from a more general perspective, but most of my informal investigation of the topic has tended to focus on economic analysis and my personal experience. My apologies in advance for any economics jargon or boring anecdotes that may slip in.

Chunk 1: the March of the Penguins

One of the principal antecedents of the current movement was another student mobilization in 2006. This movement was called "the march of the penguins", so named because the students' uniforms made them look like penguins. The main objective of these protests was to achieve greater equality in education. Some specific demands were free/reduced student fares in public transportation, reduced/waived fees for taking the university entrance exam, and repealing the eleventh hour omnibus education bill that constituted the Pinochet government's parting gift to Chile. In answer to the protests, the center-left government promised a lot and delivered little. Many students today feel betrayed by their politicians for the lackluster response to the march of the penguins.

End of Chunk 1

Chunk 2: Imposed freedom

The more general antecedents of the movement have to do with the history of Chile. After the military coup in 1973, the Chilean economy went through a twenty-year liberalization process. This series of reforms, aimed at opening the economy to foreign trade and investment and at privatizing historically government-controlled markets, was primarily guided by a group of Chilean economists called the "Chicago Boys", so called because they had received their economics training at the University of Chicago. Their ideas were heavily influenced by Milton Friedman and reflected a marked preference for free markets over government regulation. Despite what Friedman described as the "Miracle of Chile", in which the Chilean economy experienced relatively high GDP growth in the late 80s and early 90s, many Chileans feel the economic reforms were extremely damaging to the country because the economic gains primarily benefited a very small group of wealthy families.*

Chile has a long history of social and economic inequality stretching back to when it was the southern border of the Inca Empire. The arrival of the Spaniards, and subsequent subjugation of the indigenous peoples introduced new and equally rigid social stratification. The process of independence, expansion, and industrialization were also dominated by the economic and social leadership of a select class of elites. Needless to say, capitalism rampant at the end of the 20th century didn't help very much. The gap between rich and poor continued to grow. (In 2008, the CIA calculated Chile's Gini coefficient as 54.9, roughly on par with the rest of Latin America.)

One of the primarily gripes that Chileans have with the military dictatorship's free market reforms (many of which remain in effect today) is the privatization and/or deregulation of natural monopolies and public goods. Some examples are utilities like power and water, health care, and university education... especially university education. A lot of people believe it was exceedingly unwise to unleash profiteering in these areas and that as a result the lower classes are paying heavily for the lucrative returns being carved out by businessmen in sectors where the state ought to protect consumers.

The takeaway from all of this consists in four points. Currently in Chile we have:

1. An economic culture oriented towards unregulated, and often unfair, competition.
2. A high degree of income inequality.
3. Profiteering in social necessities like education.
4. Resentment of all of the above.
   

Next chunk I'll talk about why these are important in the context of the student movement today.

*And of course, many Chileans feel exactly the opposite. As with many elements of the Pinochet regime, there is definitely no consensus of opinion among Chileans on the topic of economic reforms.

End of Chunk 2.

Fotografía

I borrowed my camera for the day.

As requested, here are some photographs from my internship with SAMU:

Here is the view from the bridge I have to walk across every morning to take the bus to get to the hospital.

Here is the dayroom at the base.

Here is the ALS crew enjoying a Youtube video.

Here is the fleet of old/extra ambulances in the parking lot.

Here is Movil 205, our ALS truck.

The back of the truck without the cot.

The three-lead monitor, O2 and suction unit, long distance monitor, and IV kit. (We start lots of IVs here. Even if we aren't going to administer a drug or even saline, we'll establish IV access and just leave it with a drug port in case the hospital wants to push something.)

The view from the side door.

The cab.

These are the suction cups I was talking about for the 12 lead.

Prehospitalario

Some notes on my work.

About two months ago, I started volunteering with the local emergency medical service. I've been meaning to write something about my experience for some time now. The service is called SAMU here (Servicio de Atencion Medica de Urgencias), is part of a national service, and operates out of the regional hospital located in Valdivia. My role is really more of observation than participation. From time to time I am needed to help with patient movement, vital signs, or basic interventions, but for the most part I'm the extraneous part of their normal three-person crew.

(For non-EMS readers, you may want to read this next paragraph and leave it at that. For those with an EMS background, you may want to skip the next paragraph and read the rest.)

First the story about how I came to work at the hospital: I arrived in Chile without really having thought too much about acquiring an internship (a significant mistake on my part). Before leaving Santiago, however, I mentioned my interest in volunteering with EMS to our program director. Within a couple of weeks he arranged an interview with the doctor in charge of SAMU in our region. Due to faulty lines of communication, however, I only learned of this interview an hour after it was supposed to have taken place. But, no matter, we rescheduled for the next day. It is important to note that at this point I had been confined to a chair for the past four days due to a knee injury suffered the previous week and could barely stand, much less walk. I dressed in shirt and tie for the interview, not sure of what to expect. Don Oscar happened to be heading in the same direction as the hospital that morning so he gave me a lift. Unfortunately, he dropped me off on the wrong side of the hospital, so I spent about half an hour hobbling around the building, which is enormous, asking people where to find the chief of SAMU's office. I finally found SAMU's base, in a separate building behind the hospital. When I knocked, the door was answered by a tall, Germanic-looking man in a lab coat. I had found the boss. It turns out Doctor Schulz doesn't have an office, he operates (not surgically) from a desk in the middle of the communications center at the SAMU base. My interview consisted of him asking me where I was from, what I was studying, and then telling me he didn't have any problem with me working with them. Then he introduced me to the shift on duty, and that was that. I showed up later that afternoon in work clothes and started riding along and getting to know the staff.

I want to note some general observations about the service, narrate a typical run, and comment on some of the significant differences between the service I know in Ohio and what I've seen here. Keep in mind that what follows are impressions that I've developed through a language barrier in less than three months, not established facts.

General observations

There are two ambulances operated out of our base, a basic truck and an advanced truck. The service also has one ambulance based out of Lanco, a smaller city in the north, and La Union, a city in the south. These four trucks are responsible for the Region of Los Rios, an area about 30% bigger than Connecticut. Resources are not as stretched as it sounds at first. SAMU is supplemented by the ambulance services of the local hospitals. There are some eleven hospitals, and each operates two trucks, so the entire region is served by about 26 trucks. We also have a couple of reserve trucks that are only staffed on special occasions like holidays or long weekends, when more people tend to use emergency medical services.

Each truck runs with a crew of three. For the basic ambulance, that means a driver (no medical training), an assistant (equivalent to a first responder), and a paramedic technician (equivalent to an EMT). In the case of the advanced ambulance, the crew is a driver, a paramedic technician, and a nurse (equivalent to a paramedic). (Supposedly there is a third classification of crew with a doctor on board, but I've never seen this happen.) There are crews for two trucks on duty at any given time, so six people per shift. Our base employs about 24 ambulance workers in total.

We also have a communications center that handles all calls for the region. (You have to dial a different number depending on which emergency service you need in Chile; 131 is the number for ambulances.) They have two phone operators and a doctor on duty at any given time. The doctor is there for medical direction, but sometimes he or she with help manage the phones when things get busy. There is also a secretary during business hours and a kid who cleans the base. (We had a dog who hung out for years in the base and in the emergency department of the hospital, but someone stole him about a month ago. He was the only dog I've ever met who liked to chew on gravel.)

Typical run

Our salidas normally go down as follows: an operator answers the call, generally on the sixth or seventh ring to make sure it's a serious call. The operator then spends several minutes trying to firmly persuade the caller that they don't need an ambulance. (The operators' main job is to allocate very scarce resources, and they get a great deal of nonsense calls.) After getting information about the patient's location and problem, the operator alerts the ambulance crew via the radio. "Mobile unit such and such. Code such and such." It's usually a code 101 "medical problem of unknown etiology". The crew then goes to the ambulance and marks that they're ready. Then the operator relays the location and the patient details. We don't have GPS or maps in the trucks. The driver generally knows where all the streets are, and if they can't find the address, they radio the base for directions. We generally don't use emergency lights during the day and rarely use the siren (only for cardiac arrests and such). When we arrive on scene, the in charge person, either a paramedic or a nurse, goes into the house to assess the patient. They usually make a transport decision in the first 30 seconds and call for the cot. We only change the sheet on the cot once per day, so generally we ask for a thick blanket from the patient's house to lay the patient on. The houses are small with narrow hallways and steep stairs. We don't have a stairchair and the cot doesn't fold, so patient movement is usually one person grabbing the patient by the armpits and another by the legs and just carrying them. Once we have the patient in the truck, the secondary medical crewmember, either an assistant or a paramedic, checks the pulse, oxygen saturation, and blood pressure (almost never manually). The in charge person reads the patient's medical documents, takes a short history, gives basic interventions like oxygen, bleeding control, or starting an IV, and then calls medical control on the radio and gives a report. Sometimes medical control will indicate an additional drug, but usually the doctor just says to transport as is. Then the in charge person tells the driver to go. One family member is allowed to accompany the patient in the back of the ambulance during the transport. The in charge person often uses the rest of the transport time to finish up the paperwork. When we get to the hospital, the driver unloads the patient on the cot and wheels him or her into the emergency department. Then he finds a vacant bed, we move the patient onto the bed, and wheel him or her to the side of the hallway to wait until a nurse or doctor is available (this usually takes several hours for non-critical patients). The in charge person gets the on-duty nurse to sign for the patient, and then we drive the 200 meters back to the base.

Notable differences

I'll start with the nitpicky and move on to the bigger things:

• Unlike in Ohio, examination gloves are optional here, and most opt not to wear them unless they see blood or vomit.
• Handwashing before and after runs is also infrequent.
• Patients are almost never strapped to the cot, and on some of the cots, the Velcro is so old that the straps are more decorative than functional in any case. (Frankly I don't understand why we strap patients down in Ohio. I've never seen a patient come close to falling off a cot- it's rather implausible under normal circumstances- but I have seen several patients hurt by carelessly misapplied straps.)
• Whereas in Ohio we walk into the house (and the hospital) with everything we think we'll need to treat the patient, here we usually walk in without any equipment whatsoever. (I've only seen vital signs taken inside the house twice; I took them both times, and it was for patients who weren't transported.)
• Vital signs are only taken once during a run, whereas we almost always take multiple sets in Ohio.
• The twelve lead ECG monitor is a separate machine from the three lead monitor here, and it's a monster. Setting up a twelve lead is a five-minute process that involves spring-clip bracelets and anklets, a bottle of conducting gel, and a large array of suction cups.
• It's perfectly normal here for a paramedic to take or make personal calls on his or her cell phone during a run.
• Every patient is asked to present their national identity card, and their RUN (identification number) is recorded, along with information like address and DOB, directly from the card.
• We reuse a lot of things in Chile that we throw out in Ohio. For example: cervical collars, oxygen masks, Yauger tips, those little ear condoms for the tympanic thermometer, etc.

Some broader differences between EMS in Chile and in the US have to do with attitude. In the fire service in Ohio, we talk about maintaining a sense of urgency. That is to say, you don't necessarily want to rush, but you do want to strictly prioritize your expenditure of time. Our system is constructed to reflect this priority. In SAMU, that sense of urgency is not so strongly felt. They are very aggressive about getting the patient into the ambulance, but at that point things become far more relaxed, even if the patient is in critical condition. They usually finish all interventions before leaving the scene, even though the driver is sitting in the cab throughout the whole process. One time I saw a patient exhibiting clear signs of a stroke spend eight minutes in the back of the truck getting an IV stick before getting oxygen therapy much less transport. Part of this lack of urgency might be traced to the knowledge on the part of the paramedics that, unless the patient is rapidly dying, he or she is going to have a long wait at the hospital before receiving definitive care.

Another attitude difference manifests itself in the patient-caregiver relation. Paramedics here seem to prefer talking about the patient to talking with the patient. They generally read the patient's medical documents and talk to family members and other emergency workers as if the patient weren't even there. It's not uncommon for the nurse to not speak a word to the patient in the back of the rig aside from asking for his or her ID card.

A third big difference is the degree of centralization. SAMU is a national service. Everywhere in Chile they wear the same uniform, drive the same ambulances, and use the same equipment with the same training. The in charge person reports to medical control on all runs. All calls for the entire region are handled out of one call center in Valdivia. This is almost diametrically opposed to how things are structured in Ohio where EMS is organized at a local level and varies from volunteer fire service, to contracted private services and every combination in between.

That's all I can think of for now. I'll add more if more occurs to me. I've been meaning to take pictures of the base and the trucks, but both my cameras were broken for quite a while, and now one is stolen and the other loaned out.

EDIT: formatting and some more differences.