UPDATE: I'm NOT going to Quirihue!

This post was from before my host city changed to Los Alamos. Slight hiccup on the part of the Ministry of Education, but the adventure continues!


Imagine a small town with only 11,000 people in the town and surrounding area. It is not featured in any guidebooks and cannot be found on any maps. It's 45 miles from the nearest “major: city (Chillan) and located 20 miles from the ocean. I will be the first native-English teacher that has ever been in Quirihue.

At first I was concerned when I couldn't find the city in any of the guidebooks or maps (I finally found it on Google Maps), but I've been waiting for so long to know my placement that I feel relieved to finally know. Living in such a small town will be an added layer on top of living and teaching abroad. Quirihue is an agricultural and wine making town, so I imagine most of my students parents will work as farm laborers. I'm hoping that it will be similar to Davis. The city is at roughly the same latitude as Fresno, CA. I'm excited and relieved to finally know. I head to Quirihue on Saturday, so more updates to come!

http://www.chile.com/tpl/articulo/detalle/ver.tpl?cod_articulo=90555

Week 2: Sick but Still Smiling

30 Sec. Update: My second week in Santiago went well despite getting a fever and bad cough. I think it was the change in weather (going from the middle of the summer to the middle of the winter). A lot of volunteers have been getting sick. I'm feeling much better now though. Orientation runs until Friday after which we depart for our host cities. I got some time off this weekend and had a chance to do some sightseeing in Santiago. My favorite was the Museum of Pre-Colombian art which featured ancient artwork from all over the Americas.


Cerro San Cristobal: On Saturday afternoon a group of us took a hike up to the top of Cerro San Cristobal, a huge hill located in the center of Santiago. On the top of the hill you have some incredible views of the city and "el smog" At the top there is also a massive white marble statue of the Virgin Mary which overlooks the city. I had seen the statue from the city streets throughout the week and it was gratifying to finally climb up to it.



Santiago, City of Dogs: One of my favorite peculiarities about Santiago are the stray street dogs. On a given day walking around Santiago you will pass a dozen stray dogs walking on the side of the street. At first I was concerned about all of the dogs, but after being here for two weeks I have become very fond of them. The other night a group of volunteers and I were going out for ice cream and a pair of dogs followed us all night. It was like the dogs were escorting us from place to place, protecting us from pickpockets. The city has a population of over 200,000 street dogs and the people of Santiago treat them as communal pets. The city has tried to control the dog population by capturing them and making it illegal to feed the street dogs but the citizens of Santiago continue to put out water for the dogs and build them shelters.

Hot dogs, the national food of Chile: The food in Chile has been alright so far. It's a lot of meat & potatoes and it's a little bland. There have been a few notable exceptions though. The first of which is hot dogs. Chileans love hot dogs! I don't really understand it, but they serve hot dogs everywhere (even in the nice restaurants). The hot dogs, called completos, usually come in a slightly nicer package: covered with guacamole, tomatoes, and mayonnaise but at the end of the day you are still eating a hot dog. One of my professors jokingly called completos “the national food of Chile.”

El Mercado Central: One delicious culinary experience was at the El Mercado Central, the outdoor seafood market in Santiago. The market featured all sorts of bizarre and interesting seafoods that I had never seen before. One of which is the Conger Eel, a Chilean specialty which is an eel-like fish. There are small seafood restaurants located throughout El Mercado and we stopped at one of the restaurants. I didn't try eating the Conger Eel, but I had a delicious seafood stew that had a variety of shellfish and chunks of fish in it. I'm hoping that there will be more seafood in the south.

Week 1: Long Hours of Orienting

30 Sec. Update: I have been in Chile for a little less than a week. Orientation keeps me very busy. I'm in classes 8+ hours a day learning about teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) and watching videos of past WorldTeach volunteers. No news about my placement city, but I should find out more information from the Education Ministry sometime the week after next. It's cold in Santiago, but I'm staying bundled up. The Andes are beautiful!


WorldTeach Orientation: Orientation is awesome. I had very low expectation for orientation going into the program but I have been pleasantly surprised with how relevant and interesting it is. The Field Directors (Megan and Thomas) are both in their 20's, energetic, taught in Chile previously, and are very knowledgeable about TEFL pedagogy and Chilean culture. We have been critiquing lots of videos of past volunteers teaching in their placements and I have a much better idea of what to expect in the classroom. Yesterday we also got to meet three volunteer teachers from the field and ask them questions about their students, their home stays, and their placement schools/cities. Now that I know I'm in such good hands, I'm anxious to get started!


Lots of girls, a couple guys: I don't how I forgot to mention this in my last post describing the group of teachers, but the group is mostly women (out of a group of 22, only 5 are men). I guess that's not that big of shock given the greater number of women teachers in the US and the greater number of women studying abroad, but I still didn't expect the numbers to be so slanted. Either way it's a fun group. We all went out for drinks last night and I got to try some Chilean beers (Escudo, Cristal, and my favorite Kuntsmann). Kuntsmann is actually a German beer that is brewed in Valdivia, Chile. Apparently there is a large number of German immigrants that were recruited by the Chilean government to settle Southern Chile in the 19th century. Hence the story behind Kuntsmann, my beer of choice for the next 4 months.


Human Rights Tour: Sunday (today) we had a more relaxed day. We got the afternoon off and this morning we went on a human rights tour of Santiago. For those of you who don't watch the History Channel, in 1973 there was a military coup of the democratically elected president in Chile. Following the coup,Augusto Pinochet became dictator and tens of thousands of members of the opposition socialist party (El Mir) were arrested, detained, tortured, and many executed. People disappeared in the middle of the night never to return, families were disrupted, and anyone who spoke out was also imprisoned and tortured.


Los Deseparecidos: Our tour guide was one of the thousands who was detained and tortured. For the tour, we visited several places around the city where this occurred. One location was literally 100 feet from our hostel on calle Londres and we had been walking by it everyday on the way to orientation classes. The whole experience was very sobering. Thousands of people (los desaperecidos) simply disappeared and executed never to be seen again. Several of the sites featured their photos and names. The hardest thing to swallow was that all of "los desaperecidos" were in their early 20's. The average age was 23 (only a year older than myself). I could have been one of the missing thousands if I had lived in Chile in the 70's. An entire generation of the youth and their ideals lost. It was a very somber morning and it was shocking to think that this happened so recently. Chile only returned to democracy in the early 90's and it was clear to me today that the country still has many open wounds.

First Impressions

I have been in Santiago for a little over 48 hours and it feels like I have already been here for a week. My flight got in at 4:30 in the morning on Wednesday and on top of that I had to wait at the airport until 9AM for the rest of the flights to arrive in order to be picked up at the airport. I slept well that first night.

My Hostel: Other than my exhausting start, everything has been going pretty smoothly so far. I'm living in a beautiful hostel in downtown Santiago. My room is tiny and there is no central heating in the building, so it is that much harder to get out of bed in the morning. On the upside:, it's located on calle Londres which is in an area where all of the streets are very narrow and the architecture is European.



My Fellow World Teachers: The group of teachers I'm with are an eclectic group. We are group of 24 and there are handful from every part of the country. There is a range of ages as well. Half of us are just out of college but the other half are mid-career teachers, lawyers, and retired accountants. Being in a group with such varied life experiences is a lot of fun. With only a group of 24, I have talked to almost everyone in the group by now. All of us cooked dinner together in our hostel last night (spaghetti with an oyster sauce).


More to come later. We are taking a field trip to the US Embassy this afternoon. We have been in 8 hours of class every day learning about TEFL, WorldTeach, the Chilean school system, and the country's history.

What can you accomplish in 7 months?

Being the night before I leave, I thought it would be good for me to set out my goals before I leave:
1) Become comfortable with speaking Spanish (or at least Chilean Spanish)
2) Learn as much as I can about Chile’s history (especially life under Pinochet’s dictatorship)
3) Master some tasty Chilean recipes (empanadas, a seafood dish or two, etc.)
4) Develop an understanding of the Chilean education system to compare and contrast with the US
5) Travel the entire length of the country
6) Find out what it means to be Chileano.
7) Finish my grad school apps (the first is due 12/1)



http://www.worldteach.org/programs/chile_year/

Some thoughts on Chile...

This past month in Providence I have felt stuck in between two places. Having already left home for the next 8 months yet still not at my final destination I am in limbo. The waiting continues even after I arrive tomorrow in Santiago because I will have another month of waiting for orientation before I move find out my school placement and what city I will be actually living in. All that I have been told is that I will be in the Bio-Bio Region which is around 250 miles south of Santiago and the second most populous region of Chile.

When I imagine what it will be like in Chile, I have one image of living in a rural location where I have only the barest necessities and a conflicting image of living in an enormous metropolitan hub which I have read about Buenos Aires and Santiago. It will most likely be somewhere in between.

12 Hours to Go!

Still in Providence finishing up some errands and saying some last goodbyes. I went to Target today to buy everything on the list of things that "past teachers wish they had brought with them to Chile."
1. Multicolored sharpie markers
2. A map of the U.S. (To show my students where I'm from)
3. Stickers to give my students as rewards (I bought a pack of 1,000!)
4. Several boxes of teaching flashcards with pictures
5. Comfort foods (beef jerkey, wasabi soy almonds, and gorp)

Hope that is all I need...

The Skinny One?

I was at my professor's house last night for dinner and I was trying to explain to her six year old son that I was going to be living in Chile. Her son happened to have a place mat with a map of the world on it, so I pointed to the map and told him that "I was going to the skinny one."