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.