Chile pat 3 – Wherever you go…

I’m going to make a shameless plug in this part of the story. For anyone who is not part of a church, you may not quite understand the full force of this, but trust me, for those of us who are part of a church (especially the Seventh-day Adventist church), it’s big.

When I was down here in June of 2011, I attended a church near my friend Ximena’s house. Everyone was so friendly, and immediately asked if I would be around for a while. Lamentably that wasn’t the case. Just before I came down here this time I wrote to the church to ask if there were any churches close to where I was going to be. I got an e-mail back from a certain Pablo, the church secretary, who informed me that there were 3 churches nearby, including this one. As I mentioned before, I went to the church in Los Condes the first Sabbath and found the congregation… aged, to put it nicely. So the following Sabbath I found how to get to the church at Ñuñoa, and found that though farther, it was significantly easier to get to. So I hopped on the bus the following Sabbath and got to church.

It was a similar drill when I got there. Everyone came up to me to ask where I was from, how long I would be there, and how I heard about the church. When I mentioned Pablo to one of the Sabbath school teachers she immediately knew who I was referring to and flagged him down. So I met Pablo and his wife Gabriela, two absolutely charming and humble people. Before the end of the service I had an invitation to lunch for the following Sabbath from Marilda and Edwin. This couple is also so much fun and so loving. Edwin is from Bolivia and Marilda is from Brazil, and she is an AMAZING cook! Their daughter Naheli immediately took to calling me tía (auntie) and started making fun of my Argentinean accent.

Another thing that goes unappreciated outside of the church is what a close connection you have to people ANYWHERE in the world. What they refer to as the 6 degrees of separation is shortened to about 3-4 degrees within the Adventist church. That first Sabbath I was introduced to the youth leader, Edgar, a tall Argentinean man, and he mentioned that I looked really familiar. I mentioned that I had spent a year at the Adventist university in Argentina, and he said that he hadn’t been there in ten years so that couldn’t be it, but then mentioned that he had a cousin there. I asked his cousin’s name and he answered, “Milton.” I asked if this Milton was by any chance married to a Romina, which he answered affirmatively. It turns out that his cousin’s wife is a friend of mine. Immediate connection! There’s something unfathomably comforting to walk into a place and find out you have those kind of links to the people.

The second weekend I went to Marilda and Edwin’s house for lunch, and another family was also there, and after lunch we went to an aviation museum that was free to enter. There was a park in back and we sat around under the wing of an old plane while Naheli and the other family’s little girl ran around, and in the evening we went to the youth service, where Edwin talked to the lady in charge of the music ministry and convinced her (and me) that I should do special music the next week.

So I found myself singing special music at the end of Sabbath school the following Sabbath, where it was announced in front of the church that it was my last Sabbath in Chile, and I was told to send many greetings back to my church in California. So MUCHOS SALUDOS to the CV SDA Church! Your brethren in Santiago send you all a big hug!

Pablo and Gabriela invited me to their house on the last two Sunday’s of my trip to “tomar once” (elevensies, which actually isn’t at eleven o’clock, but more like 5 p.m.). They were the most welcoming family, so kind, and their son Alexander was very interested in the differences between the U.S. and Chile, so both times we ended up chatting until 10 p.m., when I had to rush home before the metro closed down for the night. The family is strongly encouraging me to come back to Santiago for work because they say that my profile (young with multiple languages and an M.A.) means that I would very easily find a job down here and live beyond comfortably. They then told me about a lady from the church who works for FAO and recently got a short-term job in Rome at the FAO headquarters, and then Pablo put me in contact with her. She and I have since exchanged a few messages, and she seems really sweet. I hope that someday I get to meet her in person. I felt so welcomed by them, and they promised that they would be here for me when I come back, whenever that may be.  Both times I went to their house for once Sara and Dan and Sylvia came to me afterward and asked where I had been because they had hardly seen me all day. They were surprised to hear that I had made so many friends

I also met a retired pastor, Pastor Mayr, who attends the church, and he and his wife were also so welcoming. They invited me for lunch on the last Sabbath of my stay, but I had already made plans to go with Marilda and Edwin again, otherwise I would have accepted. The pastor’s parting words to me were “A la tercera va la vencida”, which basically means “Third time’s a charm”, alluding to the fact I’ve been to Chile twice, the third time might be when I decide to stay.

So why do I say all this? Not just because these people were awesomely warm and welcoming and kind to me, but because I want to recognize how wonderful it is to belong to something so huge. The church isn’t just a bunch of people that get together once a week; it’s the body of Christ, and we should be taking care of one another. I’ve been to other churches outside of the Adventist church that don’t have the huge network we do, and I’ve left feeling, “Well that was nice, but there’s no connection.” But I know that almost anywhere I go in the world, there is a place to meet with brothers and sisters in Christ and even if they don’t immediately invite me to their homes after church they will always welcome me with open arms. That was probably the best thing I learned while in Chile.

The pattern is set

So Wednesday of that week was our first day actually “working”. Sylvia and I are working at FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) translating their website, while Dan and Sarah are at ECLAC translating economic texts. The economic texts are probably what I needed more, but the website is teaching me a lot. Everything I’ve done has been on food security and safety, family farming, livestock farming, etc., in Latin America and the Caribbean, and it’s all been rather interesting and informative (for example, I will never again forget how to spell “Caribbean” thanks to the sheer amount of times I’ve had to type it). I’ve had to do a lot of research to find just the right term, or just to know what the heck the text is saying.

Example: “siembra directa”. I had no idea what this was, and for a while wasn’t finding anything about it, so I translated it in ONE PLACE as “direct planting”.

After a while I had a bit more clarity of thought to search in the right places, and found that the real translation is “no-till farming”. What is this, you might ask? I didn’t know either, but now I do after searching on Wikipedia (which is thankfully now up again and making the job of this translator a little easier). It’s a type of farming where you don’t till the soil, which increases organic matter in the soil and reduces erosion. I feel like such an expert, lol. But now the problem is that I can’t figure out where on earth I used the other term so that I can change it. :-/

So this is when we started following a pattern. Most days went like this for me:

• 7 a.m. – wake up and rush to the shower before anyone else. Have breakfast, get dressed, do hair.
• 8:25 a.m. – foot out the door, walk 2.6 km (a little more than a mile) to the FAO office
• 9 a.m. – arrive at FAO, start translating.
• 10 a.m. – Translate.
• 11 a.m. – Translate.
• 11:15 a.m. (or so) – Get up, fill my water bottle, sit down, translate.
• 12:48 p.m. – bug Sylvia to help me find a term that I’ve been trying to find for the past half hour. She finds it within two minutes. She’s boss like that.
• 1 p.m. – Sylvia and I leave to go home. We catch a taxi because by now it’s WAY too hot to walk.
• 1:08 p.m. – Fix lunch and eat.
• 2 p.m. – sit around on the computer doing absolutely nothing productive.
• 2:45 p.m. – fall asleep.
• 4 p.m. – Wake up. Sit around more on the computer.
• 6 p.m. – decide that I’m not hungry, but that I can eat, so go upstairs and fix dinner.
• 7 p.m. – sit around outside in the last couple hours of sunlight reading I, Robot in Spanish (I would, however, like to say that this is not a very good translation of the book). It’s no longer unbearably hot, it’s usually pretty nice at this time.
• 9 p.m. – Sun has gone down. I go downstairs with full intention of winding down and falling asleep before 10 p.m., but the idea that the sun has only just gone down makes it difficult, and I end up sitting around reading or playing computer games until 11:30.
• Repeat.

The pattern is similar for everyone in our group. Yeah, we’ve got lazy. But it’s a comfortable lazy.

The first day at FAO, I was actually in a different office where I was sitting around just waiting for someone to tell me what to do. I tried talking to the supervisor but all he said was that someone would be by soon to tell me what to do. I started chatting on Skype for a while, and finally after sitting around for almost an hour and a half, and finally someone came by, introduced himself as Gonzalo, and he took me upstairs to the office where Sylvia was working, and I started doing the same stuff that she was working on. The program we’re using is really cool, because it’s all pretty much automatic. We click on the text box that needs translating, translate it, save, click on a little lightbulb icon, and it’s already up on the website.

On the second week, we were joined by a group from MI from the International Policy Studies program who needed “translation” (interpretation!!!) while they were here. Dan and I already kind of knew that it was going to be bad from Sylvia and Sarah’s reactions on the first day. They interpreted on Monday and Tuesday and said that it was kind of a joke, the material was either way too hard or too easy. Dan and I interpreted for a museum tour, which was okay, but I started getting frustrated halfway through that I wasn’t doing very well. We were using a wireless headset while the students all had the receivers, and I would get tripped over my words and couldn’t think of words off the top of my head, and Dan would lean over and give me the word or correct me. I wasn’t mad at him, but I was getting pretty frustrated at myself. The next half of that interpretation was for a group doing work on compiling names of executed and disappeared individuals at the hands of the Pinochet dictatorship. That was hard just because of auditory problems. It was being held in the museum’s café and the acoustics were bad, there was a lot of background noise from the rest of the museum, and we could hardly hear from where we were sitting. We managed to find a more comfortable place where we could hear better after about an hour into the presentation, but it meant standing behind these two ladies who kept turning to us and telling us to keep our voices down, but we were already speaking really quietly and we finally decided to just ignore the ladies. Eventually they moved.

The following day we went with this group to a small area called La Victoria, which apparently was a settlement of land squatters established back in the 50′s. The professor in this group did Peace Corp work in this town, and it became apparent after not too long that this entire part of the trip was in order for her to be able to see all of her old friends. We did MAYBE a total of 25 minutes of interpreting for the entire 5 hours that we were there. I did a good 15-20 minute chunk when we went to the house of the lady that the professor lived with, where she told everyone about how the town was established. Dan did the rest in small chunks along the way. We both agreed that it had been a waste of time as far as interpreting went, but it was interesting to see another side of Santiago, one that isn’t well developed and the people are more humilde (poor). Santiago in general is a “clean” (I use the term loosely) and developed city, so seeing this part was a big juxtaposition. But we did get lunch out of the deal when we went by the community radio station and they fed us (all thirty of us!!).

I’m still without a camera, so no photos, sorry! More on the adventure later. I’m going to be dedicating an entire post near the end on Chilean food…

First week on the job…

I’d like to start in saying that I’m glad I got here early. Having those first couple of days to adjust, get to know my surroundings, felt good.

We are in a strange time on year in Chile where the US and Chile have switched in and out of daylight savings, so there is a 5 hour difference betwen Chile and California, whereas if it were summer in the States, there would only be a 3 hour difference. The time difference caught me off guard, so I’ve been having a strange time trying to sleep. On top of it all, the sun doesn’t go down until almost 9 p.m. in summer here, so I ended up laying in bed around 10:30 WIDE AWAKE and thinking, “I gotta sleep… I gotta sleep…”. But I managed to get up at a decent hour and make my way to church my first night.

I had written to someone at another church who was able to send me the address of a church close to where I’m staying, so I ventured into the subway to make my way there. Not hard. Santiago’s subway system is super easy to figure out. The problem was walking almost a kilometer in church shoes from the metro stop to the church. I got to the church at the end of Sabbath school, and realized that everyone was really… old. Which is strange, because it’s right next to a university. I decided next Sabbath I’d go to the Ñuñoa church, because the last time I went there were more people my age.

I wish I could say that I met some interesting people at church to spend Sabbath afternoon with, but it didn’t happen. I did meet a family from Riobamba in Ecuador, which is a nice area that I got to visit briefly while there last year, but other than that I didn’t meet anyone interested in doing anything, so I came back to the pension, had lunch and slept most of the afternoon. The pension owners had planned a dinner to ring in the new year, and it was fairly relaxed. There was a family of Brazilians who had been staying at the hostal for vacation who kept us chatting and laughing the entire time, we raised a toast (with pepsi, ha!) at midnight, and I tried to go to bed, but the time difference along with the long nap was still affecting me so I didn’t sleep until around 3 a.m.

The next day I just wandered around the house, kept myself occupied, and Monday was when everyone else showed up. Sylvia arrived first, without one of her bags, so I lent her a towel and some soap so she could shower, and Dan and Sarah arrived at around 9 a.m. They rested most of the morning, and at noon I took them around a small part of town where we’re living, they got some groceries, and then Patricio offered to drive us by ECLAC to get an idea of where it is. It’s not far, and once we saw how easy it was to get there we decided that we could stand walking in the mornings. Sylvia thinks were crazy, because it is pretty hot, but in the mornings it isn’t bad. In the afternoons there’s no way we’re walking.

We returned to the pension and Jessica, Patricio’s wife, offered to take us to a “parque” (park). It was so lovely how she described it, with plants and a ”laguna” (pond), and we thought it might be nice to just find a nice place to chill, so she drove us. Except it wasn’t a park. It was Parque Arauco, a mall, and the “laguna” was actually a fountain out in the front. There were a lot of plants, but they were mostly crawling vines covering the walls. Figuring, what the heck, and needing a few items, we ended up wandering the mall. Sylvia found a pharmacy to get some toothpaste to last her until her bag showed up, and Dan and Sarah bought plug adapters. We went for lunch, which was when jet lag started setting in for the three of them and they were acting a little silly. Dan couldn’t talk straight, Sarah kept spilling her water. We eventually got back home in one piece and everyone rested the remainder of the afternoon.

Tuesday we went to meet Cas, our professor, at ECLAC. Dan and Sarah and I decided to walk, and it was nice but Sarah and I were wearing the wrong shoes, so it was a slow walk. Sylvia decided to take a taxi. We met up with Cas, went through the long process of getting cleared with security, and met the director of the English translation department. We sort of wandered around during the morning meeting people, getting to know the lay of the land, and in the afternoon we were given a presentation on what kind of sources they use for their translation, and then HR gave us a bunch of paperwork to fill out, and we got our OFFICIAL UN BADGES!!

Spiffy, right? Sorry ’bout the quality and the fact it’s backward, but I forgot my camera in Monterey and my webcam is the best I can do. And I’ve deleted some essential info, like my last name. Gotta insist on anonymity somehow.

Sylvia and I will be translating at FAO while Dan and Sarah will be at ECLAC. More later…

shopping

So I don’t anticipate much else happening this afternoon, so I figured it was safe to post. I had a little panic attack when I went to the grocery store this afternoon, and here’s why: The exchange rate is 1 USD to about 520 CLP (pesos). So when you’re walking through a grocery store and you see a banana whose price is 550 CPL per kilo, it sounds like SO MUCH MONTEY. But actually that’s only a bit more than a dollar, so you end up with something like 5 bananas for about a buck, which is the same price you would get them for at Trader Joe’s.

So I took out 10,000 pesos (about $19.25) from the ATM (and got slapped with a $5 fee, ouch), and thought, wow, this is going to go nowhere. So I was very frugal, thinking that 10k pesos would not buy very much. Imagine my surprise when I rang up everything and it was just over 5k pesos. So I went back and bought a few more things I needed to actually be able to prepare real food, and this time it only cost 3,500 pesos. In total, I ended up with the following, along with the prices so you can see just how disorienting the entire ordeal got to be:

• 1 avocado – 673
• 4 bananas – 433
• 1 cucumber – 269
• 1 lemon – 136
• 2 large onions – 196
• curry powder – 139
• a box of vegetable broth cubes (with no animal fats, yay!) – 389
• salt – 269
• rice – 629
• the tiniest bottle of vegetable oil I’ve ever seen – 399
• toilet paper – 1,269
• instant oatmeal – 589
• a bag of lentils – 969
• blackberry jam – 499
• a head of garlic – 379
• spaghetti – 519
• pita bread (because it’s smaller than regular bread and I’m trying to watch my bread intake) – 1,019

Total: 8,775

It sounds like a lot of money, right? It’s about $17. i.e., not as scary as it looks.

Content with my purchases, I went around the block again to a store I had passed on the way there. An ORGANIC store! exciting!! I went in and the first thing my eyes landed on was…

Almond milk.

I’m saved! I sang to myself in my head. I didn’t buy any, because I’m being careful about how much I spend and I don’t think I’ll be needing it within the next few days, but it’s good to know that it’s there for when I do want it, and trust me, I will. I then saw that they have quinoa, which is definitely exciting, but I probably won’t buy any simply because I don’t foresee going through an entire bag of it in only a month. And I finally went up to the counter and asked the question that had been on my mind since I got on the plane:

“Do you guys have peanut butter?”

They did. ORGANIC peanut butter. Imported from the Netherlands, no less. Price: 990 pesos, which is less than $2. I don’t think I’ve ever seen organic peanut butter for that cheap in the States. Total cost of everything:

9,765 pesos -or- $18.81

So this all means I won’t go hungry while here Hope I have adequately conveyed how momentous an occasion this is.

Hello again, Chile…

After a LONG flight and severe turbulence, I am happy to say I have arrived safely in Santiago.

Now the bad news: I somehow managed to leave CA without my camera. I think it’s in my apartment, because when I was finishing packing at my dad’s house I couldn’t find it for anything. I have a camera on my phone from the US, so I might try that.

Nothing much to report so far. I’m severely sleep deprived due to the aforementioned turbulence. As in, so violent that it woke me up and my knee jerk reaction was to cry out, “Father God, please save us!” because I thought the plane was going down. I know turbulence rarely leads to plane crashes, but that didn’t make the experience any less unpleasant.

I’m the first of my classmates here. Someone is arriving tomorrow, but J and P, my hosts, said that they don’t remember who. I guess we’ll see.

The 15-hour mark

I’ve neglected the fact that this trip is fast approaching. I’m leaving for Chile in about 15 hours, and between now and then I have dinner with a group from church, “coffee” with my best friend from high school (it’s in “” because I don’t drink coffee, but a café is the only place we can meet up without one of us having to drive really far), laundry, packing, getting an oil change on my car, more laundry, getting together everything I’m not taking down south and packing it in my car so my dad doesn’t have to deal with it… and that’s today. Tomorrow we’re leaving at 6:30 a.m., which means I’ll be up by 5 to shower and wash my hair (that is my travel “must”: I MUST shower and wash my hair before a long flight, because otherwise I feel disgustingly uncomfortable). We’re driving to LA and we’ll get there before 10 a.m., I’ll check in, and there will no doubt be lots of sitting around until we board. We take off at noon.

Any food I’m bringing on this trip must be eaten on the plane to Santiago, because if you’ve never been to Chile, you might not know that they are a little anal about what you can and can’t bring into the country. NOTHING perishable. Read my post about my last days in Ecuador, and you’ll find that I was almost slapped with a fine for two apples in my purse that I forgot were there. They even want you to declare any chocolate you bring into the country. So no jar of peanut butter in my suitcase this time. I may try to bring a couple of Lärabars just for the plane ride, but they will get eaten before we land in Santiago.

I am bringing next to NOTHING. Normally on a trip like this I would have 2 suitcases, a carry-on and my satchel that has room for my laptop and at least 4 books. This time, it’s the satchel and 1 suitcase. I’m not bringing many distractions, because this is not a pleasure trip; this is work. And work I shall. I am, however, bringing 5 stenographer’s pads, because we are going to do some major interpreting while we’re there, and I’m going to be working night and day to get this note-taking thing down.

At the moment, all my stuff is strewn over my dad’s bed, waiting for me to do laundry. I’m going to start a load and then run to Target for a travel sewing kit, because that is one of my must-brings and I managed to leave my other one up north. We’ll see how this goes! See you in Santiago!

Ambulando again…

So it’s official: headed to Chile after Christmas! The Spanish program is offering a class at the ECLAC offices in Santiago until the end of January, basically an intensive T/I practicum, so now I’ll be able to see what Santiago is like in summer. Ximena tells me that it’s super hot in January, which at the very least means I can pack light. Just bought my ticket today, totally excited, will be posting often

A rant for your Friday morning

I don’t usually rant like this, but I need to get it off my chest.  I just got off the phone with Chase bank.  I had a checking account with them until 2009 when I switched to Union Bank, and now I’m much happier with the service I receive.  I was not at all happy with the service I received at Chase.  I was always treated very impersonally, they messed around too much with the interest rates on my credit card… OK, not going to go into it all, it just irritates me.  Suffice it to say that I no longer have a checking account with them. I do, however, have a credit card that I’m still working on paying off.

So anyway, like I said, whenever I call Union Bank I’m always greeted by a friendly and helpful person who is usually able to fix whatever situation or give me whatever information in a very friendly and polite manner.

Whenever I call Chase Bank, I am met with a distinctly Indian accent from someone who has had to take a class in “How to treat American customers” to know how to speak to me.

This morning when I called for a confusion, while this individual (whose gender is undetermined because I don’t know Indian names well enough to know whether it was a masculine or feminine name, and their voice didn’t give me much of a clue) was able to fix the situation with my credit card, I was struck with his/her tone of voice to me. It wasn’t that it was firm (I’m sure they have to be with all of the disgruntled and angry customers they must get, if everyone else’s experience has been like mine). It was condescending. It was, “Ma’am, you have no right to get upset, so shut your yap so I can get you off the phone as soon as humanly possible.”

Now, for anyone who knows me, I’m not one of those people that thinks that America is the greatest country ever. In fact, in our current situation, I could think of a lot of places I’d rather be. However, I greatly value the idea of the customer always being right. It’s something I missed while I was in Ecuador. There’s no value of the customer in Ecuador, they don’t treat you very nice, try to make you comfortable, they just want you to make your purchase, pay them, and get out. That’s kind of how I felt on the phone with this individual from Chase. Furthermore, s/he kept interrupting me, as if someone had taught him/her in his/her training, “The way to calm down an angry Chase customer is to not let them finish a sentence.” I can tell you, this only gets us more raging mad, because ultimately a customer wants to know that they are being listened to.

So I started getting angry as I sat through all this, and even after I contemplated it after I got off the phone. Really, Chase? Can you to send the jobs overseas, pay bottom dollar to people in another country that probably don’t even bank with you (because you are NOT an international bank), give them “training” so they “know” how to treat an American customer (and that not very well), and still sleep with a clear conscience at night? If you had any sense of how to treat a customer, you would keep those jobs here, which would help the economy and put people to work (ya’ wonder why those people have been camping out along Wall Street for the past few weeks? There’s one reason), and you wouldn’t have to worry about teaching someone about intercultural relations because it would already be engrained in them.

OK, I’m done. No class today, so I’m going to go to church and bang my frustrations out on the piano.

Things that keep me from working

Ohmigosh guys, I’m so excited, I found a sugar scrub recipe! OK, I know that sounds really lame, but I’ve been having some major skin issues lately. Dry patches, crazy breakouts on my chest and face… I know part of the problem is not getting enough water and not eating the right kind of foods (lots of snacking going on between study sessions), and today I just got tired of it, so I started looking up sugar scrub recipes.

I had no idea it would be so easy!! Seriously, you just start with sugar (any kind) and olive oil, and you add pretty much whatever you want from there on out. I’m going to try honey, lemon juice and a couple drops of essential oil, and we’re going to see what happens…

ABOUT AN HOUR LATER…

WOOT! Silky smoothe.

Among other things that keep me from studying, we have cooking (today I made pizza from scratch), translating things that have NOTHING to do with class, and music. I made it into the Bach Festival again, and they even let me know only a week after the audition (last time they didn’t make the announcement until the middle of November). So as you can see, we’re having a rather productive day…

And despite it all, I did study at least five hours today. Not bad for a Sunday afternoon.

Today, something touched me

This is in stark contrast to Saturday when nothing could get under my skin (except for the dog that kept wanting to cuddle up against me, which triggered my alergies). I came home after my morning class to make lunch and a friend caught me online. Allow me to explain: this friend claims to be in love with me. I’ve told him that he’s jumping the gun, that he needs to back off, but he’s always telling me how beautiful I am, how much he misses me, wants to see me, adores me… and I keep having to tell him, “Your recognition of my hotness is appreciated, but you still need to cool your jets.”

Anyway, we chat for about ten seconds and he says, “I want to see you.” For a second I wasn’t sure what he meant until realizing that he wanted to call me on Skype so he could see my face. I hesitated, then went ahead and called him, but something got messed up, so he called me, just after I had stood and leaned over… and where did you think the webcam was facing?

Oh yeah, right down the front of my low-cut blouse.

“Hello…” he laughed.

Now, this is bad enough, but I was looking at something else in another window, so it literally took me between five and ten seconds to realize what was happening, at which point I could only act nonchalant and sit in my chair, tilting the camera up so that it showed nothing below my chin.

Sigh… I’m going to bury my head now.