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… 
