4 Gringos, 1 German, and 1 Chilean equals one incredible trip

After much planning and preparation for a weekend of camping and backpacking we boarded the overnight bus headed for the south of Chile. About 14 hours later we arrived in the quaint city of Puerto Varas. From there we took a rural bus to the inside of the national park Vicente Pérez Rosales. The national park was incredible with numerous lakes and volcanoes. We decided to camp across the lake in a very rustic and small campground with an incredible view of the volcano.
Our group was really fun and included myself, Tim, Mark, Katy, one of my friends, Steph, from Germany, and one of Tim´s friends, Carolina, from Chile. At the onset we had decided that the trip was going to be completely in Spanish which was a necessary decision as us gringos needed to practice and the only way we could communicate with Steph and Carolina was in Spanish.
The best part about the trip was the place we camped because of its unique setting and because of the other people that were staying there. The campground was maintained by a old couple from Germany who also kept pigs, cows, chickens and lots of dogs. All of the animals were free to roam around and it was typical to open up your tent in the morning and be staring at a pig in the face. The other people staying there were Chileans who were there to fish in the mountain streams and rivers. We quickly made friends which was very fortunate as we spent every night circled around a bonfire with them telling jokes, sharing stories, and singing along to music with the guitar. The Chileans shared their catch with us every night as well and I don’t think I have tasted anything quite as good as fresh trout and salmon roasted in wine and onions over a makeshift grill. We also tried a traditional drink which is wine and orange juice heated over the fire.
We were lucky and had very good weather. The south is known for being cold and rainy but we only had about a half an hour of rain. We were very thankful to have the sun as the temperatures were quite cold and I don’t think I took my hat off the entire weekend. During the day we went on hikes, went fishing, climbed up a good portion of a volcano, and went on a boat tour of the lakes. It was refreshing and exhilarating to be outside in a beautiful and untouched landscape.
Unfortunately the four day trip had to come to an end and on Sunday night we packed up camp and invited the fishermen to dine with us in the city of Puerto Mont. After a long weekend of new friends and adventures, it was hard to get back on the bus headed back to the city filled with the reality of schoolwork and busyness, but I feel blessed that I could spend Easter with friends in the beautiful country of Chile.

Seize the Day

I heard this song the other day and found the lyrics which I really like. Sometimes the time goes by so fast here it is hard to value the present moment. It is easy to look forward to the next weekend for travel or anticipate a certain date with friends when actually I am happy to be exactly where I am right now, in a computer lab in Santiago, listening to Chilean music, and thinking about my experiences. The pictures are from a recent backpacking trip. Sieze the day.

Seize the Day – Lyrics (Carolyn Arends)

I know a girl who was schooled in Manhattan

She reads dusty books and learns phrases in

Latin She is an author, or maybe a poet

A genius, but it's just this world doesn't know it

She works on her novel most everyday If you laugh she will say . . .

Chorus:

Seize the day – seize whatever you can

‘Cause life slips away just like hourglass sand

Seize the day – pray for grace from God's hand

Then nothing will stand in your way

Seize the day

Well I know a doctor, a fine young physician
Left his six figure job for a mission position
He's healing the sick in an African clinic
He works in the dirt and writes home to the cynics
He says, “We work through the night so most everyday
As we watch the sun rise we can say….

Chorus

I know a man who's been doing some thinking
He's as bitter and cold as the whiskey he's drinking
He's talking ‘bout fear, about chances not taken
If you listen to him you can hear his heart breaking
He says, “One day you're a boy and the next day you're dead
I wish way back when someone had said….

Chorus

Well one thing I've noticed wherever I wander
Everyone's got a dream he can follow or squander
You can do what you will with the days you are given
I'm trying to spend mine on the business of living
So I'm singing my songs off of any old stage
You can laugh if you want – I'll still say….

Chorus

Valparaíso: Entre Mar y Cerros

‘Valparaíso me usurpó, me sometió a su dominio, a su disparate, Valparaíso es un montón de casas locas y coloridas.’ - Pablo Neruda

Two weekends ago Mark, Celeste, and I headed down to Valparaíso for Saturday and Sunday. The famous port city is about two hours from Santiago and is truly a ‘mountain of crazy and colorful houses’ like Chilean Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda describes.

The city is fun and unique because, like the title of this entry, the port lies between the sea and steep hills. The atmosphere is a little like San Francisco with lots of inclines and a bohemian feel but it also feels like Dr. Seuss was here because of the brightly painted houses and interesting textures and angles in the architecture.

It is easy to see why Pablo Neruda had one of his houses here and why it was one of his favorite places to write poetry. Valparaíso has a romantic and creative air; there are lots of literary cafés, tiny pubs with live music, and incredible views from the hills. Each hill has a name and a different feel to it. My favorite cerro is Cerro Alegre which is known for the tiny bookshops and cafés that it has to offer. The name literally means, ‘happy hill.’

What makes Valparaíso most famous, though, is its ascensores which are like giant elevators. Since the hills are so steep and there are so many of them, each hill has its own ascensor. An ascensor is like a cable car that moves people from the bottom to the top of a hill as well as back down. It takes about one minute in an ascensor rather than quite a few minutes of tough walking. Each ascensor costs about fifty US cents.

Valparaíso is also known for its seafood which we tried in a little restaurant after we took a boat tour in the harbor. The empanadas de mariscos, or baked pockets full of seafood, were terrific. Another dish that the city boasts is choriana, which is meat, onions, and cheese on a bed of fries.

We spent all of Saturday walking around and exploring the hills of Valparaíso as well as stopping every now and then to grab a snack or a coffee in a literary café. We spent the night in a hostel and in the morning caught a bus that took us for a winding and steep tour through the hills.

The mini-trip to the port city was fun and I think Valparaíso will be one of those places that I will visit again before I have to leave.

A Copper Mine and a Rodeo

These past few weekends have been filled with lots of fun mini-trips either with the exchange program or with friends. We visited the Teniente Mine, went to a Manu Chao concert, climbed a mountain with the mountaineering class, and went to the Chilean national rodeo championships.
Visiting the mine was a lot of fun because we were able to wear all of the gear that the miners wear including bright orange protective suits, goggles, hard hats, air masks, utility belts, and rubber boots. The Teniente Mine is the largest mine in the world and is basically like a small city completely underground. The main export of the mine was copper and it is still functioning today. We took a tour of some of the bigger parts of the mine and then ate in one of the cafeterias that the miners eat in. Katie, Mark and I sat with two men who worked in the mine and they told us that they have to take a two hour bus ride too and from the mine every day to work. They said it was worth it because working in the mine is a good job and pays well. It was fascinating to be in a place so large underground that it seemed like we were in another world.

This Saturday Mark, Tim and I had an excursion to a mountain with our mountaineering class. The requirements for the trip were hat, sunglasses, day pack, hiking boots, leather gloves, and an ice pick. We left early in the morning and arrived at the bottom of the mountain about thirty minutes outside of Santiago. After being divided into groups we spent the morning climbing to the top as well as practicing using the ice pick to climb up and down especially steep terrain and rock faces. After about three hours my legs were pretty much exhausted and thankfully we had a break for lunch. After lunch we had one more final difficult ascent and descent practicing what we had learned with the ice pick and then we made our descent back to the bottom. Our next trips with that class aren’t until June which is when we actually camp for weekends at a time.

Sunday Jessica, Mark, Tim and I went to the Chilean national rodeo championships in Rancagua which was only about two hours from Santiago by bus. The atmosphere was lots of fun and everyone was dressed especially for the occasion. The Chilean cowboys or vaqueros wore straight, straw sombreros and colorful ponchos. Their traditional costumes were beautiful and the cowboys wore them with dignity and pride. We looked a bit out of place with our sandals and t-shirts because everyone was dressed to ride. The rodeo was completely different than those in the United States. All of the events were new to me, the equipment on the horses was different, and the breeds of the horses themselves were some that I had never seen before. One of the things that we enjoyed most about the day was the food – there was any kind of meat you could think of cooked over a grill shish kebob style, Chilean beer and another fermented drink called chicha, and lots of helado (ice cream). It was really fun to see such pride and strength exhibited in another culture.

Excerpt from 'Through Painted Deserts'

I found this passage and I really like how it was written - it doesn´t describe what is going on in Chile here, but I like how it made me feel after I read it. (However the pictures are from a recent climb with my mountaineering class).

"IT IS FALL HERE NOW, MY FAVORITE OF THE FOUR seasons. We get all four here, and they come at us under the doors, in through the windows. One morning you wake and need blankets; you take the fan out of the window to see clouds that mist out by midmorning, only to reveal a naked blue coolness like God yawning.

September is perfect Oregon. The blocks line up like postcards and the rosebuds bloom into themselves like children at bedtime. And in Portland we are proud of our roses; year after year, we are proud of them. When they are done, we sit in the parks and read stories into the air, whispering the gardens to sleep. I remember the sweet sensation of leaving, years ago, some ten now, leaving Texas for who knows where. I could not have known about this beautiful place, the Oregon I have come to love, this city of great people, this smell of coffee and these evergreens reaching up into a mist of sky, these sunsets spilling over the west hills to slide a red glow down the streets of my town. And I could not have known then that if I had been born here, I would have left here, gone someplace south to deal with horses, to get on some open land where you can see tomorrow's storm brewing over a high desert. I could not have known then that everybody, every person, has to leave, has to change like seasons; they have to or they die.



The seasons remind me that I must keep changing, and I want to change because it is God's way. All my life I have been changing. I changed from a baby to a child, from soft toys to play daggers. I changed into a teenager to drive a car, into a worker to spend some money. I will change into a husband to love a woman, into a father to love a child, change houses so we are near water, and again so we are near mountains, and again so we are near friends, keep changing with my wife, getting our love so it dies and gets born again and again, like a garden, fed by four seasons, a cycle of change. Everybody has to change, or they expire. Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons.

I want to keep my soul fertile for the changes, so things keep getting born in me, so things keep dying when it is time for things to die. I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently.

Only the good stories have the characters different at the end than they were at the beginning. And the closest thing I can liken life to is a book, the way it stretches out on paper, page after page, as if to trick the mind into thinking it isn't all happening at once.
Time has pressed you and me into a book, too, this tiny chapter we share together, this vapor of a scene, pulling our seconds into minutes and minutes into hours. Everything we were is no more, and what we will become, will become what was. This is from where story stems, the stuff of its construction lying at our feet like cut strips of philosophy. I sometimes look into the endless heavens, the cosmos of which we can't find the edge, and ask God what it means. Did You really do all of this to dazzle us? Do You really keep it shifting, rolling round the pinions to stave off boredom? God forbid Your glory would be our distraction. And God forbid we would ignore Your glory.

HERE IS SOMETHING I FOUND TO BE TRUE: YOU DON'T start processing death until you turn thirty. I live in visions, for instance, and they are cast out some fifty years, and just now, just last year I realized my visions were cast too far, they were out beyond my life span. It frightened me to think of it, that I passed up an early marriage or children to write these silly books, that I bought the lie that the academic life had to be separate from relational experience, as though God only wanted us to learn cognitive ideas, as if the heart of a man were only created to resonate with movies. No, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath:
I'll tell you how the sun rose A ribbon at a time...

And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you, about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it?
It might be time for you to go. It might be time to change, to shine out.
I want to repeat one word for you:

Leave.

Roll the word around on your tongue for a bit. It is a beautiful word, isn't it? So strong and forceful, the way you have always wanted to be. And you will not be alone. You have never been alone. Don't worry. Everything will still be here when you get back. It is you who will have changed." -Donald Miller

Un Amigo Nuevo

“Do you believe that people live on the moon?” Gonzalo asks me (in Spanish of course) after he had just gotten done eating dinner with me and my family and I had asked him how he thought it went. “No,” I tell him wondering where this was going, “I don’t believe that there are people living on the moon.” He responds with, “How would you feel if you had to act interested and participate in a conversation about something that you didn’t and couldn’t believe in?” His question, in the context of the situation, was sad, strong, honest, and frustrating all at the same time. I haven’t been able to shake it from my mind since. Let me explain.

Every student in the Poverty and Development class has to enroll in an internship with a non-profit organization somewhere in or near Santiago. The idea is to observe in real life the theories and problems of poverty that we are studying in the classroom. I am going to be working for an organization called Corporacion de Beneficiencia Padre Patricio Espinosa Saez in a small town about an hour and a half outside of Santiago called El Monte. The corporation handles everything from giving fincancial assistance, to offering classes, tutoring children, making home visits, and building small houses.

Another girl in my class is working at the same place and on Wednesday we met with the volunteer coordinator of the program, Gonzalo. We met for a drink in the evening to talk about the goals of the program and our personal goals of the class. It was a fun and relaxing meeting because unlike most of the volunteer coordinators, Gonzalo is young – twenty four years old, and is able to relate to us just like any other friend. We each shared a bit about our lives and our past experiences and I became especially intruiged in Gonzalo’s story.

Gonzalo originally grew up in an aristocratic family with significant wealth. His father owned a successful vineyard and his mother for some years was the minister of education in Chile. When Gonzalo was about 18 his father asked him, the only son in the family, to take over the family business. When he refused and chose instead to study history at the University of Chile, his very traditional and regimented family turned their backs on him. Gonzalo moved out, graduated from college on his own, and then worked for a program called “Un Techo Para Chile” (A Roof for Chile) for two years as the youth volunteer coordinator. Un Techo Para Chile is basically the same program as Habitat for Humanity in the United States. As his two year term for the program was finished, Gonzalo started on his masters in history at the University of Chile and started working in the community of El Monte. His ultimate goal is to be the minister of education of Chile like his mother and to shorten the distance in the quality of education in Chile between the rich and the poor.

A few days later, as his university is only a few blocks from my house, we met at a café to talk about the field trip on Saturday to visit some rural communities of El Monte in extreme poverty. After commenting on his life story and apologizing for my forward question, I asked him if he believed in Jesus and he replied that no, he didn’t believe in any sort of God. Then why, I asked him, did he dedicate his life to working for the poor. He explained to me that he has found that the only times in his life that he was happy were when he was helping somebody else. After telling my family about my volunteer director I asked if I could have him over for dinner, not realizing that in the different culture of Chile this is a very big deal.

What made it even a bigger deal is that Gonzalo is well-known in the city; he has a lot of influence in academic, political, and social justice circles. For example, my younger sister, Kote, wants to volunteer in Un Techo Para Chile when she turns 18. Needless to say my family was excited not only because hosting someone in this country is an honor, but because they, as new Christians, supported the work that he was doing and wanted to bless him. I arrived home the night of the dinner sweaty and tired after mountaineering practice thinking that we would all meet, have a quick bite to eat, and then I could head off to bed. When I stepped into the kitchen and saw the enormous amounts of gourmet food my mom had spent all day preparing, I wished I could have undone the invitation. I started to panic and become really nervous as the cultural weight of the dinner began to sink in. I couldn’t wait until the night was over. What was I thinking inviting someone I barely knew to have dinner with a family that was not really my own in a country that was foreign to me?



Gonalo arrived at 10pm with the traditional bottle of Chilean wine and we started la cena (dinner). Gonzalo told them about his work experiences in the rural areas of Chile with Un Techo Para Chile as well as the work that I was going to be able to do in el Monte. One thing you should know about my family is that they are very close and intimate with each other. Emotions are expressed freely and honestly and their love for each other is strong and evident. Gonzalo shared with us that his family was not like mine; his was a bit more cold, proper, and formal. Thus said, things were going fine until my mom started talking about Jesus.

Once they realized that Gonzalo didn’t believe in God my family began to share openly anything they could think of to help Gonzalo believe. Testimonies were shared, tears were shed and prayers were lifted up. My appetite long gone, I sat tensely watching as the intense and emotional scene unfolded and tried to guess the thoughts of Gonzalo who was sitting a bit stiffly at the head of the table. But my guest played it cool; he asked questions, looked interested, and was polite in the akward situation.

Finally, at one in the morning, several church invitations later and satisfied that Gonzalo was well on the way to conversion, my family said goodbye and I walked our guest out. I love my family so much and I have so much respect for them and the way that they share the love of Christ with everyone that the night had really moved me. I had not been prepared, however for a meal like that nor had I thought to warn Gonzalo of my family’s zeal for the Lord. Feeling slightly embarrassed and yet somewhat hopeful I asked Gonzalo how he thought it went.

And that’s when I received the people living on the moon question.

Gonzalo thought that my family was warm and welcoming but he said it was really hard to participate in a conversation for three hours in something he didn’t believe in. I wanted to grab his shoulders and shake him; didn’t any one of the tears, stories, or testimonies affect him in the least? But I didn’t. I apologized for him feeling uncomfortable and thanked him for coming.

I say all this because my vounteer coordinator has been on my heart a lot this week. I see in him all of the traits that I see in Jesus like humility, kindness, generosity and a servant’s heart and yet I see an emptiness as well. I feel like this man has a lot of influence in Santiago and will continue to be a strong leader here in the future. If you happen to be thinking about this story from Chile, just pray that his heart would be open to the love of Christ because I feel like God wants to use him.

One of the things he said to me as he was closing the gate was, “Your world is religion, and mine is politics, you’re not going to be able to change that.” I know that me by myself am not going to be able to change that, nor will my family be able to, but maybe someone bigger can.