Chilean Chronicles, Part 49: We Have a Community

In one of my favorite scenes of one of my favorite shows, Detective Bunk Moreland confronts Omar Little, about, among other things, how young children have started to glorify the shotgun-toting rippper and runner. His trademark cigar in between his index and middle fingers, his right hand pointing at the seated vigilante, Bunk declares about the area where they both grew up several years apart, “Rough as that neighborhood could, we had us a community.”

Bunk’s words came to me early this afternoon as I sat next to Macarena Rodriguez in the front row of a lecture by Francesca Lessa at the University of Alberto Hurtado about legal impunity in Latin America.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wmgghlEagA&w=420&h=315]

(Start watching around 3:00 to see the build up to Bunk's statement.)

Maca, whom we had met with her husband Miguel in Chicago, picked us up at the airport when we landed in Santiago on July 12.

Our friend and Maca’s colleague Hugo Rojas sat next to Francesca at the table.

Outside of the room was an exhibit of long maps of Chile that showed the concentration camps, the Caravan of Death, and the women, militants and communists who were disappeared during the Pinochet dictatorship.

Hugo had shown me the display on Monday that two Geography professors at the university had created after drawing on data from a national report about torture and a list of disappeared people.

I had brought the students from my data journalism class to see and critique it on Tuesday.

I had given Hugo, a true gourmand, the white chocolate Dunreith had selected for him this morning on our way to the university.

He undid the staple at the top of the brown paper bag.

His eyes lit with reverence as he saw the contents.

“Es sagrado,” he said as he placed the bag in one of his coat pockets.

This is sacred.

Francesca delivered a riveting presentation about the global investigation into amnesty laws and national efforts to negate or undo them. (Some of the most successful were in Latin America.)

After the lecture I saw Dunreith, who introduced me to Ignacio, Hugo’s ayundatia, or teaching assistant. Dunreith’s been tutoring him in English to prepare him for the trip he’s taking at the end of the month to Chicago.

Ignacio, who is lean and bearded and has a hoop-shaped earring in his left ear, told us about the beauty of Uruguay, about the mural in Chicago that he wants to visit and the neighborhood in Santiago he wants to show us.

I hugged him, kissed Dunreith nand walked back to join the journalism department’s celebration of the nation’s impending Independence Day on September 18.

My colleagues were not waiting for the day to arrive to start enjoying themselves.

I grabbed a hot empanada and started talking with Literature Department Chair Rodrigo Rojas about the two years he lived in apartheid-era Pretoria, South Africa as a teenager in the mid-80s.

I thanked Arly and Jorge from Gloo, the online, digitally-oriented publication, for the special September 11 coverage they had sent me that the students had done.

Unofficial, but self-appointed guide Alejandra Matus, her face glowing with pleasure at the shared company of her colleagues and friends, made sure that I was all set to join the Independence Day party she and her husand Alberto are hosting at their home on Saturday.

I spoke with Rafael, a bearded professor with wild black hair who was exiled in France and teaches courses on interviewing and humor, about wanting to connect with presidential candidate Marco Enríquez-Ominami.

He’s a cousin and a friend, Rafael said. Whenever you want.

I chatted with Andrea Insunza, one of the nation’s top investigative reporters and the co-author of a biography about presumptive presidential candidate Michelle Bachelet. The granddaughter of the former head of Chile’s Communist Party, Insunza has a chapter in a new book in which 17 people who grew up during the dictatorship relate their experiences.

Andrea wrote about traveling in 1986 to the then-Soviet Union to see her grandfather, only to learn shortly after arriving that he had been living in Chile clandestinely since 1983.

The party wound down. I started to help Ingrid, one of the department’s administrative assistants, clean up the plates and utensils and half-eaten empanadas

She told me to stop.

I’m used to it, she said.

I’m used to it, too, I answered, citing my years of marriage and my training in our childhoold home at Griggs Terrace in Brookline.

I explained the system of middle management that Mom and Dad design involved rotating the position of General on a weekly basis.

The General had powers of delegation, but not enforcement, powers for tasks like setting and clearing the table, cleaning the dishes and washing the laundry.

Any work the other two did not do fell to the general.

In theory, we all got experience in leadership.

In practice, it meant that the general ended up doing all the work each week.

That was a good system, Ingrid said.

We laughed.

Dunreith returned from tutoring Ignacio and I went to teach my class.

The students listened via Skype to friend and Tribune colleague Alex Richards and applauded when they saw absent classmate Hernan Araya’s name listed in an email distributed to the listserv for the organization where Alex used to work and where he cut his teeth in data analysis.

I referred repeatedly to Alex’s presentation as the students presented about the projects, the first about data, on which they’ve worked for several weeks.

Before they left for the vacation, I reviewed all of the work we have done and the skills they have begun to acquire since we met in early August.

The last step after finishing a project, I said, is to celebrate.

The students applauded before filing out of the room.

Two months ago today, we landed in Chile, turning a long-held dream into a reality.

In just eight short weeks we’ve not only been the recipient of extraordinary hospitality, we’ve seen and heard and visited people and places that had previously seemed utterly unattainable.

This has been a remarkable gift.

But what is even more meaningful, perhaps, is how the people’s generosity has allowed us weave a web of connection that’s flowed from our relationships in Chicago and Massachusetts and Washington.

As the inimitable Bunk would say, we have a community.

Santiago is not our home.

But, sooner than I had anticipated, it’s starting to feel that way.

Chilean Chronicles, Part XIV: Bar Liguria and the Power of Place

Some bars just have it. That combination of noise and brightness and darkness and alcohol and food and colors and smells and seats and music that just allow you to relax, engage in stimulating and expansive conversation, and, on some basic level, be who you truly are.

Here in Santiago, the Bar Liguria near the Manuel Montt Metro station is one of those places.

I’ve been there twice in the past three evenings.

Even though the company was different both times, I emerged with a similar uplifted feeling.

On Tuesday I met with Eduardo Riveros, founder and head of VisionBionica.com, and his friend Geishy Rondon.

Eduardo and I had connected at last week’s Data Tuesday at the Movistar Innova space further south on Providencia Avenue.

He had told me about his work with augmented reality, a technology that allows him or whoever else who uses to essentially embed additional images, video or a web site on a print page.

Short and energetic , Eduardo has a high-pitched laugh and moves his hands in decisive motions. He had prepared a sample page from an award-winning Chicago Tribune project friends and colleagues Gary Marx, Alex Richards and David Jackson did last year about school truancy in the city.

Eduardo pointed his phone at the page.

Three circles swirled on the phone’s face.

Then the options appeared.

One was Gary’s Twitter account so that people who enjoyed the article could then write a Tweet or send a direct message to Gary.

The second was a video with Diane Sawyer about the Chicago Public Schools’ teacher strike last fall.

And the third was a YouTube video of an irate CPS student berating a teacher and walking out of the classroom.

All available for consumption.

Eduardo explained that he had developed a tourism site for Santiago where, while you were in one place, you could point your phone at that landmark and a bunch of other sights to see in the city would appear.

I asked Eduardo what had prompted him to go into this area of work.

He explained that he’s Chilean with Venezuelan roots and had just spent a decade in Chavezlandia, much of it going between Barinas y Cumaná.

Although he enjoyed the people and has many warm memories of his time there, the country’s relentless violence hit him directly.

Two friends were killed, and he had a gun pointed at his neck.

The last experience prompted Eduardo to get out of on the street reporting and into learning how to tell stories through augmented reality and other means.

His journey led him to earn a Master´s degree in Communication from the University of Havana-Castro’s Cuba and Chavez’s Venezuela had many cultural, academic and social exchanges-to gain certification from Junaio, a German company that he said is considered the top in the world, and to take online courses from Stanford.

Eduardo had also invited Geishy Rondon, a friend who had just earned a diploma in Chile and found work at the Telethon.

Geishy explained that while she had not herself been a victim of violence in her native Venezuela, the pervasiveness of it and the volume of incidents she witnessed and walked by were such that she wants to stay here, rather than return to her homeland.

Huddled around the sturdy wooden tables, leaning in to hear each other over the steady rumble of other customers. In addition to their work, we talked about the political situation in Venezuela and the seismic difference in charisma between the late Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro, his comparatively pedestrian successor.

If Tuesday night’s conversation focused on work, social violence and politics, Thursday evening was like a river with many dips and bends that flowed fast and wide.

In addition to Dunreith, fellow Fulbrighter Stephen Sadlier, Gonzalo Salazar and his lovely wife Jacqui, a Brit, joined us.

We met Gonzalo and Jacqui last week at the civil registry, where we were going through distinct yet related Chilean bureaucratic challenges, and it turned out later that Steve shared those same struggles with Dunreith and me. Gonzalo, who was born in Chile to a wealthy family, has a British and Chilean passport. The Chilean one has expired, yet he explained that this is the only country in the world in which he is considered Chilean. As a result, if he left the country, he’d not be permitted back in because of his expired passport.

Like Steve, Dunreith and I were trying to have our visa be successfully entered at the civil registry.

Like him, we had had each finger and thumb dipped in black ink.

Like him, we were told that the stamp the Chilean authority put on our passport was not legible.

We prevailed upon the woman, perhaps the same one as Steve has encountered in his visits, to not have us got back to the federal police station where we had been the day before.

She consented, but she told us we had to check online to make sure the task was completed by August 8, adding that we would have to start all over again if it was not.

I ran out to the gate to go to the store around the corner to make an additional copy of the document the women said she needed.

On Thursday night, though, administrative difficulties were the last topic on the proverbial table for discussion. To give a representative sample, we took a deep dive into family history-Steve comes from Haitian Creole and Catalonian stock, while Gonzalo can trace his roots back to the eighth century with documents and talked about an ancestor who fathered 120 children-before tackling national and regional levels of self-esteem in Chile and the United States.

Steve asserted that Americans are fascinated with death and being victims.

Together, we talked about some of the major items Chile has exported to the rest of Latin America and the world: a roster of poets that extends deep beyond Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda; Mistral’s progressive educational vision; and the Chicago Boys’ model of economic stabilization and a certain technocratic sensibility.

Whereas Tuesday I had a rich stout, on Thursday we had a strong pisco sour and the first carmenere wine I’ve ever drunk to accompany a plate of goat cheese and macha a la parmesana.

Thursday night also saw a band of older men playing traditional Chilean folk music, along with the theme from the Godfather, at a volume that made it increasingly difficult to hear each other.

We kept talking, though.

The truth is that I don’t know either how often I’ll see Eduardo, Geishy, Gonzalo, Jacqui or Steve again, or how deep the ties will go if we do.

But what eventually becomes of our relationships is not the point.

Rather it’s that in a period of transition, at different stages of our lives, from countries around the globe, we met, we drank, and we shared time that was both memorable and invigorating.

Bar Liguria’s welcoming environment helped make that happen.

We’ll be back.