Chilean Chronicles, Part 104: Returning Home to Chicago

We're in the air from Toronto to Chicago.

We've left Santiago, site of fulfilled dreams, 80 degree Christmas Days, our impossibly dusty postage stamp of an apartment, and the consumption of more pisco sours and glasses, well, bottles, of red wine than we could have ever imagined, and are heading back to the Windy City that has been our home since 2002.

With grins that stretched beyond our ears, Dunreith and I deposited the check from the house sale we completed the day before we left on our Chilean adventure.

It far exceeded our greatest expectations.

We had the great privilege of being in Chile as the nation confronted, more directly than ever before, the still raw wounds from the Pinochet coup that happened on September 11, 1973.

We attended vigils and memorials events and plays and conferences and documentary films and panels and book launches, all of which were dedicated to grappling with the enduring impact of the overthrow of democratically-elected Salvador Allende and the brutal aftermath.

I've lived in the United States close to 50 years, but never before had I witnessed the concentrated and unified focusing on a single event in our nation's history the way Chileans from Arica in the north to Punta Arenas at the end of the world turned their attention to the coup.

In October we witnessed the jubilant eruption of emotion issuing forth from Chileans who hugged, kissed, screamed and honked their horns when their beloved soccer team punched its ticket to the world's largest sport event, to be held next June in Brazil.

In November we went to election events and talked to voters of all persuasions and ages and sides of the political spectrum during what turned out to be the first of two rounds in the presidential elections.

And in December we traveled to Torres del Paine, a national park of unsurpassed and staggering beauty that recently was named the eighth wonder of the world, when Michelle Bachelet made history in becoming the first candidate ever to be elected president twice in the post-democracy era.

Beyond these momentous months in Chilean history, we received an enormously generous reception from Chileans with whom we had some connection-we met everyone from dear friend Marjorie Agosin's seemingly inexhaustible supply of cousins and former students to a female anesthetist Dad had helped train nearly 30 years ago to our colleague, friend of a friend, guide/secret weapon Alejandra Matus-and those whom we had the good fortune to meet through our travels.

My Data Journalism students at the University of Diego Portales gradually understood my Spanish, my teaching methods and the concepts and application of this type of journalism in a process that left both sides feeling enriched for the encounter.

My research into the landmark 2009 Transparency Act, after an initial shift in focus, led me to talk with journalists, lawyers, non-profit executives, government representatives and plain folks in a project that gave me a sharper sense of the law's as yet incompletely realized potential.

Dunreith and I traveled to the vineyards of the Central Valley, to the coast cities of Valparaiso and Vina del Mar. With Aidan we flew to the searing desert of San Pedro de Atacama, the world's driest such space, and to Patagonia, a place Dunreith had longed to visit for years.

We also ventured to Rio, where I had the honor of attending, teaching and presenting to colleagues at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference doing investigative work, often at great physical peril, throughout the world.

We flew to Buenos Aires, where we met Dad and Lee before they set off on a two-week tour to Southern Argetina and up through Chile, and strolled together down elegant, inordinately wide, European-style boulevards, ate ice cream at Cafe Tortoni, the continent's oldest cafe that oozes with swagger, listened and learned for three hours at ESMA, the largest of the Argentine dictator's network of detention centers, and feasted on the sights and food of El Ateneo, the former theater that has been converted into one of the world's most spectacular bookstores.

Jon and I had the tremendous fortune to receive a grant from the Pulitzer Center to do a project about the impact of the past on the present in Chile 40 years after the coup. Together we worked long hours over the course of two weeks for a three-part series that ran on The New Yorker's Photo Booth and on Hoy's website.

The family visits over our final six weeks in the country helped confirm to me the possibility of weaving together the people and passions and dreams and values that I hold most dear. Perhaps, greatest of all, it's fortified my increasing conviction that this way of living was not only possible, but could in a very real sense become ordinary.

Now, we are returning to Chicago, the city from which we have left, where we raised Aidan from a boy to a man, and where we have spent the vast majority of our married life.

I am, and will always be, a Bostonian at my core.

I had too many seminal events, from the Blizzard of 78 to the 1975 World Series to growing up amidst that inimitable accent for it to ever be otherwise.

But if Boston in my heart, Chicago's in my guts.

The people's straightforward manner and generous spirit, the city's sense of itself as a place of story and legend, the passion that Chicagoans bring to their sports and their politics and their brats and their neighborhoods, its industrial past and tortured history with race and segregation and immigration and labor that make it what the late, great Studs Terkel called "the true American city", have all gotten in deep, and are not going anywhere, either.

I'll miss our life in Santiago and our travels throughout the country and continent, to be sure.

And I'm excited to fly over the leafless trees toward the dirtied snow and land at O'Hare, to walk in the 20 degree weather and see our breath and our circle of friends and family again, and to bring a fresh, broader perspective to my ongoing love for the city.

We don't know our exact next steps, or, frankly, where we're going to live after we stay at my brother Jon's place on the South Side.

But we do know without any shred of a doubt that, as always, the adventure will continue.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 97: Data Journalism Class Ends

Although generally joyous, the end of school years also have a twinge of sadness. Our time together-and, with it, my chance to directly impact the students-has ended.

Life goes on.

Last Tuesday marked the addition of a new group to the list: the 20 or so students in my Data Journalism class at the University of Diego Portales.

It's been close to three decades since I first worked with three- to five-year-old students at the Bellehaven Child Development Center in East Menlo Park.

I still remember their eyelashes, their angelic expressions and the silence that greeted me after I had biked away from Stanford's leafy luxury and toward their grittier neighborhoods.

I didn't know what I was doing with them.

I didn't know why so few fathers came to get them.

But I did know that I was where I belonged.

Since then I've worked with students of all kinds of ages and backgrounds in Boston suburbs, Appalachian classrooms, and one of South Africa's first private multi-racial schools.

This group was special, though.

It was both my first crop of Chilean students and my first Spanish-language class.

We adjusted to each other as the semester unfolded.

I learned both how to explain the requirements with more clarity and to convey my insistence that they attend class and do work in order to pass. I changed the assignments from a series of smaller items and what amounted to a continent-wide fishing expedition around lotteries to three projects of increasing scope, rigor and sophistication.

For their part, the students had a series of experiences-projects, articles, guest lecturers-that allowed them to better understand the sensibility I wanted them to develop and the world of data journalism they could enter, not just the data analysis skills they needed to acquire.

But I didn't just talk to the students about data.

I told them how I had wanted to go to Chile for many years and how I had applied to the Fulbright program four times before being accepted.

I told them about how extraordinary what was happening in the country before the September 11 anniversary of the coup, how significant the presidential elections were.

I also talked to them about my tremendous fortune in being there with Dunreith, about being able to work on a project for The New Yorker with my brother Jon, who shared his work and talked with the students twice. I let them know how much it meant to me to have Dad there, who told them about the importance of being actively involved in both sides of a mentoring relationship.

Finally, I urged them to give themselves enough time to do the kind of work of which I knew they were capable and to finish strong.

On Tuesday, they did just that.

One by one they stood and delivered at the front of the room. They talked about their data sets, their maps, their graphics and the law they chose to evaluate. Using Powerpoint or Prezi or a Google Docs, students who had had no idea of what a database was at the beginning of the semester explained how they had acquired and analyzed their data.

Dunreith and Aidan arrived about two thirds of the way through the class.

My family I said.

Please give them a round of applause.

The class complied with gusto.

The last student finished about 10 minutes after our scheduled time, and I moved forward to the front of the room for the last time.

I apologized for the lateness and asked them to think back to August, when they knew little to nothing about data.

I told them again how much I had enjoyed working with them and how being there and working with them was the realization of a dream for me.

I told them that I had learned that it's possible to live from dreams and values, and that I hope they felt the same way.

I explained that they had had the opportunity to meet some of the people in the world who do the best work in this area.

And your brother, one student called out.

And your father, said another.

You're almost there, I said.

I'm proud of the progress you've made, but you're not done yet.

You can finish strong.

I believe in you, I said. I'm available to you as a resource now and in the future. And I'll be in my office tomorrow if you need help.

Then I thanked them and told them they could go.

The students applauded and started to leave.

I stood by the door.

The male students and I hugged each other on the way out.

The women and I kissed each other's cheeks.

Then it was over.

Grading and deciding with Dunreith and Aidan what to do next awaited.

As always, I had the knowledge that I could have done better.

Vulnerability in the knowledge, too, that life continues its ceaseless forward flow. The end of the class anticipated, in a small but real way, the ultimate ending we all face.

Drained.

But I also felt good, deep down good, at the knowledge that I had given my best, at what we had done together and at the transmission of a spark that I believe, at least for some, will not soon be extinguished.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 91: Becky Simpson's Counsel and a Full Life

In the nearly quarter century that I knew her, Becky Simpson, known to many as the "Mother Theresa of Applachia," taught me many lessons. She taught me that visions can come true after she had had an image of a mountain of food, a mountain of clothing and a molehill of money-and all three happened at the Cranks Creek Survival Center she co-founded with her husband Bobby.

She taught me about how far a sense of righteous indignation at society's inequities and a seemingly bottomless well of compassion and giving can flower and touch people from around the world.

She taught me that fierce and gentle can exist in equal measure in the same person.

She taught me that meaningful moments shared cut across all kinds of lines.

She also taught me about how people can endure and move through unimaginable suffering and come out bruised, but intact, on the other side.

This last lesson came after I asked her how she had been able to survive so much-a third grade education, the death of her younger brother and one of her six children, a profoundly damaged back, the most grinding of poverty, Bobby's blindness, floods that wiped out her home and a devastating car accident are only among the most noteworthy-and still continue both to extend an open hand to help those who needed it and to fight for justice.

How do you do it? I asked as we sat around the kitchen table where we spent many, many hours talking.

I was waiting for a lengthy explanation of social justice tactics.

Becky gave me nothing of the sort.

Rest and try again, she said, her clear blue eyes filled with hard-earned wisdom.

I'm trying to draw on Becky's counsel these days, when things are popping on many fronts, to put it mildly.

I'm working to pull my Data Journalism course together for the final month and to work with potential replacement Daniela Cartagena to make sure that she has what she needs to feel oriented and to continue the burgeoning tradition we're starting to establish at the University of Diego Portales.

I'm coordinating a presentation of my research into the impact of the landmark 2009 Transparency Law on the country with Antonio Campana, Yunuen Varela, and the rest of the folks at the Fulbright Commission.

I'm writing one post a week for Hoy in both Spanish and English, and working to maintain a similar pace with the Huffington Post in English.

I just sent off tonight an 8,000-word chapter that Dunreith, Gabriele Thimm, Dad and I wrote about our trip in May 2012 to Dad's hometown in Germany for a book based on the Engaging the Other conference at which we presented in South Africa in December 2012.

Dunreith and I are working out the logistics for trips that we'll take to Peru, the desert in northern Chile and the glaciers in the southern part of the country during the month that Aidan is here.

After receiving an email from high school friend Tamera Coyne-Beasley about the possibility of our class holding a 30th reunion, I reached out on Facebook to classmates to see if there was any interest in having such an event. This sparked a chain of events that has led in the past two weeks to the formation of a Facebook group with more than 150 members, the discovery that our class has had $559 since our tenth reunion in 1993, and the impending delivery of a class directory courtesy of the Brookline High School Alumni Association.

I'm gearing up for my brother Jon coming here for a couple of weeks for us to work on a journalism project, all the while trying to keep this space going.

This says nothing of following up and making plans to learn from and collaborate with, the talented, dedicated, courageous and inspiring journalists I met at the Global Investigative Journalism conference last month in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

And I'm trying to keep my writing going here and in another book project.

I don't offer this list either to brag or to complain.

It's hard for me to express how fortunate I feel on so many levels to be with Dunreith at this point in our lives and in the nation's history.

Rather it's to say that tending to all of these varied projects can leave me feeling alternately drained and scattered and to my head swirling with the myriad details to which I need to attend.

Which brings me back to Becky.

This afternoon Dunreith and I slogged through about three hours worth of checking out websites, reviews and options for each of the three trips we're taking starting at the end of this month.

My eyelids were starting to hang heavy as we sat on the lower level of the Starbucks on Pedro de Valdivia Street.

My response time and accuracy was diminishing, my irritability rising.

I've got to head back to the apartment, I told Dunreith, who was feeling the same way.

We loaded up our computers and cords and adapters into my red backpack, walked down Providencia Avenue, greeted the doormen and gratefully laid down on our bed.

The pain in my jaw that accompanies my starting to meditate began its inexorable rhythm.

My breath grew deeper.

My thoughts started to slow down.

I woke up forty minutes later.

My head was groggy, and, within 20 minutes, it started to clear.

After an hour, I felt fully recharged.

I kept contacting people to interview for the project.

Dunreith and I had dinner and watched the latest dark episode in the third season of Los 80, Andres Wood's look at a pivotal decade in Chilean history through the eyes of a middle-class family.

I called mentor and friend Paul Tamburello and filled him in on my doings.

I went downstairs, pumped away on the exercise bike and stretched on the rug-covered floor.

I came back up to write this piece.

It's close to 1:00 a.m. and I'm starting to fade again.

It's time once to more to heed Becky's words.

It's time to rest.

And, in the morning, to try again.

Chilean Chronicles, Part XXIV: On My Own and My Students’ Names

On September 4, 2000, standing underneath a tree with three branches that came together at the base, Dunreith and I held hands with Aidan in a circle and, guided by Justice of the Peace Bruce Zeitler, said the marriage vows we had written to each other.

This marked the end of a Labor Day weekend in which I had moved, left a teaching career, and become both a husband and father.

Shortly thereafter, Dunreith and I began the process to legally change our names.

It was a negotiated settlement.

I initially broached the topic by suggesting that, rather than having different last names, we all have the same surname.

My choice: Lowenstein.

This idea didn’t sit particularly well with my wife, who barely needed to hear the proposal before firing back that she had had her name longer, so that I should be the one, if anyone, to change. She made the additional point that Aidan also was a Kelly, so there were in effect two of them and one of me.

Despite this decidedly unpromising beginning to the conversation, we eventually came to agree on, and embrace, the name Kelly Lowenstein.

We liked the flow of Dunreith’s name going before mine over the reverse, agreed that we didn’t like the idea of a hyphen and felt more comfortable using both of our names rather than coming up with a hybrid like “Kellstein” or “Lowelly.”

We made the change official by having our Social Security cards reflect the combination name we had chosen.

This ushered in the beginning of countless discussions with administrators, school officials, receptionists at doctor's offices, people in payroll and billing departments, and pharmacists, just to name a few.

The conversation usually involves the following steps.

We are asked our last name.

We give it, explaining that there are two words, Kelly and Lowenstein, with no hyphen in between them.

The person in front of us or on the other end of the phone line concludes that our last name is either Kelly or Lowenstein.

We repeat our original statement.

I often add that I took Dunreith’s name, which was Kelly, while she took Lowenstein, so that together our last name is Kelly Lowenstein.

The person appears to understand, and then asks if we have a hypen in our name.

We say again that we do not.

Although this may seem like an enormously tedious and time-consuming experience, it can have certain advantages in journalism.

In my experience, the vast majority of administrative assistants have been women.

I’ve found that telling them about having taken Dunreith's name elicits one of two reactions.

“That’s interesting” or “That’s different” is the first.

The emotion behind this response can range from intrigued to skeptical.

The second response happens more frequently.

Much more enthusiastic, it includes statements like “That’s sweet” or “I’ve got to talk to my husband about that.”

The point for me as a journalist is my hope that the goodwill indicated by the second response will lead to my message being passed along with more alacrity.

I don’t have any data to prove this actually happens, and it certainly feels that way.

In this context, then, an additional reason for my being excited to travel to Chile was the fact that folks go by two unhyphenated last names here.

For those who don’t know, people generally have their father’s last name in the place where the Kelly is for us, while their mother’s surname goes where the Lowenstein does.

I will say that the attendance sheet I received from the University of Diego Portales for the Data Journalism course I'm offering gave me pause as the majority of the students were listed as having four names.

For example, what would you think a student named “Doren Jara Lowry Sebastián” would be called?

If you said, “Lowry Doren,” with Lowry being his first name, you were ahead of me.

By at least two, if not three, steps.

My confusion was not aided by the fact of our having two Oscars-the first one on the sheet is “Delbene Peñaloza Oscar Felipe”, while the second is “Pacheco Castillo Oscar Walter”-or that several of the students have three names.

Then there's Rafael.

He was not on the sheet at all, but wrote down that his name was “Rafael Martinez.”

But when he sent me his email, it said that his name is “Rafael Martinez Carvallo.”

Throw in the additional factor that just three of the students have attended of the classes, and I don’t mind say that it’s been a bit of a struggle for me to get my head around the whole issue.

Over time, though, a pattern emerged.

If there are four names on the register, the first of the four is the father’s last name and the one that the student uses.

The third name is typically the student’s first name, while the fourth name is the student’s middle name.

In other words, “Aburto Miranda Katherinee Alejandra” is “Katherinee Aburto.”

“Araya Marambio Hernán Felipe” goes by “Hernán Araya.”

And so on.

My understanding of my students’ names has had an accompanying revelation.

Even though most of them have a pair of unhyphenated names, they and other folks at the university don’t look at my last name and think that it is Kelly Lowenstein.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

On professional invitations, name tags for presentations and students greeting me in the hallways, a consistent name rings out.

Jeff Kelly.

Dunreith loves it.

I don’t mind, either, even if I do feel a twinge of disappointment at the knowledge that the end of explaining our name choice is not as imminent as I had first hoped after arriving.

Chilean Chronicles, Part XXIII: Latin American Journalism Conference

I’ve been sending the students in my Data Journalism class at the University of Diego Portales a lot of emails. Over the weekend I let them know about a year-long fellowship sponsored by the Open Society Institute.

I sent them a notice about the Massive Online Open Course about Data Journalism offered by the Knight Center.

And, on Thursday night, I forwarded them an email saying that I had gained admission to the final day of to the second Cumbre Latinoamericana de Periodismo, or Latin American Journalism conference that was organized by the Colegio Latinoamericano de Periodistas, or Colaper. A host of organizations, including the University of Chile, Reporters without Borders, and professional journalism organizations from Chile, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru, among others.

The next morning, I ventured to the Room of Honor at the former Chilean Congress to attend the final morning of the three-day summit that brought together about 80 journalists from 17 countries, according to Claudia Castro, who helped organize the conference.

The focus was on press freedoms, and, overall, the news was not positive.

While Ecuador, Venezuela and Colombia were the major countries of concern, several presenters voiced their distress about the current media environment here.

Maria Pia Matta, who heads the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters, was one of them.

Sitting in front of portraits of two mustachioed politicians whose portraits hung underneath classical design ringing the room and between golden colored flowers that flowed into lamps, the diminutive Matta took direct aim at Chilean media.

“We are not neutral,” she said at one point, her hands gesturing animatedly, her voice rising in volume and intensity. “We have a position.”

Matta was referring to fellow community radio providers across the world. Her comment struck at the doctrine of objectivity to which she said too many journalists erroneously cling.

She also spoke at length about the difficult conditions to which many Mapuche, members of Chile’s largest indigenous group, seeking to do community radio work are subjected. Matta explained that the Mapuche had a legal license to operate a community radio station, but had it taken away after they tried to use it.

In general, resources for community radio workers around the planet are scarce, according to Matta. About 95 percent of people who work in the field are volunteers.

In response to a student's question, Matta said that she was open to community radio receiving governmental support provided that they could retain editorial autonomy.

The imbalance between the geography and range of coverage was another element of Matta’s critique. We only learn about what is going on in Santiago, she said. People don't know what's happening in their communities. We need more diversity of coverage.

But if the content offerings are not sufficiently diverse, the people attending the event certainly were.

There was Irene Helmke, a Chilean with German roots who studied at Columbia Journalism School, lived in the United States for a decade and speaks fluent Spanish, German and English.

As is quite common here, people hear me speak Spanish and, after hearing my accent, respond in English.

I kept going with the Castilian, which meant that Irene would say something in English to which I would respond in Spanish.

With Alejandra Izarra, who recently arrived in Chile from her native Venezuela, the conversation was puro espanol.

Izarra, who earned a Master’s degree in Marketing from Rafael Belloso Chacín University, is looking for work.

Aurelio Henriquez, who flew in from the Dominican Republic, has plenty of it.

In addition to being the chief of communications for the state-sponsored lotteries in his home country of the Dominican Republic, he also heads an online outfit called Diariodom.com.

Henriquez explained that he has a team of 12 people, including reporters in the capital and most, but not all, of the country’s provinces. (That’s a goal he’s working to achieve.)

There also were students from Ecuador, journalists from Colombia, another presenter from Peru, and, when Castro was going through the list of represented nations, an audience member called out repeatedly that Mexico was present. Participants were treated to a full slate of topics during the days.

Other sessions included looks at ethics, human rights, investigative Journalism and political journalism

At the end of Matta’s presentation I identified my Fulbright and Hoy affiliations, explained that Hoy wanted to hear Matta’s voice and that of other participants, and extended an open offer to print opinion pieces of about 800 words.

About a dozen participants seemed interested and passed me their cards.

Others wanted to take a picture with me.

This included a Peruvian journalist and a Chilean colleague.

We put our arms around each other, smiled for the camera, and, after we saw the results, jokingly complimented each other on our good looks. (Que caballeros! We exclaimed.)

One month from yesterday marks 40 years since the United States-backed coup that overthrew democratically-elected Salvador Allende.

Chile and Peru have had diplomatic disputes and wars that go back to the 19th century, and that continue until today.

But in that room, for that moment, there was unity and camaraderie animated by a common goal and professional creed.

It certainly wasn’t enough to change the absence of press protections in Venezuela and other nations, but it was a moment of unity and camaraderie animated by common goals, values and a shared professional creed.

My students will hear about that tomorrow when we meet in person.

After class, I'll probably send them some more emails.