RIP, Nelson Mandela

I have had the honor to learn from Nelson Mandela in innumerable ways during the past 28 years. In the mid-80s, I learned about the personal sacrifices he made to fight for the liberation of his people and the country. During this time I first became involved in taking the often awkward steps from considering injustice to doing something about it after being exposed to the brutality of apartheid during the state of emergency. Grappling with guilt at my various levels of privilege in American society, I somehow felt soothed by what I saw as the unalloyed moral clarity of black South Africans fighting against the evil white oppressive government. I hungered to go there and know that land.

In 1990, shortly after his release from Victor Verster prison, I took part of the afternoon off from selling Green Monster and Bleacher Creature t-shirts at Fenway Park to head down to the Esplanade with my best friend Vinnie D’Angelo. Hearing the unbowed Mandela thank, in his firm formal and heavily accented tones, “the peo-ple of Mass-a-shoe-setts” for their role in the anti-apartheid movement helped me understand humanity’s interconnectedness and the ceaseless struggle for justice that he continued to wage until his final breath.

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In 1991, I learned about his fierce determination as he strode up to the front of the hall where negotiations were being held between Mandela’s African National Congress and F.W. deKlerk’s ruling National Party and answered the leader’s attack against the ANC.

“Even the head of an illegitimate, discredited, minority regime as his, has certain moral standards to uphold,” Mandela said in icy tones. “He has no excuse, because he is a representative of a discredited regime, not to uphold moral standards.

“And he has abused his position because he hoped that I would not reply. He was completely mistaken. I am replying now,” Mandela continued.

In 1994, I wept as I watched 89-year-old women being carried into voting booths they had waited a lifetime to enter. Dressed in a blue three-piece suit, Mandela demonstrated the importance of a leder’s words in articulating the hopes and standards of a wounded country emerging from its darkest time when he delivered his often-quoted, if not fully realized, injunction that, "Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another."

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In 1995, I realized a decade-long dream by living in Alan Paton’s Beloved Country. I taught and coached at the Uthongathi School, one of the nation’s first private multi-racial educational institutions.

It was one of the most important years of my life, and learning from Madiba was at the core.

My Fulbright exchange partner Vukani Cele got to meet then-President Bill Clinton.

I didn’t have the equivalent experience, but my education from Mandela continued nevertheless.

I had the privilege to witness the nation opening its wounds and delve into seemingly unspeakable public pain during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was a central element of Mandela’s effort to help move the nation forward, and, later, a model for the world.

This would not have been possible had Mandela not been able to master himself and his anger, to study the language of the Afrikaaners who imprisoned him for close to 30 years so that he could understand them, and to reach out not just to their leaders, but to their heart in his embrace of the Springboks, the rugby team who won an improbable victory over New Zealand’s mighty All Blacks just months before I arrived in August 1995.

I saw Mandela in person at a soccer tournament, and could scarcely believe the childlike joy he elicited in the tens of thousands of people who practically burst with joy at the sight of their leader driving around and waving to them.

I watched him dazzle English royalty during a fundraising trip with his dancing while wearing one of his many famous multi-colored shirts, his fists moving from side to side as he swayed to the music.

I also learned about his sense of humor, not the least of which was his ability to laugh at himself.

That quality was on full display in 1998, when he traveled to Harvard to become the first African to receive an honorary degree from the country’s oldest, most prestigious university.

He concluded his remarks by telling the audience who had gathered in the Yard about a cheeky 5-year-old girl who had called him a stupid old man.

If you agree with her, I would ask you to be a bit more diplomatic than this young lady, he said with a smile.

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Mandela continued to teach in how he retired from politics, leaving the presidency after one term when he could have easily won a second term because he wanted to strengthen the nation’s fledgling democracy.

He showed and lived the importance of speaking about even most taboo topics, talking about AIDS after he buried his son Makgatho, who had died of the disease.

He published a book of watercolors, supported dozens of charities and served on the global Council of Elders.

He even taught in his death.

Last December, Dunreith and I were with dear friend Ntuthuko Bhengu, whom I met during the year Vukani was working in Newton, when Madiba was going through yet another death scare.

Each time prepares us for the inevitable, Ntuthuko told me.

Today, mercifully, it came.

And, with it, the beginning of the sleep in the permanent peace he has so richly earned.

Of course, Mandela was not perfect.

No one is.

But, perhaps more than anyone during my close to half-century of life, he lived a near-perfect blend of service, integrity, leadership and humanity.

The world, and we, are better because of him.

Siyabonga kakulu, Madiba.

Usi Letela Uxolo.

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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 87: Students Progressing in Data Journalism Class, Channeling Paul Tamburello

I love to teach.

It's a passion that stretches across three decades and the past millennium back to high school, when I thought it would be fun to be a teacher someday and spoke to teachers about what and why they did.

In 1985 I worked with three- to five-year-olds four days a week at the Bellehaven Child Development Center in East Menlo Park.

I only was there for a quarter, but it was long enough for me to feel that I was where I belonged.

The following year, after my parents were in a near-fatal car accident, I returned home to be with my family.

Pierce School Principal Al Fortune invited me into his office, expressed his concern in a surprisingly quiet tone and offered me a job as a recess aide.

Touched by his gesture, I accepted on the spot.

I only learned later that the reason the job was open was because the previous recess aide had fled her post after having been pushed into the snow and pelted with snowballs by members of the eighth grade class who were labeled by adults throughout the building as "the worst class in 30 years."

The eighth graders were as advertised, eyes glittering with malice and the knowledge that they had toppled the last authority figure.

Nevertheless, I loved working with them and the rest of the grades.

After graduating from Stanford, I returned to Pierce for my most formative teaching apprenticeship: a two-year stint in Paul Tamburello's fourth grade classroom-the same class where I had been a student a dozen years earlier.

To this day I still draw on the lessons I learned in Paul's laboratory of teaching excellence.

He taught me how to help students chart their progress, how to cultivate a healthy sense of dramatic occasion and humor even as you're pushing the students beyond the limits of what they think is possible.

He showed me how and when to be firm, and how you can at times win by losing.

The more power you give out, the more power you get back, he would say.

Paul continually displayed an organic sense of learning, creating whole units from a student's comment that reinforced essential skills while showing his charges that they could follow their curiosity wherever it lead.

Above all, Paul demonstrated over and over again the importance of witness, tenacity and perspective.

I've applied those lessons in the quarter century since I finished what he called my "post-graduate degree in fourth grade."

Most recently, that has taken place in my Data Journalism classroom here at the University of Diego Portales in Santiago.

It took a while to sort out exactly who on the roster actually will attend the class on a regular basis, and we've gotten there.

It also has taken me a couple of months to fully understand the implication of the Chilean university system for students' attendance and delivery of the assignments I've given them.

As opposed to the United States, where students take anywhere from three to five classes, here students take as many as eight or nine classes.

This has all kinds of academic consequences for them, not the least of which is that they calculate exactly how many classes they need to make to reach the 60 percent departmental requirement to pass the course.

I've adjusted to this environment by assigning three cumulative projects throughout the semester, by working to make the class as stimulating as possible, to alternate between exhorting the students to attend and noting their absence, and, at base, to accept whoever comes that day as the lineup we have to work with for that session.

As Paul did throughout his teaching career, I've worked to link what we do in the class to the larger world. I do this so that students understand why they are learning what we are doing and so that they have tangible examples of where they can go.

Like Paul, I bring in guest speakers to expose students to the community of people throughout the world who share our love of data.

Today, the invitado, or guest, was Joe Germuska, a former history major from Northwestern who played a key role in the development of the Chicago Tribune's NewsApps team, and who has been, since December, working at Northwestern University's Knight Lab. This interdisciplinary space seeks to help advance news media innovation through exploration and experimentation.

He also helped me get here by introducing me at the June 2012 IRE conference to Miguel Paz, the founder of Poderopedia, a site that traces relationships between Chilean elites.

Miguel connected me to Carlos Aldunate, who wrote me the letter of invitation that was a requirement for becoming a Fulbright scholar.

Joe told the students about his background, talked them through a number of projects he had helped develop like the Chicago Tribune's crime site and CensusReporter.org, a tool he worked on that tries to make Census data more accessible to reporters.

He talked about the importance of placing data into context and of making information as accessible as possible.

He stressed the integrated approach to planning and development, saying they are related, not separate, stages.

At base, Joe emphasized the need to be skeptical, critical consumers of information and technology, and the role that programming skills can play in assisting.

The students applauded Joe's comments with genuine enthusiasm.

From there we went over yesterday's visit to La Nacion, the newspaper in Argentina I visited yesterday. I passed out stickers that Gaby Bouret and other members of the data team had given me.

We went over their midterm projects.

I told them in general what they had done well in comparison with the first one they had completed about a month earlier. I also went over the elements I liked from each student's project.

With some it was their graphic.

With others it was the map they had created.

Still others wrote a fine summary, opening paragraph or conclusion.

Projects' structure, writing skill and the fact of passing the work in at all each generated praise.

The students clearly understood better how to do data-oriented journalism, even if the depth of their work was not what it could be.

I told them other areas where they needed to improve and shared what I would do to raise the quality of my work with them.

One thing I had not done as well as I could have was to give the students sufficient time to work on the practical tools I had shown them.

So, after explaining how I was going to give them more time, I did just that.

The students spent the end of class starting with the assignment.

These are all strategies I absorbed during my apprenticeship.

It's always a positive sign when students voluntarily stay beyond the scheduled time the class ends.

That happened today with close to a dozen of them.

As they walked by me on the way out, they did a combination of shaking hands, exchanging high fives, or, in the Chilean custom, kissing me on the cheek.

Their eyes danced with pleasure.

So did mine, both because of the progress they are making and because of the space we have created amongst us.

In this space failure is a virtue and all are accepted.

In this space we learn from each other and the best idea wins.

In this space we work to support each other.

I am deeply grateful to all those, including Joe, who have helped me be here and have this opportunity.

I'm profoundly appreciative of my students for how they've engaged this new and often challenging class.

And I feel doubly blessed to have learned how to teach in Paul's class more than a quarter cenutry ago and to still be challenging what he shared with me all these many years later.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 68: We're Going to Machu Picchu

I still remember seeing the Cape of Good Hope for the first time.

It was in the fall of 1995.

I was on a 10-day fall break during my year at teaching at the Uthongathi School just north of Durban.

Fellow teacher Kay Wise, her boyfriend and later husband Suri Chetty and Suri’s brother Theju drove us down from Durban past the Garden Route and down to Africa's southernmost point.

We had already visited a tattered version of Dutch colonist Jan van Riebeeck’s fabled hedge of bitter almonds that Allister Sparks used as the framing metaphor as the separation between the European colonists and indigenous people in his book, The Mind of South Africa.

The day was cold and windy, the weather overcast.

I saw the point of land where the Indian and Pacific Oceans converged and merged.

During my years as a Social Studies teacher I taught many times about legendary Portuguese explorers Vasco da Gama and Bartolomeu Dias reaching, and then rounding that point on their way to India in search of an all-water trade route.

Standing on the same spot where the sailors had passed through unknown lands more than five centuries before changed forever my understanding of history and the world.

Whereas previously I had thought of the discipline I taught and loved as a series of dates, names, people and places to memorize and spit back, the greater the volume, the deeper my understanding, now I realized that I indeed could be and travel to and feel a connection to those people who had come before us and played a role in shaping the world we have inherited.

I thought of that moment yesterday when Dunreith and I, after a couple of weeks of searching and wading through Internet outages and hassles, pressed, “Compar” on the TACA Airlines website.

Buy.

The tickets we purchased will take us from Santiago to Lima, and then Cuzco, in Peru.

Machu Picchu lies just a couple of hours away.

I first learned about the Inca in seventh grade.

Steve Orrell was my teacher.

Sharply dressed, with thinning brown hair, he often took a break in between classes to buy or sell 1,000 shares on the stock exchange. (A tech company was a particular favorite.)

Mr. Orrell later left teaching to open a clothing store on Boston’s Newbury Street.

In his class, though, we had a major project about ancient Incan culture and civilization.

David Sharff, my early morning running partner and fellow newspaper boy, did the best one.

He earned a 98 for his elaborate drawings of Incan villages-he later became an architect-as well as his thorough description of the various aspects of Incan culture.

I left mine until nearly the last minute.

I don’t remember the exact day of the week that the project was due, but I do remember waking up very early in the morning two days before, sitting at our kitchen table and working to produce the project’s required elements.

I didn’t yet have an understanding of empires or colonialism. For me, this was material that I had to produce about a distant land that I did not even consider whether I would ever visit or not.

But I do remember the words Machu Picchu and the images of the glorious ancient temples that were the nation’s headquarters.

Yesterday’s purchase assured that we will see them.

The past 16 months have been a time of extraordinary gifts and realization of long-held dreams for me.

In May 2012 we traveled with Dad to his hometown in Germany for the first time in 73 years-a journey I had wanted to take for decades.

In November last year, with plenty of help from Dunreith and Paul Tamburello, I finished and published On My Teacher’s Shoulders, my memoir about learning from Paul at three distinct points over the course of 30 years. I had first discussed the project with Paul in the summer of 1999, months after I ran the Boston Marathon in his honor.

And in February of this year, I gained acceptance as a Fulbright Scholar to teach Data Journalism at the University of Diego Portales and research the impact of the 2009 Transparency Law on journalism here in Chile. In 2000 I filed the initial of what turned out to be four applications to participate in the program to travel with Dunreith and Aidan to live, teach and do research in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

These experiences, and the people we’ve met through them, have helped me gain an ever-stronger conviction that it is possible both to live a life based on deep and long-held dreams and fundamental values as well as to weave a life together with my blood and chosen families.

Based on that understanding, I need both to make sure I have enough space to reflect on my dreams, to give them the time and space to take specific form, and to work with those whom I love to make them real.

That process will continue in December, when Dunreith, Aidan and I board the plane and travel to a place I first learned about 35 years ago.

Once there, we’ll see the wonder of what the Incas created.

I expect that I’ll continue to savor my great fortune at being alive, too.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 66: Carlo Gutierrez and the Fight for Public Emails

As part of my work as a Fulbright scholar here in Santiago I’m looking at the impact of the landmark 2009 Transparency Law on investigative reporting.

I’ve written before about how the focus of my research has changed after I arrived here and found that my initial plan of doing a pre-and post-law analysis of content in the country’s leading news outlet was fundamentally flawed.

Instead, I’m taking the pulse of a range of folks who have been involved with the law.

Carlo Gutierrez, who heads the legal team of the municipality of Melipilla, is one of them.

We met briefly last week during our meeting with Melipilla Mayor Mario Gebauer.

Gutierrez was the point person for the municipality’s ultimately unsuccessful effort to gain access to emails that contained communication about how to distribute reconstruction funds after the devastating earthquake of February 2010.

I took the bus again to Melipilla, made my way to the city hall, and was directed to the back of a series of single-story buildings.

After asking three people for directions, I found Gutierrez’s modest office.

His name is printed on the wooden door. Neatly organized piles of paper sit like rows of cards in a solitaire game.

Gutierrez, who has a boyish face and longish black hair, arrived a couple of minutes after I did.

He had prepared a folder of material relative to the precedent-setting case he had filed and that led him eventually to present for the first time in his life before the country’s Supreme Court.

For Gutierrez, who had previously worked in the Interior Department, the initial request as well as the subsequent legal arguments, seemed straightforward.

The Transparency Law gives citizens the right to information by and about their public officials.

Digital communication like emails that are written from official accounts are covered by the law.

The subsecretary of the Interior, then, had a responsibility to supply the information he had requested on behalf of the community.

It didn’t go that simply.

Gutierrez explained that the agency answered neither the first nor the second request he sent.

When they eventually did answer, they refused to provide the information, citing privacy concerns of the public officials.

This struck Gutierrez as strange because they explicitly had asked for information from public officials written on public accounts about public business.

The community then appealed to the Transparency Council established by the law. It accepted the municipality’s argument and said that it had a right to the emails it had requested.

This time the government appealed to the regional court in Santiago. It’s the middle of three levels within the Chilean court system.

Gutierrez offered an oral argument before the court.

Again, he felt the issue at hand from a legal perspective was straightforward.

But the court of three judges found otherwise.

It held in favor of the defendants, accepting the argument that emails written by public officials on public accounts are not subject to the law.

On to the Supreme Court, the highest in the land.

Gutierrez again went and presented his oral argument. A lawyer for the Transparency Council joined him.

As opposed to the United States, where lawyers arguing before the Supreme Court have exactly 30 minutes and can be peppered at any minute by any of the nine justices, in Chile the lawyers have about an hour, Gutierrez said.

Also in contrast with the United States, where the questions the judges ask often can reveal the justice’s orientation in a case, Gutierrez explained that the lawyers only received a few questions, none of which sparked a meaningful exchange.

Earlier this year the court rendered its decision.

It held in favor of the defendants.

The decision was a bitter disappointment to Gutierrez, who felt that it was made for political reasons.

The court has reiterated its stance in ensuing cases filed by non-profit organizations like Ciudadano Inteligente. But what is perhaps of even graver concern is that Secretary General Cristian Larroulet is seeking to codify in law the restrictions that the court has placed through the cases on which it has ruled.

In Chile, legislation originates from the executive branch, then goes to the Congress and Senate for discussion and a vote before returning to the president to be signed.

As Secretary General, Larroulet has President Sebastian Pinera's ear and is doing his bidding. (Pinera already showed his anti-access position in 2011 when he sought to have members of the Transparency Council removed because of their support for releasing emails.)

Gutierrez holds some hope on the new government that he hopes would propose legislation that goes in a more, rather than less, open direction.

But he also is strongly concerned that the courts’ actions have struck a strong blow against the nation’s still fragile democracy.

Chile has been an authoritarian country in the past, Gutierrez said. A key tool in the transition to democracy is the access to information.

They have closed the window on that, he said, a trace of sadness crossing his face.