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 89: October Behind, November Ahead

Our journey just keeps expanding.

If September was about an unprecedented eruption of memory on the fortieth anniversary of the Pinochet coup followed by a week-long celebration of the nation's independence, October was marked by journeys to countries and places we had never been.

We flew first to Rio for the Global Investigative Journalism Conference.

Traveling to Brazil was by itself a remarkable experience, and what struck me even more was being in a community of 1,300 investigative journalists from 90 countries around the planet.

It was like a wedding in which all of the guests loved to dig dirt on public officials, Four days of conversations begun and interrupted, but no one took offense.

Though these interactions I met colleagues whose work in countries where, as opposed to the United States, there are no laws requiring authorities to produce the information they request.

Journalists whose work in revealing the truth about what is happening are met with threats or blackmail.

Like a female journalist from Azerbaijan whose revelations of malfeasance by the president's family prompted authorities to plant a hidden camera in her bedroom and record her intimate moments with her boyfriend.

Or a young woman from Iraq who conceals her identity to preserve her safety.

Or a new friend from Brazil who traveled up and down the nation's borders to expose the trafficking and abuse of children.

Their dedication and courage and resilience moved and inspired me.

I returned from Rio to teach, but Dunreith continued to Brasilia, where she spent rich and relaxing days with her former student Veronica and her family.

A week later, we flew to Buenos Aires with its wide tree-lined boulevards and European-influenced elegance to meet Dad and Lee before they embarked on a 17-day tour that will take them down to the continent's southernmost point and around into Chile.

We saw the groups of mothers who have marched since the beginning of Argentina's Dirty War, waging a ceaseless struggle to learn the whereabouts of their disappeared children and husbands and brothers and sister, calling over and over again for those who ordered and carried out these heinous actions to be brought to justice.

We visited the detention center at ESMA, the former naval school, the largest of the country's network of hundreds of sites where Argentines were tortured and killed.

About 5,000 detainees entered ESMA.

Only 200 survived.

But we also visited Cafe Tortoni, the continent's oldest cafe that oozed with Old World charm and swagger, a place where poets and artists and writers and dancers and plain folk have come for more than a century and a half.

We had lunch at El Ateneo, the former theater turned bookstore that in 2008 was named one of the world's most beautiful bookstores.

We had a parillada, a plate of all kinds of meat, with Colombian friend and fearless journalist Jenny Manrique in the Palermo Hollywood neighborhood. The plate was filled so high with ribs and chicken and sausage that a friend of Facebook deadpanned that she gained five pounds just by looking at it.

I visited and learned from the folks at La Nacion, the country's second-largest newspaper and a place where the data team is showing remarkable persistence and creativity in accessing, cleaning and displaying data online and in the newspaper.

All of us soaked in the energy and openness and generosity of the Argentine people we met and whose eyes showed their pleasure when we told them how excited we were to be in their country.

We also traveled to Colonia, Uruguay, a town of just 25,000 a ferry ride and a country away from Buenos Aires. Together we strolled along the cobble-stoned streets in the community that alternated between Portuguese and Spanish control nine times during the years 1680 to 1825, when the nation won its independence from Spain.

We spoke with our tour guide Maria, a woman with short, pulled-back brown hair and a blue pants suit, about why Uruguayans twice had voted against reversing a law that granted amnesty to the leaders who ruled the country during the dictatorship from 1973 to 1985.

There was a war, she said. People did bad things on both sides.

And, at the end of the month, Jon and I learned that our application to gain funding to use the upcoming elections here in Chile to explore the degree to which the country's past lives in the present had been accepted.

Each of these experiences, each of these journeys to places which for years had only been places on a map and not somewhere that we would actually visit, has meant something.

Each conversation and encounter with someone with whom I have a shared passion for story and uncovering and sharing truth, has mattered.

They've mattered because they've contributed to a continually widening and deepening yet also shrinking sense of the world and of the interconnection of people who come from different backgrounds and cultures and classes and races and languages, but who share values and commitments and beliefs.

October's behind us.

November begins today.

I'm optimistic that the expansion will continue.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 79: Fulfilling The Road

It's been four days since I returned from Brazil, and life has started to resume its (for now) normal rhythm here in Santiago. I've worked with students and colleagues at the University of Diego Portales, had lunch at my favorite place near campus-you can get a tasty and filling meal of chicken and mashed potatoes for just $4-and taught our final English class to the adult learners at UDP's American Corner.

After Dunreith arrived back from Brasilia last night, we resumed our ritual of watching Los 80, Andres Wood's show that takes us through a pivotal decade in Chile's family through the eyes of the Herrera family.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vFVu9Sbdl8&w=560&h=315]

But the ripples of the conference remain, whether starting to explore the website mastery of the remarkable Gianinna Segnini or passing out the business cards I collected to my students and having them read out the countries of the new colleagues and friends I met.

One of them was a young female investigative reporter from Iraq.

She's slight, with long, straight, black hair and is just a few years older than the fourth-year students I have the honor to teach.

We met outside the Royal Tulip hotel where we were both staying and took a cab to the campus where the conference was held.

I'm not going to share her name because she doesn't use it when she reports.

She uses a pseudonym instead.

Her byline has no picture above it.

She gives no interviews.

And, while some of her immediate family know what she does, many others think that she works in a bank.

This reporter takes these measures to protect herself.

Because of the nature of what she writes-her most recent project is an expose of corruption in Iraq-she could be killed if her identity were to be revealed.

She told me this in a matter-of-fact manner, as if she were talking about the type of computer she uses or where her office is located.

She spoke without hesitation, fear or any plan of stopping doing what she loves.

On Tuesday I told my Chilean students about this brave young woman and her work.

On Wednesday, I wrote to her, along with all of the other folks I met at the Rio conference.

In the note, I shared with her that the young journalists in my class now know about her because of what I told them.

Today, she answered.

She thanked me for my email and then wrote a simple, but breathtakingly profound, statement:

People who appreciate our work are the ones who help us to fulfill the road

Think for a minute about the interrelationship she suggests between the author and the audience, the writer and the reader.

Think about the community she implies of journalists dedicated to digging up and sharing the truth with people about what is happening in their countries.

Think about the road she invokes and its direction toward a more open, informed and peaceful world.

Consider her idea that being appreciated does not mean that others do the work for us.

But it does help.

She went on to tell me that her most recent project will be published in Arabic and English if she can find an outlet before thanking me again for my note.

The gratitude is mine.

I'll continue to move forward with projects here and planning with Dunreith what we will do when we return to Chicago.

But as I do, I'll also think at moments of the wisdom of my courageous young Iraqi colleague, who continues to expose the truth of what is happening in her homeland, all the while being strengthened by those who acknowledge and encourage what she does.