Chilean Chronicles, Part XXXV: Thinking in Spanish Before English

It happened for the first time the other day. I had just woken up and was thinking about the comments that I will deliver tomorrow about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.`s life and legacy to about 100 students at St. George´s school.

The thoughts came in Spanish, and went on for a little while before I made two realizations.

The first was that my reflex had been Spanish before English.

The second was that this wouldn´t be particularly useful at St. George´s because their medium of instruction is English.

I grinned nevertheless.

For me, learning a language is a long-term and fitful process.

While you can, if you master about 500 essential words in just about any language, function at a certain level, it can take years to get to the point where you no longer make routine gramatical errors, you have a firm command of idiomatic expressions and the first question out of people´s mouths after meeting you is not, “Where are you from?”

They´re generally asking this because it´s abundantly clear that, whatever country you have traveled from, it is definitely not the one where you are at that very moment.

The closest I´ve come to someone thinking I´m from Chile since Dunreith and I landed here in mid-July is a five-year-old girl whom we met while taking our initial hike in the Andes.

After she asked me where I was from, I told her to guess.

Argentina? She asked hopefully.

No, I answered, pleased that her lack of knowledge led me to entertain, if only for a minute, the delusion that I actually sounded like I hail from one of Chile´s neighbors and biggest rivals.

I´m not holding my breath for anyone who actually knows anything about world geography or accents to think that somehow I come from the southern part of Chile.

At the same time, I have been inching closer and closer to the point where I am no longer continually doing the translation dance of hearing spoken Spanish, translating it into English, formulating my response in English and then translating the words back into Spanish before opening my mouth.

This is why the St. George´s thought was so exciting for me.

I´ve come close to this point before in other languages.

I had a moment or two after my exchange with Lai-Ang Tea in eighth grade-the program was set up to be English and French, and somehow the American and the Cambodian, who I later realized was likely a genocide survivor, were paired-after I spent two weeks with his family when the words started to come in French before English.

In 1985, after a couple of months of study in Florence, Italy and several weeks of travel, I dreamed once in Italian.

Working at Hoy since March 2011 has been terrific for my Spanish speaking, reading and writing.

I still remember a couple of months into my stint there, when colleague and friend Leticia Espinosa, a Mexican national, leaned over to me after I had spoken and said, politely but directly, ¨Jeff, I notice that you use the verb “sembrar” a lot. That verb doesn´t exist in Spanish.

What are you trying to say?” she asked.

I want to say “ to seem,¨ I answered.

“Es paracer,¨ she replied.

Leti´s instruction was one part of the gifts that many, if not all, of the members of the Hoy team gave. Octavio Lopez corrected my error-riddled writing with efficiency and without complaint.

Still, even with all this support, the combination of interacting a lot with Tribune folks and those folks on the Hoy staff who are more comfortable in English has contributed to my not yet taking this step.

Until now.

When it happens again, and I´m optimistic that that time will not be long, I´ll again feel joy and satisfaction at arriving at this level of fluency.

I´ll be grateful for the help provided to me by Dunreith, who has consented to have us speak Spanish much of the time we are at our apartment in Santiago as well as on the streets as we experience our various adventures here in Chile.

I´ll also remember Brandon Magruder, my friend and former colleague at Community Renewal Society.

A thin, highly intelligent young man with spectacles, a beard and a distinguished manner that belied his chronological age, Brandon and I spent hours, literally, talking Spanish with each other.

We´d greet each other by saying, ¨Hola, señor.”

Hello, Sir.

Then we´d chat for a while in Spanish before going our separate ways.

For a while, we met daily during our lunch break to go over exercises in the Instituto Cervantes workbooks, chat about our lives and dream of the day when we could one day reach the highest level that Instituto Cervantes had established.

“Estamos leyendas en nuestras mentes,¨ we`d say.

We´re legend in our own minds.

Brandon and I have not yet reached the Promised Land of attaining the pinacle of Instituto Cervantes achievement, but we haven´t given up our quest, either.

Brief and small, like a bulb poking up in spring, my thought the other gave me hope that we´ll get there.

Poco a poco.

La lucha continua.

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.

Chilean Chronicles, Part XIX: On Four Weeks in Chile and Time's Rapid Passage

Around noon of July 28, 2001, Dunreith and I were at our apartment in Easthampton shortly before driving over to Look Park for our second wedding ceremony. Wearing a navy blue blazer and a Save the Children tie, I laid down on the couch that at times doubled as a bed to catch myself for a minute.

Dunreith’s father Marty looked over and said to me, “Enjoy it, Jeff, because tomorrow it´ll all be over.”

He was right.

Marty’s words came to me when I realized this morning that today marks four weeks since we caught a cab in the early morning from Joe, a 70-something, rail thin gentleman from Louisina, rode to O’Hare Airport and boarded the first of two planes that would take us to Chile.

The sense of accelerating time has only increased since I began teaching my Data Journalism class this week here at the University of Diego Portales and, more basically, as Dunreith and I have started to establish daily routines of visiting baked goods chain Castaño for our daily rolls, zipping into Mercado Providencia for a tomato, avocado, or palta, as they are called here, and some fruit, then getting going with the day´s activities.

On the one hand, this is a wonderful development.

Indeed, the rapidity of time´s passage comes exactly from the experience of establishing patterns of behavior that allow us not to have to think too much or too hard about quotidian tasks. In Evanston, this meant that Dunreith and I knew instinctively where to cross the street during the walks, and often had to just say a word or two to switch directions or change our destination.

Friend and Hoy colleague Rodolfo Jimenez showed me exactly where he would stand each day at the El stop in order to ensure that he got a seat, and the point was also that he was doing a repetitive action.

Being here long enough to start to shift from everything being new and fresh and requiring attention is, after all, a sign that we are settling in just fine and starting to establish the routines that can make daily life more comfortable.

We now chat with Senora Gloria, from whom we bought flowers at the mercado, are getting to know Don Rene in the stand across the aisle from her. Both have come to the Mercado for more than 40 years. (Senora Gloria giggled when that though she´s been at the market for four decades, she just got married four years ago.)

Both greet us with greater warmth and enthusiasm each time we enter the airy, spacious hall with yellow beams that hold us the triangular roof.

We greet Don Manuel, a mustachioed, grey-haired man who has plied his wares of household goods-Dunreith bought a pair of towels from him a couple of weeks back-in a cart in the Providencia neighborhood for the past 58 years, on the way to the Metro.

We know which way to turn when we exit the Los Heroes station near the University and when we return at the Manuel Montt stop.

Along the way to constructing these routines, which are still forming as we learn more and more about the specifics of life here in Santiago-unlike in our part of the United States, hummus is not always available, for instance-we have already had a series of extraordinary experiences that are precisely the reason why we wanted to come here.

We have had magical days of conversation and drink and food with inconceivably generous and welcoming colleagues and friends of friends and family.

Dunreith has had the space to immerse herself in a new language.

Together we’ve had the great and good fortune of arriving at a critical moment in the nation´s history as well as to talk with, and learn from, the people who lived through the Pinochet era and emerge on the other side.

Perhaps most fundamentally, we have stepped off what at times felt like a treadmill and moved even more into a life of deliberate choice based both on seeking to orient our lives around our deepest dreams and most basic values and on weaving the various strands of our life into a rich and lush tapestry.

Given all this, it's impressive to think that all of that has happened within our first 28 days here in Chile.

But, wow, it´s been fast.

The speed strikes me on two levels.

The first is that we spent so much time preparing and anticipating and packing and getting ready for our voyage here that it´s difficult to accept that a certain chunk of that time here is already over.

The second and related part is that, in many ways, our time here in Chile is a metaphor for life itself.

It´s not so much as John Lennon sang, that life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt3IOdDE5iA&w=420&h=315]

Rather it´s that, as I move through the latter part of my 40s, the pace of time’s passage feels increasingly pronounced.

The other day I wrote Nick Harrison, a friend from my eighth grade year in Oxford, England in 1978.

At the end of the email I said that it was hard to believe that it had been 35 years since we first met.

I gulped as I wrote the number.

Part of my throat’s movement came from the contrast between the number of years and how recent the memories of attending English and History classes with Nick, being doubles partners in tennis with him, and acting together in Hotel Paradiso feel in my heart.

The other part is from the knowledge that, as fast as these decades have gone, the next one will probably go just as quickly, if not more so.

At that point, Nick and I will be near the end of our lives, if indeed we make it that far.

The lesson, for me, is to live consciously, to spend time and energy with those people and doing those activities that mean the most, even as I move with the humbling knowledge that it is all but certain that what I will value most then will be different than what is most important now.

I also seek to savor each moment, heightened by an awareness of the layers of past experiences and future aspirations that provide the context for the particular experience.

It´s been 12 years since Dunreith and I had our public wedding ceremony and Marty offered me his sage words of advice, and more than three years since he passed.

For us, week four in Chile ends tomorrow.

This present moment, as it always is, is happening right now.

Chilean Chronicles, Part VIII: A Day in Five Parts

The days are getting awfully rich here, and we’ve barely been here 10 days. Breakfast with Santiago Times

Today’s adventures began early over breakfast at Emporio La Rosa in Bellas Artes, a funky, artsy neighborhood situated right between downtown Santiago and our Providencia neighborhood.

Dunreith and I left our place at about 7:15, and, after a brisk walk and some direction asking the old fashioned way-translation: we asked people where to go rather than consulting our cell phones or GPS-we arrived at our destination. Steve Anderson, founder and publisher of the Santiago Times, a longstanding English-only publication that has been online since its inception in 1989, was there to meet us.

Steve, a Texas and Arkansas native with curly, graying hair and a flowery shirt from his recently ended family vacation in Mexico, started the publication a couple of years after arriving toward the end of the Pinochet regime. He came to Chile in 1987 to do social justice work and has been here ever since.

He’s raised a family, bought a farm in Puerto Montt in the southern part of the country with turkeys and hens, and purchased three apartments in Santiago.

One of them houses the paper, which has grown from Steve’s hobby to a well-respected operation that is currently staffed by a blond Aussie editor named Joe Hincliffe, a bearded business manager from Bangor, Maine named Cort Hepler and a rotation of anywhere from eight to 10 interns, most of whom stay for three-month stints.

Steve spoke with pride of Times alums who used their time at the paper as a training ground to orient themselves in Latin America, and who have gone on to work at high-profile outfits like Reuters and Bloomberg elsewhere on the continent.

It’s a financial struggle, though.

Like media enterprises the world over, this one is thinking hard about how to have a viable future.

Over some tasty tostadas with avocado, we identified possible areas of collaboration and specific next steps.

Fulbright Chat

We took a quick jaunt a couple of blocks to check out the apartment/office and then walked with Cort to the Metro stop before zipping north to meet with Antonio Campana, the Fulbright Commission Director here in Chile, and Yunuen Varela, who provided absolutely invaluable logistical assistance for us in the months leading up to our flight two Thursdays ago.

We chatted pleasantly for an hour about the upcoming Fulbright orientation, the state of Chilean journalism and the impending presidential election. Antonio pointed out that former President Michelle Bachelet is trying to do what has not been accomplished in Chile in the more than two decades of post-dictatorship democracy: win a second term.

By law Chilean presidents are only allowed to serve a single term, something Bachelet did from 2006 to 2010.

Although there was a time early in her tenure when her approval rating was quite low, when she left it was at more than 80 percent.

It’s stayed there since, and, as Antonio pointed out, her strategy to avoid having it fall appears to be to make as few public appearances and comments as possible-a latter-day version of the “Rose Garden” tactic Jimmy Carter used to win the 1980 Democratic primaries.

Antonio went so far as to say that a very high percentage of the Chilean voting electorate, when asked, would be unable to explain Bachelet’s political program or the key issues on which she plans to focus, if elected to a second term in office.

His theory in part was that, as opposed to her first campaign, the far left parties are supporting her, and thus she wants to say as little as possible to alienate any members of her coalition.

He attributed Bachelet’s enduring popularity to many Chileans’ identifying with her personal journey of enduring her father’s being killed because he stayed loyal to the country's constitution and to democratically-elected President Salvador Allende in the face of the Pinochet coup, enduring torture, having gone into exile and then having returned. At the same time, he noted that she has been working steadily to increase her own power for the past three decades.

For her part, Yunuen said she was excited that for the first time in Chilean history there are two major presidential candidates who are women.

Mercado Providencia

The conversation wound down, we headed back to the apartment well equipped with a blue Fulbright Chile bag, a to-go coffee mug and a bunch of brochures. A little while later, went to Mercado Providencia, a covered market whose vendors sell all kinds of fresh fruit, vegetables, fish, chicken and meat as well as, in some cases, homemade prepared foods.

Dunreith and I followed a tip we had received and purchased piping hot empanadas from Empanadas Tinita, an empanaderia that we went to just in time because the line stretched to more than two dozen people who waited patiently for their freshly prepared concoctions.

They weren’t disappointed.

Dunreith went for cheese and mushroom, while I had the mariscos, or shrimp, that also had what we are learning of standard ingredients of hefty servings of onions along with eggs and black olives with seeds.

We like to ride our bicycles

Happily sated, we took advantage of the unseasonally warm weather to take our initial ride on the bicycles friends Miguel Huerta and Maca Rodriguez lent us the day after we landed in Santiago.

It took a while to unlock the bikes, adjust the seats and take them to a local bike store to get the tires pumped, and soon enough we were off.

It’s safe to say that it was a very different experience than our traditional jaunt down Lake Shore Drive’s bike path.

To begin, the bikes are much heavier than the ones we have in the United States, our seats kept sliding down as if they had their own will, we stopped repeatedly because of traffic lights, and the terrain is generally much more urban, with plenty of walkers, children, parents and cars with which to contend.

None of it mattered, as once again starting the endless rhythm of cycle stirred something deep and visceral within me.

We returned the bikes to our former apartment, got the makings for a quick snack and then walked down to the Movistar building where I had been invited to talk about our work with data at Hoy.

Data Tuesday

They took place on the second floor of the Movistar Innova building, an incubator zone for startups that had the requisite rows of casually dressed, potential entrepreneurs hunched over the Macbooks and talking in sing-song tones before the presentations began. in a long, high-ceilinged room with images of yellow, orange, pink and white balloons and bordered at each end by semi-circular arches. One part at the front of the room showed the time down to the second, while another at the back automatically calculated the number of people in the room at that moment. (The number ranged from 58 to 60 during the course of the evening.)

I spoke during my presentation about our evolution with data and as a team during the past three years, how we’ve moved from doing very little with data in 2010 to creating infographics in the daily two-page center spread, online photo galleries and a interactive map in 2011. I then explained how in 2012 we hired videographers, produced the Crunch Time series, created Google Fusion Maps, embedded tables in our posts from Google Docs and used Document Cloud to annotate our stories, before moving onto this year, when we built an in-house television studio and our remarkable intern Wil Morales became the driving force behind our food inspections application.

The other presentations were from Nicolas Kaiser-Bril, a French data journalist who started Journalism++, a company that does customized data visualizations and who has also developed free tools like Data Wrapper; Alvaro Graves from the winning team of a recent scrapeathon held in late June who in eight hours built an impressive site designed for parents and policymakers that looks at schools quality, distance and cost in Santiago; and Francisco Kemeny who owns a company named Black Sheep. He gave a very provocative look at big data, social media and choosing metrics that actually matter. (When I told him about being able to write an 800-word piece in Hoy, he said that he could do it in seven Tweets.).

The talks stimulated a bunch of questions, and the conversation continued afterward over tortillas, croquettes, fine wine and absolutely delicious egg custard and a creamy cheesecake- like dessert with strawberry flavor and a flaky crust delivered in a small cup and a smaller spoon

I spoke with Claudia, a reporter from El Mostrador who is very committed to reporting about the intense concentration of power in Chile, knows very little about data, and wants to attend the course I'm going to teach.

We also met Raul, a Colombian programmer from Cali who moved here to work for the big boys, is doing freelance work in Javascript and said there are a lot of high-quality coders in Colombia, Brazil, Argentina and Peru because those companies have large populations and faltering economies.

Raul contrasted the resources and opportunities for graduates here in Chile compared his country, saying that students here have the luxury of studying what they want and what interests them. In Colombia, he said, young people have to focus on making enough money to support their families.

This sparked a sharp response from Claudia, who cited the high percentage of people in Chile who barely make enough money to get by.

Raul rejoined, talking about the large number of Afro-Colombians who come to Chile chasing an updated version of the American Dream who ended up exploited and without the work they so desperately seek. (I wrote earlier about Donde Mi Negro, a restaurant owned by an Afro-Colombian who, like Raul, comes from Cali.)

Things were really starting to get interesting, especially since the woman serving the desserts had brought out one of the cheesecake ones just for me that blended just perfectly with the rich red wine I had already consumed.

But the crowd was starting to leave, and we did so, too.

It was fine with me.

Although I was not like the guy in the famous “Better get me a bucket” scene of Monty Python fame, I had already had way more than enough material to digest for the next couple of days.

We walked down to the first floor, said our goodbyes in English, French and Spanish to the people who spoke those languages, and once more strode to our apartment, the cool evening air hitting our faces as we went.

We didn't even want to contemplate what things will be like in December.