Chilean Chronicles, Part 100: The Joy and Honor of Working with Jon Lowenstein

Our time in Chile has been an extraordinary and expansive time for many reasons.

Dunreith and I have been animated by a sense of adventure that’s been heightened by having sold our house the day before we flew to Santiago.

We’ve been treated with enormous and continuous generosity by colleagues, students, taxi drivers, and Chileans of all stripes, ages, classes and political backgrounds.

We’ve had the chance to travel within and outside the country to places that in some cases we had dream of going for years, even decades.

We’ve also had a heavy dose of family.

We flew to Buenos Aires to meet Dad and his partner Lee for five days before their two-week cruise in Argentina and Chile.

We’re about three weeks into a more than month-long stay with Aidan, who’s fresh off a fantastic semester of study and travel in New Zealand.

We also had my brother Jon here for two work-filled weeks.

Jon likely would have come here to visit us anyway, and having a professional purpose clinched his decision.

That came in the form of our successful application to the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. We put in a proposal that said we would do a three-part series for the The New Yorker’s Photo Blog, a similar project for Vivelohoy, and a number of blog posts for a combination of the Huffington Post, the Ochberg Society, Hoy and my personal blog.

Jon and I have collaborated before.

We’ve covered police brutality on Chicago’s South Side.

We participated in a fellowship where we did a project about the experience of undocumented Latino migrants who become disabled on the job. (This was the one for which I taught myself Spanish.)

We’ve traveled to the far reaches of Northern South Africa to cover life in a rural community there and the efforts of Evanston resident Ann Covode to bring a library and other educational support to the children in the community.

It was during this project that, after a formal ceremony and introduction, one of the teachers told us in front of the staff that they had prepared a delicacy for us to eat: a cow’s hoof.

Last year we flew to Dad’s hometown to photograph and write about his return there for the first time in 73 years.

These have all been remarkable experiences, and the work we did in Chile was our most ambitious yet.

Over the course of a series of conversations, we defined our scope.

We would look at Chile’s past, present and future 40 years after the Pinochet coup.

The past would involve going to memory sites like the Museum of Memory and Human Rights and Villa Grimaldi, interviewing survivors and activists who had lived through the time like Ana Gonzalez, a feisty 87-year-old with bright red fingernails whose husband, two of her sons and a pregnant daughter-in-law were murdered by the government during the dictatorship, and talking with memory scholars like friend Hugo Rojas.

The present consisted of covering the first round of elections that pitted nine presidential candidates against each other, including frontrunner and former president Michelle Bachelet of the Nueva Mayoria, or New Majority, and childhood friend Evelyn Matthi of the conservative Independent Democratic Union.

And the future including talking with young, digitally-savvy Chileans who grew up during and after the dictatorship and who are working to improve the country.

People like Jaime Parada, the son of Pinochetistas whose parents joined neighbors on the street in weeping the night in October 1988 that Pinochet lost the plebiscite that would have kept him in power.

Last year Jaime became the first openly gay public official in Chilean history when he won a Councilman position in the wealthy, politically conservative Providencia neighborhood. Since his election he’s worked with reform Mayor Josefa Errazuriz to push for, and win, a battle to change the name of one of the community’s major streets from Avenida 11 de Septiembre, a name that honored the Pinochet coup, to Nueva Providencia, or New Providencia.

People like the light-blue shirted volunteers of TECHO, a non-profit group founded in 1997 by Father Felipe Berrios and some young Chileans to help individuals and communities fight poverty. Since its inception TECHO has evolved from doing construction work to a more ongoing and holistic approach in which they work with community members to diagnose, and then set a plan to meet, the community’s needs.

Together we went to a campamento, or shantytown, in the La Florida neighborhood that cropped up after powerful floods devastated the area in 1997. The volunteers there were in the process of setting up a community center; other campamentos with a TECHO presence have tutoring programs, a library and micro-enterprise stores.

Being able to do work that you love is a tremendous gift.

Doing that work with one of your brothers for one of the world’s top magazines is even greater.

Indeed, many of the day that Jon was here, before I left the apartment, I’d say to Dunreith, “I’m going over to Jon’s apartment. We’re on assignment for The New Yorker.”

And a riveting assignment it was.

Together Jon and I went to Algarrobo to interview Hernan Gutierrez, who was 13 years old when he witnessed decapitated bodies floating down the Mapocho River shortly after the coup.

We spoke with Mario Hernandez, who told us about waiting on Salvador Allende and Pablo Neruda as well as serving high-ranking members of the dictatorship.

We went to Villa Grimaldi and spoke with Carlos Contreras, who still had the chess board he made out of cardboard to play with fellow inmates when they were detained in 1974.

We attended the end of campaign event for presidential frontrunner Michelle Bachelet, listened to her race through her speech and met former President Ricardo Lagos.

I shook his hand and told him that I had seen his finger years earlier. (His finger-wagging calling out of Pinochet was seen by many as a critical moment in the “No” campaign.)

We went together to the Open Mind Fest that was sponsored by MOVILH, one of the nation’s leading gay and lesbian activist groups, that stretched across four city blocks. Jon shot picture after picture of the drag queens who were the unofficial stars of the event, of young lesbian couples holding hands and of the youth dancing and swaying and vibing at the four stages set up along Paseo Bulnes.

Jaime Parada told us that MOVILH held the event near the presidential palace and congressional offices to remind politicians of the community’s clout.

The message appeared to be heeded, as five of the nine presidential candidates attended the event.

Beyond all that we did, the project was a chance to learn from Jon, who is one of the planet’s top photographers.

He shoots and shoots and shoots, getting closer and closer to the action, swerving as he identifies an opportunity to make a picture, letting the place speak to him, always thinking about how he can be do better.

Jon’s been shooting seriously for more than 20 years, and continues to expand his skill and scope. His passion for photography, storytelling and documenting what’s happening in the world remains undimmed. If anything, it’s only grown stronger with the passage of time, clarity of vision and commitment to his craft.

We didn't only work.

Together with Dunreith, Dad and Lee, we'd have lengthy dinners topped off by nightly servings of ice cream. We'd carve out space to laugh about family stories and discuss the latest developments in the NBA.

I don't want to suggest that the collaboration was easy at every moment.

It never is with two strong-willed people, let alone two brothers with more than four decades of history.

And there’s no doubt in my heart and head that working with Jon was a joy and an honor, and something I’ll remember for as long as I can remember.

Living in Chile has been magnificent, and the project with my brother is a big part of it.

I can’t wait for the next one.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 93: On Albie Sachs and Giving Thanks

I’ve learned a lot from Albie Sachs over the years.

The South African freedom fighter and classical music lover whose taking the other as a Supreme Court Justice elicited a tear from then-President Nelson Mandela endured solitary confinement and a car bomb in Mozambique that cost him much of his right arm and part of his vision.

I first saw him at a conference in New Haven, Connecticut that Marc Skvirsky and I attended with Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow. Among many important things he said that day was that although Mandela had near-perfect pitch with the people he led, one should not mistake the leader for the source of the victory he and so many others had dedicated their lives to winning.

Speaking in his mellifluous baritone voice, his left arm moving animatedly, Sachs also cautioned against moral relativism.

Apartheid was evil, he said. We were better. And we won.

A few years later, he spoke at a community event for Facing History and Ourselves around his book, The Free Diary of Albie Sachs, a work that chronicled his six-week journey with then-partner, now wife, Vanessa September, to London and other European capitals.

In his opening comments Sachs talked about the dreams that he had had as a younger man of living as a free man in a country that was being transformed from a site of intense evil to a thoroughgoing democracy with many official languages, one of the world’s most far-reaching and inclusive constitutions and open debate of the questions of the day.

He also talked about living with a woman with whom he wanted to spend his life.

These dreams, he explained, had all come true.

Although I understood the meaning of Sachs’ words, I didn’t feel them the way he seemed to.

Now, I do.

There are moments, and I’ve been blessed to have a number of them recently, where I literally cannot believe the abundance of gifts and love I’m privileged to experience.

Where I wake up wondering not so much what I’m going to do, but which delicious set of options we’re going to explore together.

The past few weeks, which have seen Jon come here for a couple of weeks so that we can work on a project about Chile’s past, present and future.

A week later, Dad and Lee, whom we had seen in Argentina and Uruguay, were in for a week after their glorious two weeks plus tour that took through Argentina and down to the southernmost part of the continent before heading to the spectacular views of Torres del Paine, up into Chiloe and meeting us again in Santiago.

There are the gains that the students in my Data Journalism class have made, the pair of conversations in the next couple of weeks sponsored by the Fulbright Commission in which I’ll share preliminary results about my research into the nation’s 2009 Transparency Law, the news we’ve heard about the memorial event in Essen led by the indefatigable Gabriele Thimm that she told us was the best ever and the plans we’re formulating to advance the project, the events that we are planning in Wellesley and Cambridge and Arica or Punta Arenas.

All that is beautiful, and one of the most meaningful parts for me and for us is that Aidan got here on Sunday for what will be a month together in Santiago, in Northern and Southern Chile and in Peru’s fabled Incan ruins of Machu Picchu.

He’s just returned from a semester in which he traveled to New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia and the United States before he set foot here. It’s a treat to spend any time with him, let alone such a concentrated dose, and, in parts at least, Internet-free zone.

Underneath all of these experiences is a sense of possibility and flow, of the great fortune of being in a space it feels deeply possible to successfully integrate family and friends and language and investigation and teaching and writing and networking and traveling and food and drink and discussion and applying for new opportunities and converting those that arise and working more and more to do what we all need to do in life, which is to steer the ship of our lives.

This is not to say that we live in a perfect world.

Far from it.

Indeed, some initial discussions with Aidan have only reminded us how deeply flawed the world is that we will leave to his generation.

Nor is it to say that I’ve always felt this way.

That, too, has not been the case.

Indeed, my appreciation of this moment is deepened not only because I am more aware than before of life’s finitude, but because this more profound sense of possibility and authority comes after years of having a different gut-level conviction.

So, as Hannukah begins, after we’ve had one Thanksgiving meal and before we’ve had another, with a series of Chilean adventures behind us and more ahead, with family having departed and our son here, the sun shining in a cloudless sky, the breeze rustling the curtains of the room where Dunreith and I are next to each other, I am immensely grateful for my life’s abundant gifts.

I imagine that wherever he is, Albie Sachs is giving thanks, too.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 92: Pure Joy as Jon Arrives and Family Time Begins

There's nothing else like it.

The feeling you get around those who knew you when, the people with whom you shared the most formative, embarrassing, meaningful and ordinary moments of your lives.

Those with whom you grow up and whose progression through the life cycle helps you mark your own life journey.

Your family.

Our time here in Chile has been an extraordinary one for many reasons.

One of the most important of these is that Dunreith and I are sharing this adventure.

That we sold our house the day before we left only heightens our sense of carving this chapter together.

Late last month we had the pleasure of spending five glorious days with Dad and his partner Lee in Argentina and Uruguay.

They'll be coming here next Thursday after a 17-day tour that has them heading down to the continent's southernmost point before making their way up Chile to Santiago.

They'll also be here with my brother Jon, who arrived in Santiago this morning for a two-week stint during which we'll do a journalistic project.

It promises to be a period of intense activity. I've been exerting a lot of energy calling and emailing to make sure we take full advantage of the opportunity.

I'm optimistic that we'll do just that with a hard push.

And, mostly, I feel tremendously fortunate not only that we have this time together, but that we're able to collaborate on work that we love.

Jon's arrival marks the beginning of our final seven weeks here in Chile.

Dad and Lee will stay until November 21.

Aidan, who set off for Bali today after finishing his expansive semester in New Zealand, lands a few days later.

He'll be here for a month.

During that time we'll travel to northern Chile to see the desert and to the south to spend time in Chiloe and Patagonia, a place Dunreith first wanted to visit in 1977 after reading Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia.

We'll also spend close to a week in Peru, including several days in legendary Incan site Machu Picchu.

Time with any family member is something to be treasured, particularly since we no longer live near each other.

Having that time with Aidan, especially in places where none of us will have access to the Internet, feels even more so.

Dunreith, Jon and I met at our place after I had finished with teaching and meeting and interviewing and planning.

We all walked to our favorite Peruvian restaurant, where Jon had his first dinner on Chilean soil as well as his Peruvian pisco sour. We made plans for what we'll do tomorrow and the weekend and as much of the next week as we've got lined up at this point.

We savored the three types of ceviches, feasted on the classic Peruvian dish of aji de gallina and devoured the crepe-covered ice cream and the tres leches cake.

After dinner we took the Metro down to La Moneda, the presidential palace that was bombed on Sept. 11, 1973, the day on which Salvador Allende delivered his famous final speech to the Chilean people.

The massive Chilean flag that is so often unfurled and waving in the wind during the day was still.

The palace was surrounded by a wall marking it off as a construction site.

Dogs lay on the sidewalk, looking, and perhaps even being, dead.

O'Higgins Street bustled with activity.

The three of us walked to the site to get a better look at the front of the palace.

A statue of Diego Portales, one of the nation's most critical political figures, loomed in the distance.

We strolled past the parking garage and into the cultural center and saw a large, open space where workers were packing up chairs and speakers from a performance.

We went out the back and saw a statue of Allende standing above words from his final speech, "Tengo fe en Chile y su destino."

I have faith in Chile and his destiny.

We headed back to the Metro.

Jon stopped every few steps to take pictures of the dogs, of the political posters, of the artwork in the station of Chilean geography, and, after we got off at the Pedro de Valdivia stop, of a yellow public service announcement telling people to register their guns.

On one level, Jon's setting foot in Chile bring just a tiny hint of sadness because it means that the finish line to a remarkable time in our lives is visible, if only faintly.

But that wasn't what I felt tonight.

It was pure joy.

Chilean Chronicles, Part XXVIII: Meeting Dr. Juan Zuchel at Cerro San Cristobal

If there’s one thing Dunreith and I have learned in our first five weeks here in Chile, it’s that there are no end of places to meet people here. I met augmented reality ace and entrepreneur Eduardo Rivera at last month’s Data Tuesday, held at innovation space Movistar Innova.

I met Juan, a nine-year-old Colombian boy who had moved here four months ago with his mother, at the Federal Police Station in downtown Santiago.

I met Gonzalo and Jacqui Salazar while trying to get out of the civil registry compound to get a copy made of a page that the female bureaucrat said was insufficiently clearly written.

And, today, we met doctor, author, half-marathoner, two-time husband, father, grandfather, great-grandfather and Concepcion loyalist Juan Zuchel close to the summit of Cerro San Cristobal.

We were on a quest to make the four-mile trek so that we could approach, and even touch, the massive white statue of the Virgin Mary.

It’s not that I’m suddenly considering becoming Catholic. Rather, it’s that we can see the statue from the balcony where we’ve already been treated to all manner of gorgeous sunsets. On Thursday night, during a pleasant evening with several Santiago-based Fulbrighters, we learned from two of them who jog daily up to the top that it’s a very pleasant run and an accessible trail and decided to check it out for ourselves.

By the time we met Juan, we had already passed a determined group of red-jacketed and red-shirted striking postal workers gathered at Pio Nono, a major Santiago intersection that leads into the funky Bellavista neighborhood that’s heavy on lapislazuli shops and student eating and drinking options. (The University of Chile is right nearby.)

A number of workers appeared to have slept in tents next to the Rio Mapocho.

According to the Santiago Times:

The workers are asking postal service Correos de Chile — an autonomous state enterprise — for a 50,000 peso (US$97) raise per month. This figure was negotiated two years ago, according to Jessica Havia, the secretary of the National Postal Workers Syndicate (SOP). Already irritated over the delay in payment, new raises for managerial staff pushed workers to strike.

But if the workers were irritated, they certainly didn’t show it.

Like yesterday, they were chanting, singing, blowing whistles and horns and seeking to collect money from passersby in an effort to keep going as the strike extends to the end of its second week.

Dunreith and I walked to the left of the park where we had been our first weekend in Chile and started our trek up the mountain.

We had plenty of company.

A stream of walkers, bikers, bike-walking bikers, joggers, and cars also made their way toward the summit.

Although it’s still winter, the temperatures stretched upward of 75 degrees. As if often the case, Dunreith had more foresight than me and put on sun block.

But, though we brought a dozen tiny clementines that Dunreith had purchased yesterday at the Tirso de Molina market, neither of us had brought water. This omission started to take its toll as we wound our way around the sun-exposed asphalt surface.

The air got clearer as we rose in altitude, and we were increasingly able to see the smog that hangs over the city like a cloud and that seems, almost magically, to work its way into our two-room apartment at rates that requires twice, if not thrice, daily, cleanings.

Beyond the smog, we were also able to see the snow-capped Andes.

I took a series of pictures using the panorama feature, including one that also featured the multi-story gleaming glass cell phone building.

Enter Dr. Zuchel, who was coming down the mountain.

Clad in a blue t-shirt with a red Z inside a yellow triangular shape over his heart, he had a ring of sweat around his neck. He looked younger than his 68-years, had sturdy legs had propelled him to a second-place finish in his age group during last year’s Santiago half-marathon, and, we learned a little hairless, a nearly hairless chest.

“I call this a monument to consumerism,” he told us.

This was not the first critical comment we had heard about the structure.

During our first week in Santiago, Alejandra Fritz, our uber-guide at Pablo Neruda’s house La Chascona, fired a salvo against it, too.

It was fortunate that Don Pablo did not live to see this built because he would have had a direct view from his home and would not have liked it, she said.

For Juan, the anti-cell phone tower statement was only the beginning of his conversational gambit.

In short order, he informed us that he was from Concepcion and that he was both a surgeon and a forensic doctor who taught at the University of Concepcion, the most beautiful university in the land. (Here he dipped his head to show us the university’s name on his yellow hat.)

Juan also told us that he had a German father and Chilean mother, but could only speak a little German. He has four daughters and one son from his first wife and two daughters from his second one. He has seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild. One of the children is a doctor, while two others are psychologists, he told us after urging us to walk with him toward the summit.

Juan also let us know that he has written seven books about everything from love to children’s literature, that the entire area of Concepcion would support Michelle Bachelet, the former president who is currently seeking re-election, and that the pediatrician and former torture survivor would earn a decisive victory in November.

I also suffered under Pinochet, he told me as we continued walking closer and closer to the top. When I asked him for more details, he said that he had been detained repeatedly, but not tortured.

I can't lie, he said.

I told Juan that I hadn’t know how divided the country still was about the Pinochet era, adding that I had spoken with many people who offered freely their opinions that life was more orderly, respectful and generally better during the dictatorship than in the 23 years since he left power in 1990.

It all depends on your circle and how much it affected you, he answered.

The conversation was flowing easily and the increasing presence of tourist wares told us that the summit was getting closer and closer.

But, amidst all of Juan’s sharing, one part confused me; he kept telling us that he was looking for his green family car.

It’s got to be somewhere, he told me early in our conversation.

Where exactly that somewhere would be was not clear to me.

There appeared to be both no car that color anywhere in sight as well as absolutely no room in either lane for said car to park, if indeed it actually existed.

Juan kept referring to the car throughout our conversation and trek upward, which lasted about 20 minutes.

I found myself torn between wondering if his car was the Chilean version of Mr. Snuffleupagus, or if this was the entry point to some request for us to lend him money to get down to the bottom of the mountain on a funicular. We arrived to the top. Juan waved us through the gates and told us he would meet us inside since he had to wait for the auto.

We smiled, inwardly shook our heads, and gratefully gulped down the water, Gatorade and reheated mushroom and cheese empanada we bought from a stand near the end of a row. We walked up dozens of cobbled steps toward the massive white statue of the Virgin Mary, her arms uplifted to the heavens.

Like I do when I reach the halfway point of lengthy runs, I felt compelled to touch the structure before we turned to start making our way back down the mountain.

We walked past rows of neatly manicured and multicolored flowers as the strains of solemn religious music washed through the air.

Dunreith, who had just had a small bite of the empanada, brightened when she saw a stand where she could buy ice cream.

His back turned to us, Juan was standing there with a young girl with straight, blond hair.

He had shed the hat and was wearing a white t-shirt that declared his allegiance to the band Los Jaivas, a group whose members have mixed rock with South American ancestral music for the past half-century. (Juan had just seen one of their concerts the night before.)

After a quick consultation with Dunreith, I tapped him on the shoulder.

Juan turned.

His eyes gleamed when he saw us.

This is my youngest daughter, he said. I met my family.

So he had.

They were there, sitting on the brick ledge that lined the steps across from the ice cream shop.

His wife Valeska and second-youngest daughter Francisca.

His cousin Jaime, his wife Belen, their daughter Alejandra and granddaughter Ximena.

We chatted for a while.

Did he tell you that he’s written books? Belen asked.

He did, I replied. One book for every day of the week. He also told me about being a surgeon and forensic doctor, about running 10 half-marathons and about teaching at the University of Concepcion.

He told you a lot, Valeska said meaningfully, her tone suggesting that her husband’s loquaciousness was an occasional, if not frequent, source of irritation for her.

I talk a lot, but I don’t say much, I responded,then laughed much harder than anyone else in the group.

We moved on to other topics, like whether Francisca had a boyfriend (she did), and whether Alejandra might be interested in my brother Jon (She appeared intrigued, but Jon’s never having been married at 43, and, perhaps more important, the thousands of miles between their homes seemed to present a prohibitive barrier for her.)

The conversation was just at the point when it could have started to expand and go in all kinds of directions when Juan intervened.

Let’s go to the Virgin, he said.

His family rose as if they were a single person.

We hugged and kissed each other.

Before the family departed, I asked all of them to write their names down so that I could remember them.

More hugs and kisses, and the family started walking to their destination.

Dunreith and I turned to go, but, before we did, I read the names.

We’ll wait for you in Concepcion, Francisca had written in large blue letters, an explanation point with a strong line emphasizing her point at the end of the sentence.

I don’t know if we’ll go to Chile’s largest city, or, if we do, whether we’ll see Juan’s family.

But I do know that our time here has shown again and again the myriads of people, each of whom has their own unique story and particular desire to connect, that exist in this country, and in the world.

We didn’t need to come to Chile to learn this, of course.

And somehow being here and new and outsiders and open has allowed us to see this more than usual, and to benefit from the exchanges.

Tomorrow, Dunreith and I will go for a walk, see a museum or explore a new part of Santiago.

I can’t wait to see who we meet.