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 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.