Chilean Chronicles, Part 104: Returning Home to Chicago

We're in the air from Toronto to Chicago.

We've left Santiago, site of fulfilled dreams, 80 degree Christmas Days, our impossibly dusty postage stamp of an apartment, and the consumption of more pisco sours and glasses, well, bottles, of red wine than we could have ever imagined, and are heading back to the Windy City that has been our home since 2002.

With grins that stretched beyond our ears, Dunreith and I deposited the check from the house sale we completed the day before we left on our Chilean adventure.

It far exceeded our greatest expectations.

We had the great privilege of being in Chile as the nation confronted, more directly than ever before, the still raw wounds from the Pinochet coup that happened on September 11, 1973.

We attended vigils and memorials events and plays and conferences and documentary films and panels and book launches, all of which were dedicated to grappling with the enduring impact of the overthrow of democratically-elected Salvador Allende and the brutal aftermath.

I've lived in the United States close to 50 years, but never before had I witnessed the concentrated and unified focusing on a single event in our nation's history the way Chileans from Arica in the north to Punta Arenas at the end of the world turned their attention to the coup.

In October we witnessed the jubilant eruption of emotion issuing forth from Chileans who hugged, kissed, screamed and honked their horns when their beloved soccer team punched its ticket to the world's largest sport event, to be held next June in Brazil.

In November we went to election events and talked to voters of all persuasions and ages and sides of the political spectrum during what turned out to be the first of two rounds in the presidential elections.

And in December we traveled to Torres del Paine, a national park of unsurpassed and staggering beauty that recently was named the eighth wonder of the world, when Michelle Bachelet made history in becoming the first candidate ever to be elected president twice in the post-democracy era.

Beyond these momentous months in Chilean history, we received an enormously generous reception from Chileans with whom we had some connection-we met everyone from dear friend Marjorie Agosin's seemingly inexhaustible supply of cousins and former students to a female anesthetist Dad had helped train nearly 30 years ago to our colleague, friend of a friend, guide/secret weapon Alejandra Matus-and those whom we had the good fortune to meet through our travels.

My Data Journalism students at the University of Diego Portales gradually understood my Spanish, my teaching methods and the concepts and application of this type of journalism in a process that left both sides feeling enriched for the encounter.

My research into the landmark 2009 Transparency Act, after an initial shift in focus, led me to talk with journalists, lawyers, non-profit executives, government representatives and plain folks in a project that gave me a sharper sense of the law's as yet incompletely realized potential.

Dunreith and I traveled to the vineyards of the Central Valley, to the coast cities of Valparaiso and Vina del Mar. With Aidan we flew to the searing desert of San Pedro de Atacama, the world's driest such space, and to Patagonia, a place Dunreith had longed to visit for years.

We also ventured to Rio, where I had the honor of attending, teaching and presenting to colleagues at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference doing investigative work, often at great physical peril, throughout the world.

We flew to Buenos Aires, where we met Dad and Lee before they set off on a two-week tour to Southern Argetina and up through Chile, and strolled together down elegant, inordinately wide, European-style boulevards, ate ice cream at Cafe Tortoni, the continent's oldest cafe that oozes with swagger, listened and learned for three hours at ESMA, the largest of the Argentine dictator's network of detention centers, and feasted on the sights and food of El Ateneo, the former theater that has been converted into one of the world's most spectacular bookstores.

Jon and I had the tremendous fortune to receive a grant from the Pulitzer Center to do a project about the impact of the past on the present in Chile 40 years after the coup. Together we worked long hours over the course of two weeks for a three-part series that ran on The New Yorker's Photo Booth and on Hoy's website.

The family visits over our final six weeks in the country helped confirm to me the possibility of weaving together the people and passions and dreams and values that I hold most dear. Perhaps, greatest of all, it's fortified my increasing conviction that this way of living was not only possible, but could in a very real sense become ordinary.

Now, we are returning to Chicago, the city from which we have left, where we raised Aidan from a boy to a man, and where we have spent the vast majority of our married life.

I am, and will always be, a Bostonian at my core.

I had too many seminal events, from the Blizzard of 78 to the 1975 World Series to growing up amidst that inimitable accent for it to ever be otherwise.

But if Boston in my heart, Chicago's in my guts.

The people's straightforward manner and generous spirit, the city's sense of itself as a place of story and legend, the passion that Chicagoans bring to their sports and their politics and their brats and their neighborhoods, its industrial past and tortured history with race and segregation and immigration and labor that make it what the late, great Studs Terkel called "the true American city", have all gotten in deep, and are not going anywhere, either.

I'll miss our life in Santiago and our travels throughout the country and continent, to be sure.

And I'm excited to fly over the leafless trees toward the dirtied snow and land at O'Hare, to walk in the 20 degree weather and see our breath and our circle of friends and family again, and to bring a fresh, broader perspective to my ongoing love for the city.

We don't know our exact next steps, or, frankly, where we're going to live after we stay at my brother Jon's place on the South Side.

But we do know without any shred of a doubt that, as always, the adventure will continue.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 82: Marjorie Agosin's wisdom, SIGAChile.cl and Dan Middleton

In one of her many wise comments, made during a conversation we had about 15 years ago, poet, human rights activist, and dear friend Marjorie Agosin made the point not to assume that there are too many stories.

By that I understood her to mean not that she was diminishing any single person's individual experience.

Rather she was saying that there is a finite number of universal stories with which readers can relate their own personal experience.

You see what Majorie's talking about in The Wire, David Simon's epic five-season take on the American City.

In his final speech before he is murdered, D'Angelo Barksdale explains his understanding of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic The Great Gatsby in terms that show the story of white decadent wealth in the 1920s has resonated with him across decades, culture and class:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DOy4hCih7w&w=420&h=315]

If what Marjorie says is true for stories, I believe it's also true for people.

Over time, I've come to find more and more that certain people's hair or expression or coloring or walk remind me of others I've known before.

That certainly happened to me yesterday morning, when I attending the launch of SIGAChile.cl at the University of Diego Portales.

It's an innovative new web site that's the product of a private-public-university collaboration that seeks both to give people with disabilities information about access in public spaces like restaurants and to provide them with the opportunity to share reviews of what they learn from going to those places.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8C0Oqy63ox0&w=560&h=315]

What my mother would call the mucky mucks were there.

People like Minister of Social Development Bruno Baranda and Maria Ximena Rivas, the head of the country's agency for people with disabilities.

Cecilia Garcia Huidobro, dean of the communication school at our university, was there spoke, as was a high-ranking people from Google Chile.

All talked about the power of the site, which was developed by the digital team of colleagues and friend Arly Faundes and Jorge Gonzalez, with extensive help from students like Katherinee Aburto.

All said that it could play a role in reducing the inequality and isolation faced by so many Chileans with disabilities-a number that one of the speakers placed at 2 million people.

They also talked about the culture change that it can help engender-a shift in which people with disabilities are more fully accepted.

Under this change, people will comply with the law not because they fear punishment, but because they understand that people with disabilities may require some accommodation, but have both equal rights and talents to contribute.

This was the point Felix Orellano made.

He's a Chilean wheelchair user who had lived outside the country for a couple of years-a period during which he got used to having easier access to public places than what he experienced upon his return.

During his presentation Felix said he didn't want his disability to be considered a good or bad thing, something that hindered or helped him.

He wants it just to be a fact.

His comments made sense to me.

And what struck me the most about Felix was how closely he resembled Dan Middleton.

Dan's one of the people outside of my family who's meant the most to me in the 30 years since we first met as freshmen in Rinconada dorm at Stanford.

During our college years we spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours laughing and joking and talking about all manner of subjects.

Starting sophomore year, a number of friends and I developed an informal rotation of helping him get to bed.

The initial goal was to help him defray his medical expenses,

Eventually, though, it became a coveted activity we all wanted to do because it meant we got to spend more time with him.

We've kept up in the more than quarter century since we've graduated, continuing our decades long dialogues and politics and sports and literature and women and family-you know, the stuff of life.

I've not seen Dan in person since 1997-we Skype with some regularity-and I still have the image of what he looks like clearly in my mind precisely because we spent so much time together.

Now I want to be clear about a key point.

I understand that it is an oft-stated stereotype that members of a majority tell members of a minority group that they look similar to other people in that same group.

So when I talk about Felix and Dan it's not because they are both wheelchair users.

I'm talking about Feliix's lean build and broad shoulders and how he sat back in the chair.

About the right part in his longish brown hair and dark coloring.

About his limp fingers that he extended when I offered my hand and how he used his wrists to move his chair.

All of these reminded me so intensely of Dan that for just a moment I felt as if I was seeing him in Felipe.

The presentations and congratulatory video and lofty words ended.

I approached Felix to ask him his last name.

He was wearing a tiny earring in his left ear.

He spoke Spanish, of course.

His voice was not as deep as Dan's mellifluous tones, his frame was not at tall as Dan's 76 inches.

But, because of his resemblance to Dan, I still felt like I knew him better than I actually did.

I left the launch impressed by the work Arly and her team had put into the project, excited about the possibilities to spread the site to other countries and intrigued by the multi-faceted collaboration for a public good.

Yet I also felt grateful for the reminder of Marjorie's wisdom and the opportunity to feel physically close again to Dan for a little while.

Chilean Chronicles, Part XXXIV: On Sylvia Broder's Courage

Our first six weeks here in Santiago have included a seemingly unending stream of glorious lunches and dinners that start late, end later and last anywhere from four to nine hours. Thanks to dear friend Marjorie Agosin, colleagues at the University of Diego Portales, chief among them the remarkable Alejandra Matus, family connections, folks from Chicago and the Fulbright program, we’ve had the extraordinary good fortune to meet a wide range of fascinating, generous, committed and intelligent people who have opened their homes and hearts to us.

Yet even our lengthy initial meetings have allowed us to forge connections of a surprising depth, I’ve also felt an almost inevitable reserve of distance from the folks we’ve met. It’s as if, to draw from the Czech writer Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, we don’t yet know if the words we are speaking mean the same thing on each side, or rather if we simply are speaking from a Dictionary of Misunderstood Words.

Now, though, we’re starting to see people for a second time, and are finding that the connections are getting deeper.

This was the case yesterday with Sylvia Broder, Marjorie Agosin’s cousin who had hosted us and two other couples for a lovely at her apartment in the Vitacura neighborhood the first Thursday after we arrived. She and the couples had previously lived in a property with five houses in Las Condes.

Sylvia and her family were in the middle, flanked on the right and left by each of the friends. The difference was more than geographic, as the friends on the left were politically left of center, while, Jorge Reizin, the husband on the couple of those who lived on the right was a self-described extreme right.

During an evening of free-flowing, jazzy conversation, among other topics, we talked about children, and, in Sylvia’s case, grandchildren and the vagaries of home repair.

We covered the upcoming presidential election that features Michelle Bachelet and Evelyn Mattei as the two of the nine candidates considered to have the best chance of winning and the complete failure of the Census to arrive at an accurate count. (Jorge advanced the theory that it was a deliberate effort by left-wing bureaucrats to enhance their power in the next government.)

Sylvia also told us about her personal history.

Her mother was a Polish concentration camp survivor, while her father was a Polish partisan who survived the war fighting in the woods like Tuvia Bielski of Defiance fame. Born in post-War Prague, she moved with her family to Chile with her sister at age 10. She did not know that she was Jewish, nor had she yet considered why, as opposed to her classmates, she had no grandparents.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdVMT44nWzk&w=560&h=315]

But she did not tell us about the people she hid during the earliest week of the Pinochet dictatorship that took place nearly exactly 40 years.

There were two of them.

One she knew.

The other she did not.

She hid the one she had not met before in the first week after the coup.

Sylvia had gone to work at the Australian Embassy the morning of September 11, but instantly could tell something serious was happening.

She went to a friend’s house nearby, but wasn’t able to leave for two or three full days.

When she came out, she learned that the man needed help, and took him in without hesitation.

She did so, even though her action meant that she could have been detained, tortured or killed.

Even more, Sylvia advocated to help the man get out of the country.

The Australian government had not committed itself to an agreement that would have obligated it to take action to assist the man and other victims of the dictatorship, so Sylvia worked with officials of the Canadian government to provide him sanctuary.

Which they did.

Sylvia said she did not consciously think of her family’s background, her parents’ survival and her murdered relatives whom strangers had not helped, when deciding to take the man who did not speak into her home.

But she’s sure it played a role in her decision.

Several weeks later, a friend also needed a refuge.

Sylvia let him stay for closer to a month.

Her neighbor sheltered someone, too.

The fugitives hid during the day, and they all enjoyed themselves at night.

Sylvia said there were other neighbors who supported Pinochet and knew what she was doing.

But they didn’t turn her in.

The friend later escaped to Cuba, lived in other countries and eventually returned to his homeland. Another one of Sylvia’s friends, a woman, called to take her to a family event.

After picking us all up downstairs, she took us on a knuckle-grabbing ride that evoked Woody Allen’s ride Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, and that ended for us at the bike store run by a couple who’s worked on bicycles in Santiago for 44 years.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mem9Hby9oRk&w=560&h=315]

We survived and started our walk down Providencia Avenue and past sites like the Fulbright office and Santa Isabel supermarket that have become increasingly familiar during the past six weeks.

As we walked, we were filled with a sense of quiet wonder at Sylvia’s unreflecting courage and at our great privilege of learning about the many layers she and others are already starting to reveal as we start to shed our initial interaction of host and guest and begin to relate to each other as fellow journeyers on the road of life.