Chilean Chronicles, Part XXII: Memories of South Africa in Chile

Almost exactly 18 years ago I flew to Durban, South Africa as a participant in a Fulbright program.

I had wanted to visit Alan Paton’s beloved country for nearly a decade.

During my sophomore year at Stanford, while I was studying in Florence, Italy, the anti-apartheid movement swept the campus. Drawn by searing images of black South Africans being openly beaten by the apartheid police during the state of emergency declared by recalcitrant President P.W. Botha, the students on campus established shantytowns and held sit-ins where they chanted and clapped rhythmically. I was riveted by the brutality being visited on the black South Africans , and touched by the righteousness of their cause.

This sense only grew stronger after I returned to campus and joined Stanford Out of South Africa. I joined then-President Donald Kennedy on an early morning run, argued with him about divestment and wrote about it in a column for the campus newspaper.

In 1990, I begged off of selling Green Monster and Bleacher Creature t-shirts and ventured down to the Esplanade with my best friend to hear African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, then fresh out of prison and on a global goodwill and fundraising tour, thank “the people of Massachusetts”. (He made it sound like Mass-a-shoe-sets.)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n3PTV7nElE&w=420&h=315]

In April 1994, like people the world over, I wept at the sight of elderly women being carried into voting booths they had waited three days and a lifetime to enter.

Fed by a diet of books, films, political ideology and news coverage, South Africa became a country whose very soil was imbued with unalloyed moral clarity, a land where a united black majority labored to overthrow an oppressive white minority.

By the end of the year, I had arrived at a more nuanced understanding of the country’s history, its present moment and the seemingly endless permutations of political parties, in-factions, and levels.

It’s not that I ever thought that apartheid was justified.

Far from it.

It’s rather that I emerged with less judgment of members of individual groups and a clearer understanding of the complexity of the country’s history and seemingly endless stripes of political parties, factions, and regional differences.

Interactions with real South Africans helped muddy my previously crystal clear vision of the country.

My exchange partner Vukani Cele’s friends, who took me in and treated me like a brother, were at the top of the list.

During the year Tsepo Mahlaba, Ntuthuko Bhengu and an enormous circle of friends took me to ritual slaughter of cows before weddings and after a year of mourning for a loved one, drove me to Johannesburg to watch South Africa win the Four Nations Cup, and invited me to their weddings. (Three of Vukani’s buddies got married during the course of the year.)

We had barbeques, or braais, on the weekend, played a pair of soccer matches against the school team that I inherited from Vukani, and drank copious amounts of brandy and coke.

They never let me pay.

They also helped me realize some of the many differences within South Africa’s black community.

But if Vukani’s extended circle of brothers were my teachers, so, too, were the students I worked with and coached at the Uthongathi School.

Shortly after I arrived, for instance, I was explaining to the class what we were going to cover in the time that we had left before class at 11:30.

One of the students informed me that classed ended at 11:15 for the annual track and field tournament.

I started to repeat my statement, then realized this was a perfect opportunity to have the students realize that their knowledge and voice mattered.

I mustered my best Socratic thinking and began.

“How long have I been here?” I asked.

“Two weeks, Sir.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Four years, Sir.”

So far, so good.

“So who probably knows more about the school?”

“We do, Sir.” Promptly.

I had them right where I wanted them. Logic was about to triumph. Impact was about to be mine.

“So who is probably right about when the Athletics competition?”

“You are, Sir.”

Without hesitation.

Unsure what to do at the complete evaporation of my goal, I kept on teaching until a student from another class came shortly after 11:15 to tell me that we were late for the Athletics competition.

It’s close to two decades later, and I’m again in a country through the Fulbright program that I had dreamed of living in for years.

Like South Africa, Chile endured years of an oppressive and murderous regime that committed acts of unspeakable barbarity before emerging into a comparatively bloodless democratic era.

Like South Africa, the country’s sustained inequality directly contradicts the constitution’s lofty promises.

Both countries’ unhealed wounds color present interactions.

And, as I did before, I brought a similarly straightforward and morally based view of the country that was fed by many of the same type of sources as in South Africa.

Of course, things are different in important ways. Whereas then I was in the outer edges of young adulthood, now I am a husband and father firmly in middle age.

I went to South Africa alone, and am here with Dunreith.

Yet I find myself rapidly having my preconceptions about the country challenged through conversations with Chileans.

I also hear echoes of that earlier time.

In the unstinting generosity of Alejandra Matus, friend of a mutual friend, who hosted Dunreith and me with her family for hours and hours of food and conversation and drink, I think of the loving hospitality Tsepo, Ntuthuko and the guys showered me with throughout my year in South Africa.

And on Thursday, when I started to tell the class about an assignment that was due the following Thursday, a young woman raised her hand and informed me that there was no class, memories of my distant dialogue with my class at Uthongathi roused themselves.

I could look at this to mean that this Fulbright experience here won’t be as fresh or as meaningful as the previous one.

But that’s not how I see it.

Rather, I consider myself extra fortunate to have a chance to again savor joyful memories of expansive time with friends, and, based on understanding how much those relationships and experiences have meant since, embrace the present moment and set of opportunities even more fully.

Chilean Chronicles, Part XXI: Our Day in Pictures.

Today, the images are going to speak for themselves. Enjoy.

Chilean Chronicles, Part XX: Zorba the Greek and My Data Journalism Class

I read Nikos Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek when I was a sophomore in college, and many of the book’s moments are with me still.

I remember an old man reprimanding the narrator, also known as the bookworm, character when he asks what dish was his favorite, telling him it is a great sin to say this dish is good and this dish is bad because there are people in the world who are hungry.

I think about the description of Zorba reaching out his huge hand closing his mistress Boubalina’s eyes with “indescribable tenderness” after she died.

I remember Zorba’s seizing of life at every possible instant, his not taking offense when Boubalina’s parrot calls him by a different name, and, of course, his love of dance.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6K7OC-IKnA&w=420&h=315] Yet one of the strongest memories of the book are when Zorba comes across an old man who is planting an almond tree. When Zorba expresses skepticism that the man will live to ever see a single almond, he tells Zorba that he acts as if he will live forever-a statement that elicits Zorba’s retort that he lives every day as if it is his last.

“Two equally steep and bold paths may lead to the same peak,” Kazantzakis writes.

I thought of the Greek legend’s words on Thursday, when friend, lawyer and professor Macarena Rodriguez and cognitive science doctoral student Alvaro Graves came and presented to the students in my Data Journalism class at the University of Diego Portales.

We're just two classes into the semester at the University of Diego Portales, and I can already tell we're going to have a lot of fun.

Now, I will be honest and say that I’m not exactly sure how many students are in the class at this point.

The class list I received from the department says I've got 16.

Six students attended the first session, two others wrote me explaining why they won't be there for the first two weeks, and eight students, including four who weren't there the first time, went to the second class.

By my reckoning, that makes 12, and I won't know for sure until August 14.

That's the date when the students have to make their final decisions about what they actually are taking for the semester.

Whatever the total we ultimately will have, I can tell we’re in for some lively exchanges and some learning from each other.

In the first class I explained that working with data entails acquiring, cleaning, analyzing, incorporating them into your reporting and displaying them.

There are four major ways to acquire data: writing a freedom of information request; scraping data from websites by writing code and transferring them into a format that can easily be analyzed; downloading existing data; and building a dataset.

Macarena and Alvaro came to talk about the first two options.

Maca spoke first, explaining to the students the origin and key elements of the country’s landmark 2009 transparency legislation.

“There’s no greater disinfectant than sunlight,” one of the slides said.

Macarena proceeded to explain why.

She put Chile’s law in the context of the move by governments around the world over the last 62 year years to institute similar legislation. Finland and Sweden were first in 1951, the United States followed in 1966. Maca also showed a slide of a 2011 world map of the world that indicated by country the states of national transparency laws. (Northern and Central Africa, parts of the Middle East and Asia had the biggest holes.)

Although 11 Latin American nations have freedom of information legislation, she talked the students through the history of secrecy that has shrouded many of the countries before going on to talk about key features of the Chilean law like the transparency council that decides on individual requests.

The students peppered her with questions about the council’s composition and the types of records that are subject to the law.

Although the volume of questions meant did not have time to see the sample of a successful information request that Maca had, she has agreed to look at their letters to help refine and make them as precise as possible.

Precision is a critical part of scraping, and Alvaro talked the students through what he and other members of the winning team in a recent Scrapeathon here in Santiago. (For those who don’t know, a scrapeathon is when teams compete in a specific amount of time to pull data from a publicly available site, organize them into an analyzable file and then build some sort of visualization from it.)

Alvaro and his team were interested in looking at school quality in Santiago.

They used the SIMCE, a single number published by the Chilean government that ranges from 200 at the lowest to 300 at the highest.

After pulling the data, the team then merged that information with geographic location and plotted the points on a map using a free tool from Google.

That was just the first phase for the team.

They then moved to show the amount of distance students would have to travel and money parents would have to pay by neighborhood to go to schools of varying quality levels.

The point, unsurprisingly, was that parents in poor neighborhoods would have to pay more and have their children travel farther to have their students attend high-quality schools than their wealthier counterparts.

Again, the students lobbed a series of probing questions at Alvaro.

How did you know where in the neighborhood people live, one student wanted to know.

Alvaro explained that he and the team had scraped the data, joined it and built the site in eight hours, adding that the code they used was open source and available on their Github repository.

The team plans to refine the project, he said.

Time was running very short.

I reminded the students that while we were going to hear from many American journalists during the course, we were starting with Chilean professionals who had studied in Chile and the United States, were available to them as resources and who are in different ways committed to bring the truth about their society to light.

I also repeated that the students’ assignment was to write a 500-word analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of each method of data acquisition.

One of the students who had taken notes for the class said they were about 500 words and asked if he could be exempt from the essay.

No.

I took a few pictures of the speakers and students.

Maca zipped out of the door and onto her next task. Alvaro lingered for a while.

Several students asked again to clarify the homework.

Writing freedom of information requests and scraping data may not be the stuff of life and death that Kazantzakis wrote about in his epic novel, but they are different paths to reach the same goal.

On Tuesday we'll see where the students land.

We'll tally their arguments into a list in a Google Spreadsheet, thereby showing them how to build a database.

I can’t wait.

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 XVIII: The End of Basque Week at the Estadio Español

“Love and the truth,” Gonzalo Salazar’s mother Hilda declared. “That’s the basis for marriage.”

She would know.

She and her husband Amador have been married for 68 years, and together for 70.

Hilda is 88 years old, but looks at least a decade younger, the product of a lifetime of tennis, healthy living and a love of dance that surfaced when she heard the strains of traditional Basque music.

We were sitting at the table set aside for the family for the final event of Basque Week at Santiago’s Estadio Español, the city's social club for Santiago residents with Spanish ancestry.

Dunreith and I had visited the grounds our first week in the city with friends Miguel Huerta, Macarena Rodriguez and their sons Martin and Domingo, but it was near sundown so I didn’t have a sense of all that the facility had to offer.

This time, I was there with Gonzalo, whose parents were among the club’s founders shortly after World War II by Spanish émigrés, and his wife Jacqui.

During a leisurely stroll along the idyllic settings and acres of grounds, Gonzalo explained to me the difference had been there when he was a boy more than six decades ago-he’s now 67-and what it has now.

The growth has been exponential.

There’s a garden for children and many more sports facilities that are used by people from at least three different generations

Prime red clay tennis courts.

An astroturf soccer field for men and a grass space for the youth.

A mini-golf course where dozen of players in full golf outfits were waiting their turn to play one of three holes that at most were 30 yards away.

Indoor basketball and an outdoor bocci ball courts.

Places for the Spanish version of racquetball.

A clear blue swimming pool surround by a walkway with arches and a view of the Andes.

As we approached the banquet hall, I asked Gonzalo about whether political divisions and exile politics within the community similar to those among Iranian émigrés. Chuckling, he explained those tensions have diminished, along with the attachment to Spain, have diminished with each successive generation.

But what has not decreased is the huge volume of social energy at the club.

Of the more than 4,000 families that belong to the club, close to half live in about a four-block radius near the club, many in a building that resembles a ship and that stands directly outside the grounds.

Gonzalo saw his high school chemistry teacher, a former priest named Luis Fernando who left the ministry, married and is now a grandfather. They hugged and caught up briefly with each other.

We walked by a man with long, dark hair in a ponytail and beard who was wearing a red beret and playing a Basque horn that looked liked their equivalent of a Shofar, a ram’s horn used in the Jewish tradition on Yom Kippur, our Day of Atonement. Thin intertwined green, red and white string dangled from the instrument.

We entered a long, chilly banquet hall, checked in with a pair of elderly men and found our table, which had a white tablecloth with a bright red cloth strip laid across the middle. The chairs alternated by white cloth and white with a red sash tied midway around them. Each neatly set plate had a primer on basic Basque vocabulary translated from the Spanish.

Hello was Kaixo.

Wine was Ardo.

Lunch was Bazkari.

We were at Table 18 toward the back of the room.

Hilda got there first, looking dazzling in a black pants suit that matched her and a black and white scarf.

Clad in a dark jacket, tan sweater, and a red tie tied in a thick knot, his black beret tilted to the right, Amador came later, accompanied by Gonzalo’s brother Tito and his family. Another cousin and his wife from Peru joined us, too.

I told Hilda how I had heard about her, but had trouble believing that she was indeed 88 years old.

She affirmed that she was, and, shortly afterward, took out from her wallet a black and white picture of herself in a bathing suit as the teenaged woman her husband fell in love with 70 years ago.

I knew right away that he was the man of my life, she said.

Then came a photo of a serious-looking Gonzalo at age 7, getting ready to dance with his older sister, followed by an image of Gonzalo’s brother as a baby in a carriage next to a dark haired mother and father.

His right index finger pointed upward, a boy wearing a red beret and scarf and holding his smart phone in his left hand initiated with the ceremony with a burst of high-pitched Euskadi.

Cultural entertainment appeared in between the courses.

Four young women dressed in white hats, black vests and aprons, and red dresses with black stripes stood on the stage at the front of the room, their skirts whirling as they snapped, stepped and jumped the traditional dances to the accompaniment of recorded Basque music.

There was also a Basque version of the Conga line, dancing in which Gonzalo participated and a series of raffle prizes.

Tito instructed us to concentrate hard on the Number 18 when our table wasn’t winning, and, eventually the strategy worked.

Jacqui’s seat was called and she marched happily up to the front of the room to collect her prize.

The last of the gifts were announced and the crowd started to dwindle.

We made plans to get together again soon, possibly at a fish restaurant, and I headed back to our apartment to meet Dunreith.

As I walked to the El, thoughts about traditions altered, but not broken, over time and generations and about the communities within a community jumped around in my head.

But mostly I thought about the love between Gonzalo’s parents, that his mother knew instantly and in her core would be forever, and that has proven to be so, through up and downs, children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and now, even as they near the end of their lives, continues undimmed.