Chilean Chronicles, Part XXXI: Learning from my Fulbright Colleagues

I still remember visiting Stanford University for the first time with my father in April 1983. I had been accepted to join the class of 1987, and flew out to see the place where I ended up spending my undergraduate years.

The row of palm trees on the appropriately named Palm Drive essentially sealed the deal-I kept repeating, “Palms trees, Dad. Palm trees.”-and the tour that followed knocked the exuberant air out of me for a little while. While strolling around the libraries, main quadrangle, clock tower, and student center, the tour guide, who, if I remember correctly, was wearing a Stanford t-shirt, started running down the numbers of the year’s applicants.

If we wanted to more than fill the class with valedictorians, we could have done it, he said.

If we wanted to more than fill the class with people who made All State, we could have done it, he added later in the same conversation.

He went on in this manner, and, as the tour progressed, I find myself feeling less excited about Palm Drive and the campus’ beauty and more and more wondering how I had actually gained admission to the place.

Memories of the tour stirred within me this morning as I listened to five of my Fulbright colleagues present about their research, their teaching and their future plans at the University of Chile.

It was an impressive group of scholars doing significant, socially conscious and complementary types of projects.

Tim Warner, a reserved Zimbabwean native who was raised in South Africa, went first. A geologist from West Virginia University who’s working at the University of Concepcion, he presented about his work on remote sensing in Northern Chile. It’s a potent technology that can be used to map urban growth, natural disasters or mineral observation.

It’s also got interplanetary possibilities.

Tim explained that the minerals that exist in arid saline lakes in Chile are the same as in the Burns Formation in Mars. As a result, using remote sensing to understand the lakes in Chile has the potential to tell us something about what is happening in Mars.

He also said that he wants to use the class he is teaching and the time he is spending here as a basis to have a university wide and ongoing relationship between his institution and the University of Concepcion that could eventually include a Master’s program.

Collaboration was a core emphasis of the relationship between the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and the University Del Desarrollo, according to John Katers, a UWGB professor.

He’s 14 days in an 18-day whirlwind trip that did not so much have a specific objective, but was the latest in a series of steps that began a couple of years ago when Alex Godoy spent eight weeks at the Wisconsin campus.

Katers, a burly Green Bay native who attended the public schools, graduated from the University in 1991 and lives two blocks from the fabled Lambeau Field, has engineering and business backgrounds. This interdisciplinary orientation not only helps him feel comfortable approaching industry for funding-he mentioned that he has raised $3.5 million in the past decade from area businesses, rather than traditional foundation funding-it is an integral part of campus life at UWGB, which in the 70s was known as “Eco-U”, he said.

Katers showed a series of images to illustrate Green Bay’s strong points and challenges (He included a slide that he said the Chamber of Commerce would like to or did use for its promotional material for the former, and showed images of sludge to illustrate the latter.)

The Ventanas community in Chile, which is about 90 minutes north of Santiago, also has both.

Katers talked about the many similarities in industry, poor educational outcomes and pollution that Green Bay shares with its Chilean counterpart. .

He’s used the time to see as much of Chile as possible-they’ve ventured north and south-and to work with Godoy to design a series of projects that could advance the relationship that the two institutions have forged during the past two years.

Katers did not come alone.

Rather, he spoke with university administrators about having more university faculty join Alex and him during their time here.

They agreed, and four of Katers’ colleagues, including Humanities Professor Cristina Ortiz, have been here in Chile, too. This shared experience between him and his colleagues increases the likelihood that the project will continue to advance.

Benjamin Crosby, a geologist from Idaho State University, is studying the progress of rivers, paying particular attention to the issue of dams.

A river has a pulse, he told us during his presentation, and he’s interested in seeing how the pulse is downstream as compared to upstream. As opposed to the United States, where many dams are already in place, certain parts of Chile, especially in Patagonia, have not yet constructed.

Ben’s hoping that the information that he learns about how the downstream sections of rivers act will be useful to the engineers who will make the dams.

It’s an ambitious task, and Ben’s staying a semester beyond the five months that most of us are doing in order to make progress on his project.

He’s also planning to drive home with his wife Cana, an ethnographer, and their two children.

They don’t yet have a car, and they’ve got time.

Time was a focus, albeit indirectly of Laurance Geri’s presentation.

The lean and lanky professor from Evergreen State College delivered his remarks about Chilean energy policy in Spanish, the only member of today’s group to do so. (When asked by an audience member whether he wanted her to ask a question in English or Spanish, he replied with a grin, “English is probably easier.”)

Like John and Ben, Larry put his comments and his work in the context of Chile’s current moment and the advantages and challenges it faces. He made the point that, while there is still time to make progress on energy policy in the country, urgent agent is required because of the ever-encroaching presence of climate change.

He also talked movingly about the role that civil society can and must play in helping to make these policies. Larry spoke about how the traditional modes of hearing citizen’s voices have started to erode, but that this erosion only underscores the importance of creating spaces for meaningful citizen input on this and other critical issues facing the nation.

The people’s voice will be heard one way or the other, he said.

For her part, University of Richmond instructor Deborah Westin is interested in the assessment, measurement and evaluation of key competencies for teaching and learning.

Her particular slice of the people is adult learners. Deb said she's passionate about working with this group to ultimately be able to help make the world a better place. Deb, who is working at the University of Chile, is doing research and working with her colleagues on a book about this issue. She’ll also be a guest instructor in some University of Chile classes.

Her presentation, like all of the others, elicited questions and discussion from the crowd, which included former Fulbrighters, students and members of the public, and folks from the United States Embassy.

In short, it was an utterly stimulating, near symphonic morning of sharing and conversation.

Meeting and learning about my colleagues and new friends’ work reminded me of how impressed I had been by my potential classmates three decades ago, when I first set foot on Stanford’s campus.

This time, though, rather than being intimidated, my dominant impression was of gratitude at being part of the community.

We’ve got six more presentations tomorrow, including mine, and lunch after that.

I can’t wait to learn some more.

RIP, Rena Down

There is a certain kind of pain that comes from learning that someone you cared about passed away a couple of months ago. It’s not that we didn’t try to get in touch with Rena Down before we left for Chile.

Dunreith did, a couple of times, via phone and email.

But we didn’t know at the time that her body and life were in their final stages.

Tonight, after Dunreith received a bulk email from Rena’s beloved daughter Katie, we poked around on the Internet and learned that Rena had died on June 6.

The news saddened me, both because we it came later than the time of her passing and because I cared deeply about Rena, who was a truly unusual person who accomplished an awful lot and taught me even more about purpose and passion and family and intellect and theater and just plain sucking the marrow out of life.

We met about 15 years ago, shortly after Dunreith and I had started dating at a Facing History and Ourselves exhibit, and around the time of the launch of the Choosing to Participate exhibit at the Boston Public Library.

Jeff, I’m Rena, a friend of Dun-reith’s, she said, her voice rising on the second syllable. I love Dunreith.

I did, too, so we had that in common from the very beginning.

Dunreith’s a great collector of strong, intelligent, accomplished, fierce yet modest women.

Rena fit right into that mold.

She had a magnetic smile, a voracious intellect, and an enormously creative spirit that led her to win an Emmy award for her work on Falcon’s Crest, to pen a number of episodes of M.A.S.H. and to write the classic “Who Shot J.R.?” episode that ended the show’s fourth season. The last show set records for overseas viewership, led to the equivalent of billions of dollars being gambled on guessing the shooter’s identity and set the standard for modern television cliffhanger endings.

Rena did far more than write for wildly popular television shows, though.

She authored books and plays and screenplays, including one she wrote with her son-in-law in her last major professional project. She also mentored at least one generation of students at the New School, where she was a pioneering teacher in online education, and the dozens, if not hundreds, of younger people who were fortunate enough to come under her influence.

Even though I knew that Dunreith was way ahead of me on the totem pole. I was one of them, too.

I spent the first year of our marriage writing.

During a brunch with Dunreith and Rena, I said that I thought there weren’t many stories to write about in Western Massachusetts.

Rena and Dunreith disabused me of that erroneous notion, and encouraged me to attend a couple of days at the trial of Kristen Gilbert, a nurse who was eventually convicted of killing three of her patients at the local Veteran’s Administration Hospital.

I went to the courthouse, met longtime Springfield Repbulican reporter Fred Contrada, who asked me which publication I was working for (I gulped, then answered I was working freelance), and wrote a piece that ran in the Northampton Daily Gazette.

Months later, a reporter who was working on a book about the trial contacted me.

Rena taught me about how to find a story, about how to sniff out, and then report and write about, the central elements of character and conflict and lust and intrigue wherever you are.

But she taught me more than that.

Unfailingly pleasant and affirming, she hosted Dunreith, Aidan and me at her apartment in Northampton as the three of us were learning how to become a family.

Rena showed how being on your own in middle age need not be any impediment to traveling around the world. (This included a train trip she took from New York to Chicago just to see us.)

The last five years of Rena’s life were marked by extreme, limiting and continually encroaching physical pain and disability.

But she kept living with courage, even as a stroke robbed her of her ability to walk, use the left side of her body and necessitated her receiving full time care.

I visited Rena in her apartment in May 2012, the day of the second Dart Society fundraiser. We chatted quietly for a while. Rena asked about what Dunreith was up to since she had left Facing History and offered her customary sage counsel before letting me rest in her bed while she went out to run some errands.

She was struggling to adjust to life in the wheelchair, but listened patiently as I talked about how Mom had taught me after her accident about how to accept that the life she had lived and known for more that six decades was over forever, with a new one starting to emerge in as yet undefined ways.

Dunreith and I went to see Rena again in January, again while I was in town for a Dart Society meeting. She showed us proudly how she was able to stand just a little bit outside of the wheelchair she wanted desperately to leave.

Dunreith told Rena how much she had meant to her. I let her know I loved her.

She already knew.

The size of the apartment, the location in New York City and Rena’s diminished physical capacity all reminded me of visiting my great aunt Ilse Goldberg , Ph.D., nee Frank, who lived on her own in Queens until she died in 2006 at age 103.

From visiting Ilse I l came to understand the length of time that can work before the guest can start to tire and the gift you can give simply by visiting and spending time chatting with someone.

You also get a better sense of the limits of what the human body can endure.

In May, Rena’s body started shutting down.

On June 6, it shut down entirely, and she died.

I’ll miss Rena’s bubbly energy and ready smile, her wisdom and generosity and guidance, and her sheer determination to do whatever she could in life.

Even though the last few years were very hard, her death is still a blow.

We know now why she didn’t answer the efforts Dunreith made to reach other.

But we also know that she is, and will be, inside of us for as long as we’re around in person, and, after that, in Aidan’s memory.

Farewell, dear Rena.

We honor you.

We miss you.

And we love you.

Chilean Chronicles, Part XXX: Speaking about Dr. King and Dr. Bass at St. George's College

Things are starting to groove here in Santiago, and it feels deep down good. For starters, Dunreith and I have found a favorite, reasonable restaurant, La Republiqueta, a funky joint on Ave. Lyon, right where we stayed when we first arrived. She goes for a quesadilla salad with all kinds of seeds, while I have a sandwich with three kinds of mushroom and cheese. Throw in a mate to feed her burgeoning passion for that drink, a seltzer water for me, and a tip, and we’re out of there for less than $25.

From there we’ve established a firm, if not unbreakable, nightly ritual of splitting a chocolate bar filled with marzipan and a glass of the latest red wine we’re sampling during the next episode of the original version of “Betty, La Fea,” the inspiration for the American series, “Ugly Betty.”

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A project that I’ve been working on around the Chicago Boys, the group of young Chilean economists who trained under Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago in the 1970s and applied his theories in Chile, is starting to bear some early fruit.

I’m having a terrific time with my students, who call me either “Profe” or “Jeff Kelly,” and am starting to connect with more colleagues at the university.

Dunreith is making great strides in Spanish, understanding just about everything and being able to speak more and more.

We’ve got our travel plans to Argentina and Brazil in October just about salted away.

I’ve started running again after a three-year hiatus, and my body is holding up well so far.

Dear friends Lisa Cook and Jim Peters will be flying here on Sunday morning for close to a 10-day visit.

And this morning I confirmed a speaking gig at St. George’s College, a private, English-language school, for next Wednesday, August 28.

Hugo Rojas, a law professor with whom I first connected in 2008 during my second attempt to land a Fulbright, connected me to his wife, a teacher at the school.

As justice-loving people the world over know, this year will mark 50 years since Dr. King gave his historic “I have a dream” speech.

Although he had delivered a similar version of the speech earlier in Detroit, King’s abandoning his notes and delivered an impassioned call for the nation to be true to its founding creed and that one day the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners shall eat together at the table of brotherhood is a high point in American oratory and history.

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Twenty years ago, dear friend Dennis Downey and I, along with our ladies at the time, attended the 30th anniversary March on Washington.

Fifty years ago, personal hero Leon Bass was in the crowd of 250,000 people, weeping as he heard Dr. King describe his prophetic vision for the nation.

I’ve had the great privilege of knowing Leon for close to 20 years throughout his ceaseless commitment to fighting bigotry by talking for organizations like Facing History and Ourselves and the Anti-Defamation League.

Over that time we’ve become close friends.

He attended the second wedding Dunreith and I held at Look Park, giving us a check for $100 and telling me to go see a friend called gourmet.

A couple of years ago, after more than a decade of pushing from me and other people who love him, Leon published his autobiography, Good Enough: One Man's Memoir on the Price of the Dream.

It’s a remarkable story that begins in 1925 and continues until today.

It’s a story of tradition and race and service and family and humility and seeking to find the courage to do the right thing.

Leon takes the reader through his childhood in Philadelphia, where he grew up with four brothers and one sister. His father, whom he revered, was a Pullman Porter. His mother ran a proverbial tight ship. As Leon’s told thousands of audiences, “If corporal punishment was child abuse, I was abused many times.” But he always makes it clear that he knew his parents loved him and wanted the best for him.

After graduating from high school in 1943, Leon volunteered to serve in the army, but was dismayed, and later furious, to find out that the country he had pledged to serve with his life, if necessary, was treating him as if he wasn’t good enough by making him stand at the back of the bus and eat at the back of restaurants.

He survived the Battle of the Bulge before having an experience that, as he described it, brought the blinders off and helped him understand that hatred was not limited to those who detested African-Americans.

This occurred in 1945, when he witnessed the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp and saw what he called “the walking dead.”

Bass spent about four hours in the camp, and that time was enough to alter his life’s perspective, even if he didn’t speak publicly about it for decades.

He returned home from the war and became the first member of his family to go to college, generally, but not always, heeding his father’s words to not go running his mouth so that he could complete his education.

“Once you get that, no one can take that away from you,” his father said.

Bass eventually graduated, becoming a teacher.

In the mid-50s, after some initial reservations, he became a follower of Dr. King after learning about his endorsement of the discipline and philosophy of non-violence.

One day, King came to Philadelphia, and Bass brought his class to hear him speak.

“He was a little guy,” Bass recalled, referring to King’s comparatively small stature. “But then he started speaking and I recognized him for the giant of a man that he was.”

King’s message to the students was direct. Not all of you may become doctors or lawyers, but whatever you do, you be the best at it. If you have to sweep the streets, so be it, Bass said later. You sweep the streets the way Michelangelo painted his paintings.

Bass was mesmerized, and, when the March on Washington came, he made his way down from Philadelphia to hear King offer his soaring rhetoric that endures to this day.

Bass later became a principal at Benjamin Franklin High School, one of the toughest in the city, if not the entire nation. He served there for 14 years before retiring in 1982.

About a decade before that, while at the school, he came across a Holocaust survivor talking to a class in the school.

She had lost almost all of her family, but the students were not interested in hearing about her pain.

Bass intervened, and, for the first time since that day in Buchenwald a quarter century earlier, spoke publicly about what he had seen.

What’s she saying is true, he told the young men. I know because I was there.

After the class ended and the students filed out in silence, the survivor implored Bass to start speaking in public.

You’ve got something to say, she said.

He has done it since.

One of my favorite parts of working at Facing History was taking speakers like Leon around to talk with students.

Leon and I traveled with his wife Mary, who was starting to be in the grip of Alzheimer’s, to Springfield, where he spoke to the entire student body at Cathedral High School.

I took him to Dorchester High, where, in his mid-70s, he stood down a group of unruly students by telling them, “You want to talk, you can come up hear and talk,” and then staring hard at them.

And I had the pleasure of working with Leon to tell his story in 20 minutes at a Facing History dinner that honored his years of service to the organization and that included a tribute by Dr. Calvin Morris, my former boss at the Community Renewal Society and one of Leon’s former fifth grade students.

Indeed, Dunreith and I later traveled to Cleveland, where Leon was again honored by Dr. Morris. That time, I got to have lunch with a select group of former Philadelphians that included Leon, Dr. Morris and one of Dr. Morris’ former students who had been a substitute teacher at Benjamin Franklin the last year Leon was a principal there. (They jokingly told me they’d let me hang around as a token Bostonian.)

Dunreith and I called Leon last night.

He sounded a bit tired when he answered the phone, but perked up when he recognized my voice.

He had just buried Claude, his last remaining sibling, on Friday.

I’m the last rung on the totem pole, he told me.

Even though there was mercy in his brother’s passing as he had suffered for a number of years, sadness crept into Leon’s voice.

We talked about our families and his attendance at Obama’s second inauguration, an experience he treasured. Although he’s not doing as much travel as he used to, he’s still speaking up for justice and still working to build the world that Dr. King described so memorably a half-century ago.

I told him about the speaking opportunity next week at St. George’s.

I’ll tell the students about Dr. King, I said. But I’ll tell them about you, too.

Chilean Chronicles, Part XXIX: Patricio Guzman's Nostalgia for the Light

As a child in Chile, Patricio Guzman stared at the stars and reveled in the untroubled quiet of a peaceful country, childhood and world.

Chile, as he explains in the introduction to his intricate, thought provoking and haunting documentary film, Nostalgia for the Light, was disconnected from the rest of the world.

The presidents walked the streets unprotected.

But the country began to become integrated with the world as the Atacama Desert, a 600-mile stretch of land that is commonly considered to be the driest place in the world, became the site of some of the largest, most sophisticated telescopes on the planet.

The only brown patch of earth that is visible from the moon, Atacama is sparsely populated. But you can often see women walking and digging up the terrain in a ceaseless, yet often unrewarded, search for the remains of their loved ones.

They are the mothers and wives of the country’s disappeared.

Chile’s Edenic period was disrupted first by the revolutionary ferment of Salvador Allende, and then, far more brutally, on Sept. 11, 1973. That was the day that Gen. Augusto Pinochet overthrew the Allende government and ushered in a 17-year reign of terror, death and destruction.

The barbarity of Pinochet’s regime appeared to know no limits.

Not only did the dictatorship “disappear” thousands of people, taking them in the middle of the night, holding them in concentration camps, then torturing and raping them before killing them.

They also deliberately buried the bones in different locations than they had killed their victims so that the loved ones would not find them.

In many cases they dumped them in the sea.

In the film, Guzman brings together the common threads between his childhood memories, the country’s premier location for astronomers, the quest of archaeologists to understand the nation’s pre-Colombian past, and the unhealed wounds so many Chileans suffered during the Pinochet era.

The work starts slowly, as a massive telescope being unfurled iis the only character in the film for close to the first five minutes.

The pace continues in a similar vein throughout the work.

The first third or so of the work is dedicated to astronomers and archaeologists, both of whom make the point that we are always living in, and they are always studying, the past.

One astronomer points out that even the perception of the present is in the very recent past because of the minute delay in thoughts moving to being consciously understood.

Guzman moves from this metaphysical premise to pointing out the irony in Chile being such an ideal place to study the past for these two disciplines because it has yet to fully confront its own most recent history. (He also makes the point in the film that atrocities against indigenous people occurred in the 19th century as well.)

More characters enter Nostalgia at this point, and the film, like a boa constrictor, starts to take deeper hold of the viewer’s attention and emotions.

Guzman introduces us to an imprisoned architect who memorized every detail of the dimensions of the concentration camp in which he was imprisoned once he was in exile in Denmark. Guzman notes that in a way the man, who is driven to remember, and his wife, who is losing her memory as she falls into the grip of Alzheimer’s, are a metaphor.

We meet another former concentration camp survivor who was part of a group of about two dozen prisoners who did their own stargazing while incarcerated. Led by a doctor who knew a lot about astronomy, the group was eventually stopped by the authorities who feared they would seek to escape.

The gentleman explains that he did not escape, but did feel at those moments very free.

Guzman also introduces us to the women and their ceaseless searches, explaining that cities all over the nation have people conducting similar searches.

Sometimes, having “success” is not enough.

In one of the movie’s most moving scenes, a woman explains that receiving just a part of her child’s body does not quiet the ache inside of her.

He was whole when they took him, she says, tears coming to her eyes as she sits in the desert where she has spent countless hours. I don’t want just a piece of him.

Nostalgia has moments of light, too.

One of these comes in the form of an astronomer who was raised by her grandparents after her parents were detained and killed.

She explains that her grandparents, who sit wordlessly on a couch, were pressured relentlessly by the government to reveal their children’s location lest their granddaughter be killed.

Eventually, they relented.

Despite living with this unthinkable burden, they managed to raise her in a joyful environment. Though she thinks of herself as having a manufacturing defect, she sees that the son she is raising does not, nor does her husband. This knowledge is a source of solace.

But so too is her study of astronomy and the way she has used her understanding of the natural world to formulate an attitude toward her parents’ death as part of the natural course of events.

Seeing this way, she says, allows her to diminish some of the pain she still feels over their death and absence from her life.

In the end, Guzman returns to the purity of his childhood-a period that he represents through the marbles he carried around as a boy-and the lights and stars twinkling over Santiago, the nation’s capital.

As the man-made lights start to go out and just the sounds remain, continuing as the credits roll, we are left with a deeper sense of the thread of seeking to answer questions from the past that connect so many in this injured, blood-soaked land.

Guzman is a Chilean who is seeking both to share and better understand his own experience as well as to help his countrymen confront what they together have not had the courage to completely face.

Yet, in this very effort, we are also left with the unsettling realization that, as Martha Minow wrote in the introduction to her work Between Vengeance and Forgiveness, there can be no final closure.

But we must do something.

Guzman has given us that in his film.

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.