Chilean Chronicles, Part XXXVI: Presenting about Dr. King's Life and Legacy at St. George's

As people throughout the world know, today marks 50 years since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his iconic “I have a Dream” speech in front of an estimated 250,000 people who were also attending the March on Washington. This morning, Dunreith, dear friends Lisa Cook and Jim Peters, and I traveled to St. George´s School, where I presented at Angelica Garrido's invitation about Dr. King´s life and legacy.

Located on the outskirts of the city, St. George´s is an institution which has both a rich tradition of working for social justice and many very wealthy students. The campus, which is nestled near the base of the Andean cordillera, has clean and cool air that felt markedly different than what we breathe in our Providencia neighborhood, about 2,000 students, many of whom walk around in uniforms with blue sweater, a tie and either a skirt or slacks, and acres and acres of grounds and many newly constructed buildings.

The film was the subject of Machuca, St. George´s alumnus Andres Wood´s film about the school that depicted the harrowing days before, and just after, the Sept. 11 coup in 1973. Dedicated to Father Gerardo Whelan, the movie centers on the relationship between a white and comparatively wealthy student at the school and a much poorer, indigneous boy who joins the ranks of Georgians.

Father Jose Ahumada, the current rector at St. George´s, graduated from the school in 1972 Father Ahumada lived with Father Whelan, who played a major role in his becoming a priest, around the time of the coup.

Ahumada was one of more than 80 ninth- and tenth-grade students and faculty members who filed into the auditórium for the presentation.

I explained that I wanted the session to be useful for them, that it should be a conversation and that I wanted to start with hearing what they knew about Dr. King.

The request elicited quite a bit of Spanish-language conversation, but no volunteers for what felt like closet to a minute.

Eventually, a short boy named Andres raised his hand and shared that Dr. King was someone who died while fighting for justice.

We gave Andres a round of applause.

Another student offered that Dr. King believed in working for change in a non-violent manner and that he struggled against segregation before I began the discussion in earnest.

I took the group through a chronology of King´s life, starting with his birth in 1929 in Atlanta to a middle-class family with a tradition and history of preachers. I explained that, growing up in the segregated South, his family were able to shield him for a while from some of the system´s painful incidents.

When that inevitably happened, King, who had a positive sense of himself, was wounded but not broken.

We talked about his attendance at college at age 15, about how he then went to Morehouse College, where King came under the influence of Dr. Benjamin Mays.

Like generations of Morehouse students, King was exhorted on a daily basis to take his education, go out in the world and work to make it better.

He did not initially heed the call.

Rather, he got his doctorate in systematic theology at Boston University and married Coretta Scott before moving to sleepy Montgomery, Alabama.

Rosa Parks was arrested about a year after King arrived there.

While he rose to national prominence during the ensuing Montgomery Bus Boycott, King was initially chosen by leaders in the community to be the face of the movement because he was new in town and had no known enemies.

That soon changed.

King started receiving death threats on a daily basis-threats he lived with for the remainder of his life.

They were not idle.

During the boycott, someone bombed King´s house in an effort to kill him and his family.

An angry crowd gathered at King´s house, ready to take violent action if he gave the word to do so.

Instead, he instructed them to act in a nonviolent manner.

I did make the point that King and other members of the civil rights movement´s endorsement of nonviolence, especially during this period, was not absolute. A number of top members of the movement carried guns with them.

Eventually, the boycotters won a victory in the Supreme Court, and another part of the wall of legal segregation had been chipped away. (The court had already ruled in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case the year before that the doctrine of “Separate but equal” did not hold legal wáter.)

The fight continued over the next eight years.

King played a critical role, but was one of hundreds of thousands of people who participated in the movement, which had starkly different visions of how to achieve social justice.

Sometimes, he experienced setbacks, as in 1961 in Albany, Georgia, when Sheriff Laurie Pritchett blunted the movement's efforts to spark dramatic confrontations that would often lead to calls for change.

In 1958, King was nearly killed by Izola Curry, who stabbed him with a letter opener.

King was told later that he would have died had he sneezed.

In the final address he ever gave, he talked about how glad he was that he did not sneeze, and what, because he lived, he had been privileged to see.

The March on Washington was one such event.

I showed a clip to the students of King´s legendary speech, but focused on his core message that 100 years after Lincoln, in whose shadow he and the other marches had gathered, had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, black people were not free.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smEqnnklfYs&w=420&h=315] The section starts at 2:30.

When it comes to black people, the check based on the country´s architect´s lofty promises had come back marked “Insufficient funds,” King said to the roar of the crowd.

We talked about how King continued to push on, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, encouraging crowds as they marched from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, fighting against unfair housing conditions in Chicago in 1966, speaking out against the Vietnam War in 1967, and, finally, working for the Poor People´s Campaign in April 1968.

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

It was there that he gave his final speech, one in which he made it clear that he had understood, and accepted, long before that he might not live a long life.

I may not get there with you, he declared, as the crowd in a Memphis church cheered and clapped, but I know that we as a people are going to make it to the Promised Land.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98k-pjN6nl0&w=420&h=315]

James Earl Ray shot King dead with a sniper the next day.

Before moving to King´s legacy, I made the points that he had made enormous contributions to the country, but was not a perfect man and did not do so alone. Youth and music both played major roles in the gains that were realized during those years and afterward.

I asked the students to define legacy.

One young man answered that it´s what influence remains after you retire or die.

We talked about King´s family, his books, his speeches, the hundreds of schools and streets and even a national holiday that are named after him.

I also encouraged the young people to think about the influence of people who King inspired and from whom he learned.

People like Bayard Rustin, a gay oragnizer and activist who pulled together the logistics of the March on Washington in just about two months.

People like Father Michael Pfleger, who witnessed the hatred that King and other marchers endured in his home neighborhood in Chicago and who has dedicated his entire life to serving the community and improving social conditions.

People like Barack Obama, who honored King in his second inaugural address and in the title of his second book, The Audacity of Hope.

And people like personal hero Leon Bass, a black veteran who served in the segregated United States Army, witnessed the liberation of the Buchenwald Concentration camp, and became influenced by King during the bus boycott.

A teacher in inner-city Philadelphia, Bass brought his students to hear King speak when he came to Philadelphia, and, exactly 50 years ago today, was among the quarter million people who traveled to Washington to attend the march.

Bass, who is now 88 years old, still travels and speaks to young people about his experiences.

During his addresses, he asks students the question, “Is the price too high?” to speak up for justice and truth.

I asked them the same question as I sought to connect King´s life and legacy to their own.

I asked them what they were willing to do.

We adults believe in them and are there for them, and they each had to decide for themselves what choices they would make, I said.

At this point I stopped and asked for questions.

One young woman asked for details about the role that music played in the movement, and I played about two minutes from a Sweet Honey in the Rock song that honored activist Ella Baker, who ceaselessly supported young people and never gave up in her efforts to make the world a better place.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6Uus--gFrc&w=420&h=315]

Several students asked what would happen if King hadn´t lived, if the gains would not have occurred.

I said that we could not know because he did live, but that the results in the 1960s were the product of people having worked for change two decades earlier.

One young man asked me what I had done besides talk about Dr. King.

I spoke about running with then-President Donald Kennedy at Stanford, debating apartheid and then writing about for the school newspaper, about working as an educator to improve people´s circumstances, having written about race and poverty issues for The Chicago Reporter for five years and seeking to dig up important information for Spanish-speaking communities in my capacity as a database and investigative editor at Hoy.

I also said we seek to raise our son with values consistent to those of Dr. King, but that one can always do more.

We wrapped up the questions and the students filed out and onto a break.

Angelica showed us around the campus before ushering us to the front of the school.

Reasonable people can disagree about where we are now in the United States and the world compared with 50 years ago, about whether King would be pleased or disturbed by the current state of affairs.

But few could argue that the man and the hundreds of thousands of loyal foot soldiers who stood there and listened to his soaring oratory made a dent in the universe.

In so doing, they showed themselves, their communities and their nation that it is indeed possible to stand up, to be counted and to insist that lofty rhetoric be matched with concrete actions.

We have not gotten to the Promised Land King described, and we stand on the shoulders of those who gave their energy, their commitment and even their lives to help us move from where we were.

Now, it is our turn.

Chilean Chronicles, Part XXXV: Thinking in Spanish Before English

It happened for the first time the other day. I had just woken up and was thinking about the comments that I will deliver tomorrow about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.`s life and legacy to about 100 students at St. George´s school.

The thoughts came in Spanish, and went on for a little while before I made two realizations.

The first was that my reflex had been Spanish before English.

The second was that this wouldn´t be particularly useful at St. George´s because their medium of instruction is English.

I grinned nevertheless.

For me, learning a language is a long-term and fitful process.

While you can, if you master about 500 essential words in just about any language, function at a certain level, it can take years to get to the point where you no longer make routine gramatical errors, you have a firm command of idiomatic expressions and the first question out of people´s mouths after meeting you is not, “Where are you from?”

They´re generally asking this because it´s abundantly clear that, whatever country you have traveled from, it is definitely not the one where you are at that very moment.

The closest I´ve come to someone thinking I´m from Chile since Dunreith and I landed here in mid-July is a five-year-old girl whom we met while taking our initial hike in the Andes.

After she asked me where I was from, I told her to guess.

Argentina? She asked hopefully.

No, I answered, pleased that her lack of knowledge led me to entertain, if only for a minute, the delusion that I actually sounded like I hail from one of Chile´s neighbors and biggest rivals.

I´m not holding my breath for anyone who actually knows anything about world geography or accents to think that somehow I come from the southern part of Chile.

At the same time, I have been inching closer and closer to the point where I am no longer continually doing the translation dance of hearing spoken Spanish, translating it into English, formulating my response in English and then translating the words back into Spanish before opening my mouth.

This is why the St. George´s thought was so exciting for me.

I´ve come close to this point before in other languages.

I had a moment or two after my exchange with Lai-Ang Tea in eighth grade-the program was set up to be English and French, and somehow the American and the Cambodian, who I later realized was likely a genocide survivor, were paired-after I spent two weeks with his family when the words started to come in French before English.

In 1985, after a couple of months of study in Florence, Italy and several weeks of travel, I dreamed once in Italian.

Working at Hoy since March 2011 has been terrific for my Spanish speaking, reading and writing.

I still remember a couple of months into my stint there, when colleague and friend Leticia Espinosa, a Mexican national, leaned over to me after I had spoken and said, politely but directly, ¨Jeff, I notice that you use the verb “sembrar” a lot. That verb doesn´t exist in Spanish.

What are you trying to say?” she asked.

I want to say “ to seem,¨ I answered.

“Es paracer,¨ she replied.

Leti´s instruction was one part of the gifts that many, if not all, of the members of the Hoy team gave. Octavio Lopez corrected my error-riddled writing with efficiency and without complaint.

Still, even with all this support, the combination of interacting a lot with Tribune folks and those folks on the Hoy staff who are more comfortable in English has contributed to my not yet taking this step.

Until now.

When it happens again, and I´m optimistic that that time will not be long, I´ll again feel joy and satisfaction at arriving at this level of fluency.

I´ll be grateful for the help provided to me by Dunreith, who has consented to have us speak Spanish much of the time we are at our apartment in Santiago as well as on the streets as we experience our various adventures here in Chile.

I´ll also remember Brandon Magruder, my friend and former colleague at Community Renewal Society.

A thin, highly intelligent young man with spectacles, a beard and a distinguished manner that belied his chronological age, Brandon and I spent hours, literally, talking Spanish with each other.

We´d greet each other by saying, ¨Hola, señor.”

Hello, Sir.

Then we´d chat for a while in Spanish before going our separate ways.

For a while, we met daily during our lunch break to go over exercises in the Instituto Cervantes workbooks, chat about our lives and dream of the day when we could one day reach the highest level that Instituto Cervantes had established.

“Estamos leyendas en nuestras mentes,¨ we`d say.

We´re legend in our own minds.

Brandon and I have not yet reached the Promised Land of attaining the pinacle of Instituto Cervantes achievement, but we haven´t given up our quest, either.

Brief and small, like a bulb poking up in spring, my thought the other gave me hope that we´ll get there.

Poco a poco.

La lucha continua.

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.

Chilean Chronicles, Part XXXIII: A Grey Neruda Day visiting Isla Negra

“It’s grey, but Neruda loved grey,” friend, intrepid journalist and unfathomably generous host Alejandra Matus told us. “It’s a Neruda day.” She was talking to Jack Fuller, Dunreith and me.

The four of us were sitting in the lobby of the Hotel Plaza San Francisco waiting for University of Diego Portales colleague Patricia Rivera to join us before driving to Isla Negra, Pablo Neruda’s largest home and the place in which he spent by far the most time.

Jack’s the former editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune, where he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for his editorials on constitutional issues. Alejandra hosted him throughout the week at UDP, a time during which he presented to students, alumni and colleagues about his latest book.

Although he’s a long-time and accomplished novelist-he told me during the day that he was writing fiction during his training in 1968 in Fort Bragg, North Carolina-his most recent work is about journalism and the challenges that news organization face in trying to retain large number of readers.

Dunreith and I attended his first presentation, an address on Tuesday evening in which he explained the impact of research about brain activity and the critical role emotion plays in attracting and retaining people’s attention.

A central part of his message was that journalists and news outlets need to focus both on retaining standards of journalistic integrity while at the same time integrating new methods based on the knowledge gleaned from the most recent neurological research.

Patricia arrived, we filed into the gray van that matched the day and started the 90-minute ride to Isla Negra.

The Ride and the Black Book of Chilean Justice Relieved of driving and navigational responsibilities, we settled into an easy and amiable conversational flow as we made our way through the rolling green hills.

We moved from the joys and challenge of child rearing in the United States and Chile to Jack’s encounters with some of the more Joseph Heller-like moments while serving as a correspondent in Vietnam in 1968, to my father’s quip, when asked by a colonel why he was wearing his army-issued hat backward, that he wanted people of lower rank to be able to salute him coming and going.

The discussion went in a deeper direction when, at Jack’s request, Alejandra told us the story behind, and the response to, The Black Book of Chilean Justice, her expose of the corruption and lack of independence in the Chilean judiciary during the Pinochet era.

Investigative stalwart Monica Gonzalez invited Alejandra in the early 90s to participate in the project after the publication of a federal report that criticized the judiciary. (Gonzalez, who now directs CIPER, Chile’s strongest investigative publication, later backed out due to other work responsibilities.)

Alejandra smiled as she remembered asking her then-editor for two extra weeks of vacation to write the book.

He laughed, told her to take the two weeks of vacation and then get to work.

It ended up taking six years.

The book’s publication in early 1999 came months after Pinochet’s arrest in London in October 1998.

The timing was such that the book publishers thought that there would not be a strong official response to the book becoming available nine years after Pinochet left power.

They were wrong.

Drastically so.

Judge Rafael Huerta Bustos ordered all copies of the books confiscated the day after it was published. Chief Justice Servando Jordan invoked the State Security Law, which made it a crime to disrespect public officials or governmental agencies. Among other elements in the suit, he cited the book's cover, which showed three monkeys who represented the philosophy of "See-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil."

Alejandra faced five years in prison.

Her initial plan was to stay and fight, but three conversations changed her mind.

She spoke with her brother, a lawyer who said she could indeed be imprisoned.

Her publisher said the house couldn’t protect her.

And her fiancé looked terrified.

Instead, Alejandra decided to flee the country as soon as possible.

She flew to Buenos Aires and thought the whole situation would calm down in about 10 days.

She didn’t return to her country for two-and-a-half years.

A lot happened during that time.

Presidential candidate and later victor Ricardo Lagos made the law and Alejandra’s return an issue in his campaign.

Tens of thousands of copies of the book were sold on the black market. La Tercera, Chile’s second-largest newspaper, published the book on its website outside of the United States.

Alejandra won a case she filed against the Chilean state in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and received reparations.

The law eventually was overturned.

This is a remarkable story, Jack said.

Patti agreed, adding that many people in Chile consider Alejandra a hero.

The impact of what Alejandra had shared with us was soaking in when we pulled off the highway and started driving the final kilometers to Isla Negra. Isla Negra

We walked around the property and headed down to the beach.

“I came back from my voyages and navigated constructing happiness,” was carved in Neruda’s distinctive cursive writing into a brown wooden beam holding up the front entrance to the long house that snaked along his property.

Constructing was indeed the perfect word.

Dunreith and I had already seen La Chascona and La Sebastiana, Neruda’s homes in Santiago and Valparaiso, so we were prepared for the way Neruda built a world out of his home, his travels, his politics, his writing, his women, and his friends.

We felt ready to see the fantastic objects like a life-size horse made in part of papier-mache and statues of bare-breasted women that Neruda treated as if they were alive, the secret space of the kitchen, a place Neruda he considered magical, the sacred sanctuary where he wrote, and the items he acquired from all parts of the planet. (This house contains extensive collections of pipes, bottles, sombreros, butterflies and clam shells.)

We were familiar with Neruda’s love of the sea, his penchant for naming houses and friends’ books, and his insistence on a robust and well-stocked bar.

But whereas the other homes had a more vertical feel-they were a minimum of four stories each-Isla Negra was defined by its comparative flatness and its clear and stunning views at nearly all points of the house of Pacific Ocean.

This included the tomb outside where he and Matilde Urrutia, his third and final wife, were buried.

Waves crashed into the rocks in their ceaseless, eternal rhythm, spraying foam high into the air and providing an undulating, calming background accompaniment to their permanent resting place.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTrB2HDydDI&w=420&h=315]

Charo Cofre

It was close to 1:00 p.m., and we were all feeling hungry.

Fortunately, Alejandra had arranged for us to eat at a nearby hostel owned by Chilean acoustic guitar legend Charo Cofre.

She and her husband Hugo were close friends of Neruda who lived with him for two months in Paris.

A gallery of black and white photographs, several of which were autographed by the poet, and nearly of which had relevant quotes from him writing pasted onto them, stood along the walls.

Images of Neruda’s mother, who died shortly after he was born.

Pictures of the artist in exile, looking like an earlier version of James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano.

A somber shot of the crowd of people, with Hugo identified in the back, who marched to bury Neruda after his death in the first public protest after the coup.

A photograph of his message, written in 1971 in his trademark cursive script, “I am too happy to write. I have to eat and drink with you, dear friends.”

We were the only customers in the house.

Well, besides Don Pablo.

A lifelike model of the poet, dressed smartly in a tweed jacket, a red scarf poking out of his white button-down shirt and one of his many hats, sat in the corner.

We all took some pictures next to Neruda, whose fingers moved as if ready to write some more when we started to move away from him.

We started the meal with Chilean standards of a pisco sour and rolls topped with pevre, a salsa equivalent.

Dunreith and I followed Alejandra’s lead and ordered caldillo de congrio, a fish soup that was Neruda’s favorite dish.

We were well into our meal and a few glasses of white wine where Charo came, guitar in hand and sat at the head of the table.

Her black haired pulled back tightly against her head, Charo was draped in a green shawl that covered most of her body like a cloak. The color of her light-blue flowered shirt matched her eyeshadow.

Although she regularly performs for hundreds, if not thousands of people, today it was just the five of us.

I am doing this for Alejandra, she said.

Charo sang about her country, the sea that Neruda loved so deeply and, in a new song, about her mother’s hands.

Her own hands danced and strummed and plucked as she sang, often with her eyes closed.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rIRIcA2Nb8&w=420&h=315]

In between the songs, she told us about Neruda and Matilde.

People on the left want to say that he was killed by the government, but I think he died of a broken heart, she said. (Neruda passed away just 12 days after the Pinochet coup and subsequent ransacking of La Chascona by military authorities.)

Charo based her opinion on having talked with Matilde regularly in the dozen years after her husband died, a period during which she never mentioned a murder.

Charo told us about shopping at a flea market in Paris for a bottle to add to his collection.

It was no easy task, as he already owned many of the ones they brought to him.

But, eventually, they met with success.

Neruda rewarded himself with an artery-clogging croque monsieur, ham and cheese sandwich that he said had to be kept quiet from Matilde.

Charo also talked about how she learned from the joy her mother took in daily life, in small moments like watching tiny chickens move.

Indeed, she said that she had recently told a very wealthy friend that she felt richer than her because of the way attitude she has toward her life.

After about half an hour of singing and talking and laughing, Charo said she had to go.

Soon, we did, too, to get Jack to the airport. The Return

The ride back to Santiago was slower.

Dunreith closed her eyes in the front.

I talked mostly in Spanish with Patti, a documentary film maker and a doctoral student who is doing her dissertation about narrative construction in blogs. Jack and Alejandra discussed the 1976 murder by Chilean government officers of former Chilean ambassador to the United States Orlando Letelier.

We dropped Jack at the airport so that he could catch his return flight home before the driver dropped us at the University of Diego Portales.

We went with Alejandra to pick up Alejandro, her five-year-old son, and then to meet her husband Alberto, a former militant and exile who is now a political consultant.

He hugged and his wife and son.

He and his partner were working with Ricardo Yarzo, a candidates for a council position in the upcoming November elections. He’s one of 40 candidates seeking to win the eight positions that are available in Punta Arenas, one of the country’s southern-most communities.

Alberto introduced Alejandra to Ricardo.

Do you know her? he asked quietly, pride seeping through his voice. She wrote the Black Book of Chilean Justice.

Ricardo said that he did.

We downloaded the video I shot of Charo singing, and I showed it to Alberto.

He stopped moving and watched, riveted.

“She is beautiful,” he declared.

Alejandra was right.

It was a grey Neruda day.

And so much more.

Chilean Chronicles, Part XXXII: Day Two of Learning from Fulbright Classmates

Today was the second day at the University of Chile with my Fulbright colleagues, and, again, there was an extraordinarily rich array of intellectual content to absorb. Yesterday’s presentations centered around the theme of sustainability and environmentally-oriented projects, while today’s sessions covered a series of topics.

Key points from each stood out from each one.

The emotion in his voice pushing through his voice as he gamely delivered his lecture in Spanish, David Bergin spoke about Mr. Webb, his former high school science teacher whose passion for his subject left a firm and life-changing imprint on him and many other students during his decades-long career.

Steve Sadlier used the image of a protest about domestic violence in which a black poster saying that not another woman should be killed was surrounded by papers with victims’ names interspersed with shoes to talk through the socio-cultural issues of society, culture and language.

In her talk about the Mapuche in Argentina and Chile, literary scholar Camila Lopez talked about “entre,” the space of being between two worlds that characters travel through in the work of Argentine novelist Maria Rosa Lojo.

Greg Gogolin gave an eye-opening talk about Cybercrime in which he shared that the chief of the Detroit Police Department told him that they don’t even go after crimes that are less than $100,000 in a month.

This means that cybercriminals can do as much as $1 million per year without even being pursued by the police in the city.

Beyond that, Greg gave us perhaps the most useful piece of advice at all; change your passwords, especially for banking, to nine characters.

Make sure to include at least one number, one capital letter and one unusual character.

Bumping up the total from seven characters to eight can increase the amount of time people who want to crack a password up from minutes to days, he said.

Adding one more character to nine can make the time to break the code from days to years.

In the final presentation, Paul Quick spoke about the expansive kind of interdisciplinary sharing that can happen when colleagues get together, eat and soak in the pleasure of each other's company.

The mood was certainly upbeat and the conversation rich as we broke bread, well, salad, fish and potatoes and a very stiff pisco sour, at the building where Admiral Merino, General Pinochet and their cronies set up shop after they deposed the democratically-elected government in September 1973.

Alternately joking and serious, we switched back and forth from Spanish to English as we discussed the relative merits of Chicago and Santiago’s transit systems. (Santiago’s Metro won in a romp over the El, except at Rush , even as Felix from the Fulbright Commission put in a plug for the virtue of the Loop as a neighborhood.)

We talked about the best time of year to head over the cordillera and go to Argentina’s Mendoza region for what Victoria Viteri of the Fulbright Commission said is the world’s best meat and food.

Many Chileans go to Mendoza during the week of September 18, the date on which the nation celebrates its independence. But the consensus among the Chileans at our end of the long wooden table was that Journalism Department Chair Carlos Aldunate was right in telling us, during our four-hour long dinner, in a tone that barely got to the half joking level, that Dunreith and my going there during that time would be an insult.

Dunreith showed family pictures that elicited oohs and aahs, and University of Diego Portales institutional memory Josefa Romero invited us to visit her family’s home in the fields a couple of hours away when Aidan comes to visit in late November.

The hour at which I needed to leave to make it on time to my class at 3:30 came just as the dessert and coffee arrived.

We have to have postre, Dunreith and Josefa said together in a tone that indicated they would brook no disagreement.

We did, gulping down the white and dark chocolate concoctions a bit faster than usual, but still long enough to savor the sweet, creamy mixture.

The time to talk the Metro had passed, so the three of us took a taxi after we made the rounds of both tables and said goodbye to our new friends.

Six weeks ago today, Dunreith and I boarded a plane that took us to Dallas and, from there, to Santiago, the capital of a country we had wanted to visit for more than a decade.

Yesterday, I met the entire group of this year’s Fulbrighters in person for the first time.

Filled with the food, drink and knowledge I had absorbed, feeling surprisingly at home, I walked up to the third floor, retrieved the blue University of Diego Portales binder from the departmental office and headed down to my classroom.

The students would be arriving in less than 15 minutes.