Chilean Chronicles, Part 61: Transparency Troubles in Chile

I wrote the other day about my ongoing project about the impact of the 2009 Transparency Law on investigative journalism here in Chile.

I mentioned in that post that transparency guru Moises Sanchez, who works in the area of open government with countries throughout the continent, believes that the law and accompanying infrastructure of a Transparency Council that investigates and decides on each claim is, with Mexico, among the best in the continent.

Since then I’ve reached out to investigative non-profit outfit CIPER, a stalwart organization that has broken many stories of national impact and participated in international collaborations with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

As it turns out, I also received an invitation that I passed onto my students from CIPER to attend a weeklong workshop toward the end of next month.

Among the first topics: how to file a request under the Transparency Act.

In a positive development on that point, I  heard from my student Doren Lowry that the 20 days since he submitted his request for data has passed, and that he’s going to inquire as to the status of his letter.

More fundamentally, I’ve come with more and more certainty  to believe that it is important to expand my focus beyond a strict look at a particular journalistic outlet, or even the field itself, to get a broader, more textured understanding of how the issue of transparency  is playing out here.

As a result, I contacted Ciudadano Inteligente, a non-profit organization committed to principles of transparency and open government.  The organization, along with two others, has been involved in a lawsuit around the right of citizens to have access to emails written by public officials on their work accounts.

This is an important issue as the Transparency Council and  civil society groups-but not, notably, media outlets-tussle with the government over the rights and limits of the public to have access to what the government that they are funding is doing.

There is historical resonance, too, as Chile continues to wrestle with its wounded past. The society was far from open before the Pinochet dictatorship, and, during his 17-year reign, brutality, information control, and silence were integral and related parts of a ruling method.

The lawsuit builds on the legal foundation that Mario Gebauer, the mayor of Melipilla with whom we spent a number of hours and had lunch yesterday, attempted to establish.

The year following the devastating earthquake of Feburary 27, 2010, Gebauer asked for the emails between Interior Subsecretary Rodrigo Ubilla, and the provincial government of Melipilla about the distribution of funds for reconstruction for the earthquake. (In an analogue to Los Angeles City and County, Melipilla is both a city and a province.)

The government refused to provide the requested documents, citing privacy and confidentiality concerns of the employees, even though they were acting in their public capacity.

The judicial branch ultimately accepted the government’s arguments, and no emails were released.

There was a certain irony in the timing of our meeting with Gebauer.

Today our students heard from David Donald, data editor of the Center for Public Integrity, spoke about an analysis that he helped reporter and friend Kate Golden of Wisconsin Watch of Gov. Scott Walker’s emails.

The number of emails was so copious, David said, that he devised a random sample to get a representative understanding of what the emails said.

Moreover, as Lewis Maltby wrote in Can They Do That, in the United States employers have the right to look at work and private email activity that is done during work time, and even after hours if it is conducted on a work computer.

The Chilean court’s decision is troubling enough.

Yet what is more so is that the government is considering legislation that would place official limits on the public’s ability to receive email from their officials, according to Carlos Gutierrez, a lawyer for the community of Melipilla.

I’ll be looking more into this and report on what I find.

It’s too early for me to render a conclusive judgment.

But a picture is rapidly emerging of an acquiescent press, the majority of which is neither trying to access the rights they have nor to contest the erosion of those freedoms, and of a society whose progressive promises have not yet been with an openness commensurate with those lofty ideals.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 60: The Busy Life of Mayor Mario Gebauer

A few years ago, Mario Gebauer was planning to set aside some quiet, reflective time to study social anthropology. But then came the call came to serve in government in Santiago.

He answered.

In 2008 he decided to run for Mayor of Melipilla, a community about an hour southwest of Santiago.

During his campaign Mario walked to thousands of households, knocking on doors, introducing himself and asking for support from the voters in on during his campaign.

The longtime Socialist won in a traditionally right-leaning area, garnering 58 percent of the vote.

His life has been a whirlwind of activity ever since.

To wit, he has helped the usher the community through the devastation wrought by the deadly earthquake of 2010.

He’s participated in a precedent-setting, but ultimately unsuccessful, lawsuit involving the 2009 Transparency Law and that sought public officials’ emails.

He’s started to work with Chinese companies that want to invest in the area that has traditionally relied heavily on agriculture to power its enconomy.

He’s begun working on a hospital that would replace the current facility that, along with other public services, attracts people from all over, but that he said is not equipped with state-of-the-art facilities.

He’s laid the groundwork, along with elected officials in nearby San Antonio, to create a distinct governmental region that would seek to release what he called the “super-centralized” system that, not unlike Chicago in Illinois, concentrates a disproportionate amount of power and resources in the largest city.

He’s supporting Michelle Bachelet so that she can win in the first round in the upcoming presidential elections as well as backing other candidates with similar political leanings.

He’s also raising a family.

Dunreith and I spent three and a half hours with him this morning and afternoon.

I had met Mario briefly at the University of Diego Portales with Alberto Barrera, a former MIRista, friend and husband of colleague and guide Alejandra Matus. We were following up on his invitation for us to visit his community.

Dunreith and I took the Route 78 bus from the San Borja bus station for a peaceful, hour-long ride through increasingly green, hilly and rural territory to arrive near the town square.

After walking to the town square and looking for the municipal building, we received help from Juan Manuel Cornejo, a hale and hearty lifetime Mellepilla resident who works in real estate. Cornejo delivered us to the mayor’s office and took his leave after passing me a business card.

Dressed in a sweater and blue jeans, Mario is close to six feet with thinning, fine black hair. He is clean shaven, and emits a look of intense concentration on his face as he listens.

Mario speaks quietly and moves and acts in a efficient, economical fashion. He used the time the town’s lawyer came in talk with us about the transparency lawsuit to rapidly sign a bunch of documents, all the while continuing to follow the conversation. His phone buzzes and moves constantly with calls and texts and emails.

The Social Democrat came of age during the 1988 plebiscite in which the Chilean electorate voted to end the reign of dictator Augusto Pinochet. Then 17 years old, he couldn’t vote, but he was able to throw himself into the work and see the value of a key opportunity converted into a meaningful social result.

The pictures on the wall show that his political commitments and high levels of energy have remained largely the same since then.

On one wall is a framed copy of the Bolivarian dream of a pan-Latin American federation.

On an adjacent wall is an arpillera, or tapestry, that were common forms of resistance during the Pinochet dictatorship. (He later gave Dunreith nine cards with multi-colored cloth Nativity scenes.) Near that are three black and white pictures he received during a recent trip to Cuba.

So, too, have the emotional scars from that era.

Over lunch, Dunreith said that she has been watching Los Ochenta, Andres Wood's company’s representation of life during the dictatorship as experienced by a single family.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIk3f2FZIgs&w=560&h=315]

I watched one episode of the show and decided not to watch more, Mario said.

His choice was not because the program has inaccuracies.

Quite the opposite, in fact. He praised the scenes and clothes and music and television excerpts that appear in the episodes.

Rather the show brings back painful memories for Mario. He didn’t elaborate, but said, simply, “Era fuerte.”

It was strong.

His words came after we had spoken in the office about the major initiatives he has been engaged in during his first term and the beginning of his second four years in office. Mario explained that he is deeply committed to bringing public investment to Melipilla. It’s no easy task, as about 80 percent of the municipalities have no such investment. He estimates that he travels to Santiago about once a week to solicit funds, among other purposes.

We had arrived at lunch after driving in the mayor’s official car, a white pickup truck, past rolling hills with vineyards, horses, cows, basic houses with Chilean flags and road signs with campaign pictures of candidates like Juan Antonio Coloma.

Don Roberto, a brown-haired lifelong native of Melipilla, drove, and then ate, with us at El Mirador de Popeta, a restaurant that sits above the main highway on a dusty and winding road and that specializes in typical seafood.

Miriam, an energetic grandmother of three with a purple sweater, thick black hair in a ponytail and amiable manner, greeted Gebauer with a familiar hug and ushered us to our table.

We were the only ones in the restaurant.

Shortly after we sat down, Miriam brought a steaming pile of the largest, tastiest seafood appetizer I’ve ever shared.

Shrimp, scallops, mussels in shells that ringed that the black, cast-iron bowl. Large pieces of salmon and reinata. Vegetables and a rich, brown soy-based sauce underneath.

And, of course, a pisco sour. This one had a touch of ginger on the top that added a tangy twist.

We spoke during the meal about what the experience of people in the area was during the dictatorship.

Don Roberto explained that many people worked on farms, received their information about what was happening from their patron, or boss, and thus did not know about the atrocities the Pinochet regime had committed. Because of that, the recent commemorative activities and shows on television had been a potent and disturbing revelation, he said.

In between peppering us throughout the drive and meal about the American political situation, Gebauer told us about visiting the Holocaust Memorial in Israel, his trips to Rio and his sense of Buenos Aires.

Miriam came back after we had finished-she told me she was going to punish me because I hadn’t eaten enough-and asked if we wanted dessert.

We chatted for a minute about El Mirador, which gets its seafood and shellfish from Santiago and which she and her husband opened two years ago. By this time the restaurant was bustling with customers.

The opening came 40 years into their marriage and decades after her husband, who worked for most of his life in restaurant kitchens, first hatched his dream.

Miriam told us that her daughter has taught English for nine years.

But the English of England, not America, which is a lower form, Mario said.

It’s like the different between Castilian and Chilean Spanish, I answered. (We had already discussed how many Chileans pride themselves on speaking a Spanish that is generously called hard to understand.)

They laughed loudly.

The Americans are the Chileans of English, I added.

More laughter.

We talked a little while longer until a pause came in the conversation.

Shall we go? Mario asked.

It was a statement more than a question.

We got back in the car. Mario talked, texted and answered as we drove.Don Roberto dropped us off at the bus station.

Toward the end of the meal, Mario said he hoped to get back to his studies next year.

I wouldn’t count on it.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 59: Looking into Transparency in Chile

Our time in Chile has already been filled with extraordinary experiences, and we’re not even at the halfway mark.

We´ve spent a magical day at the home of Alejandra Matus and her family.

We´ve been witness to what amounted to a smidgen of the available activities through the build up to, and commemoration of, the 40th anniversary of the Pinochet coup.

We´ve atended a bunch of fondas, eating anticuchos and drinking terremotos, during the weeklong celebration of Fiestas Patrias.

I´ve also had the great pleasure of teaching and learning from my Data Journalism students at the University of Diego Portales.  They´ve finished their first of three projects.  Their work and grasp of the concepts impressed me, while the work they´ve produced has made me feel proud.

Beyond that, we’ve all kinds of red wine, empanadas, pisco sours and cazuelas.

Of course, I’m not just here to teach a class, meet incredibly generous and interesting people, improve my Spanish and eat delicious food.

I´m also doing research into the impact the 2009 Transparency Law has had on investigative journalism in the country.

Passed during the administration of former President and current leading presidential candidate Michelle Bachelet, the law was hailed as a landmark piece of legislation that would move the former dictatorship state in a far more open direction.

Exactly how far it’s gone is what I intend to find out during the next three months.

The structure is in place, according to open government guru Moises Sanchez.

We met over Skype in 2008, the first year I applied for the Fulbright in Chile, and in person over coffee about a month agao.

Moises said that Chile and Mexico have the strongest laws and best supporting infrastructure in Latin America.

He ought to know.

His “region” is the entire continent, and he spends much of his time traveling from country to country monitoring the state of public access to information.

That’s helpful background information, and I will say that I my original research plan was to emulate the noteworthy example set by James Painter, a BBC journalist turned Oxford academic who did a fascinating content analysis of climate change denial.

My adaptation would be to look at a year´s worth of coverage by El Mercurio, the nation´s largest paper, before the law changed, and a year´s worth of coverage after its passage to evaluate what, if any, impact it had had.

There were one small, all right, major, problem with this idea.

El Mercurio doesn´t really do investigative reporting.

At all.

Beyond that, as I later learned from watching Patricio Lanfranco and Elizabeth Farnsworth´s outstanding documentary, El Diario de Agustín, the paper was not only complicit with the Pinochet regime, it was actually funded by the United States government and worked hand-in-hand with the dictatorship in its fight against what the paper´s leaders perceived as the Communist menace.

Learning that caused me to scrap my original approach.

Digging deeper, I’ve found that investigative reporting is in very scarce supply here in Chile.

This is with the major exception of CIPER, an investigative non-profit outfit headed by the indefatigable Monica Gonzalez.

Time and again CIPER, which has a small staff, has brought official misconduct to light.

One of their most recent exclusives broke the news about the comprehensive failure of the 2012 Census.

Their investigation and follow up coverage sparked a chain of events which culminated in the Census being declared invalid and needing to be redone in 2015.

CIPER has also participated in hard-hitting international collaborations with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists about key issues like the offshore bank accounts of elites in countries around the world.

I’m excited to meet the dedicated folks at CIPER, and have come to understand that beyond them, the list of investigative reporters is a very short one.

We met Waldo Carrasco, the head of libraries for the Providencia community where we live, at one of the events leading up to the September 11 anniversary.

He was working in public information at the time the law was passed.

“We had an expectation that there would be an avalanche of request, especially from the press,” he told me.  “It didn’t happen.”

I’ve also heard from some very high-level journalists that the Transparency Council is slow, picky and unresponsive.

The combined effect of this information has been that I´ve readjusted my approach froma primarily quantitative one  to a more qualitative method.

This means that rather than mostly crunching data, I’ll be talking with people.

A lot of them.

I’m shooting to talk with a range of media executives and reporters at major publications and news outlets to get their take on what the impact of the law has been.

I’m going to talk with lawyers who helped shaped the legislation to understand their sense of what the legislation has and has not done.

I plan to download and analyze data from the Transparency portal to assess how many and which people have been asking for public information as well as what the results of those requests have been.

But I also intend to connect with people in smaller outlet like Miguel Paz, whose Poderopedia, a site that details relationships between Chile’s elite, has already been exported to several other Latin American countries.

I’m also going to reach out to people in the burgeoning coding community who are using their coding skills to access and built applications that both have a greater volume and flow of data than their non-coding counterparts.

My goal is to be able to say something specific about the degree to which the promise of a more open society has been met by the reporters who have asked for information and the government which has it.

I also want to be able to paint some kind of picture of how other forces like technology and globalization are acting on the nation that University of Vina del Mar Sociology Chairman Luis “Tito” Tricot memorably called a small nation in the southern part of the world with a view of the sea.

I don’t know exactly what I’ll learn.

But I do know both that I’ll have fun along the way and that our remarkable set of experiences is only going to get richer.

Especially if red wine and pisco sour are involved.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 58: Dreams Made Real Here in Chile

You know that switch that gets flipped every four years right after Labor Day? It's the one in which presidential election campaigns go into overdrive as the voting public turns from the unofficial end of summer to start to turn its attention to the question of who they are going to choose to be their leader.

Apparently the switch has a Chilean cousin, and it just got flipped today.

Hot on the heels of Fiestas Patrias, the weeklong celebration of Chilean Independence, and less than two weeks after the commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the Pinochet coup, election fever has started to run hot here in Chile.

Before this past weekend, you could see billboard signs of a smiling, blond, bespectacled Michelle Bachelet in the same smile either by herself of with other members of her Nueva Mayoria, or New Majority, slate.

Overnight, they've multiplied faster than any rabbits I've ever seen or heard of.

Michelle signs are literally everywhere.

On the side of roads.

In Parque Forestal.

Next to shops.

The Bachelet materials are the most prominent, but far from the only, sign that the sprint to the November 17 elections have begun in earnest.

And the impending elections are far from the only thing that was on today.

As the television in the Manuel Montt Metro station reminded us, today also marked 40 years since the death of fabled Chilean poet, senator, diplomat and self-described "thinger" Pablo Neruda.

Don Pablo's body was exhumed this spring to discover whether accusations leveled by his former driver Manuel Arayas that he had been poisoned had any merit.

For folk singer Charo Cofre, who along with her husband Hugo Arevalo lived with Neruda for two months in Paris, the answer was simple: he died of a broken heart.

The poet's death came just 12 days after Pinochet came to power and his forces ransacked La Chascona, Neruda's home in the Bellavista neighborhood that borders our community of Providencia.

Neruda left for Isla Negra, his first home and the place where he spent the most time, with his wife Matilde Urrutia.

He never returned.

Although devastated by Allende's overthrow and weakened by advanced prostate cancer, Neruda did muster enough strength to inform the armed forces who were searching Isla Negra: "Look around--there's only one thing of danger for you here--poetry."

Dunreith bought me a book of Neruda's poetry for our anniversary.

I read several gems this morning before breakfast.

One source of particular delight came from The Book of Questions, a collection of 316 questions that he wrote shortly before his death and that was published posthumously.

Here is the English translation of what I read in Spanish:

When does the butterfly read what flies written on its wings?

So it can understand its itinerary, which letters does the bee know?

And with which numbers does the ant subtract its dead soldiers?

What are cyclones called when they stand still?

The campus at the University of Diego Portales was from still this morning when Dunreith and I arrived, but it didn't stay that way for long.

As soon as classes were let out, the din of journalism and literature students returned and energized from their week's vacation filled the air and rose up to the office we share on the sixth floor.

I was there for most of the day grading my students' work.

They had passed in their first major assignment, a 1000-word story, the data they analyzed, the analysis itself, a visual element, and the text of the interviews they conducted.

I also had the students do an assessment of how the process went for them, of what they did well and could improve, and what I had done well and could do better.

This is my first time teaching a Data Journalism course at the university level, and definitely my first class of any sort in Spanish, so I didn't know what to expect.

My uncertainty had been heightened by having received just one paper until 10 minutes before the final deadline.

The students' work impressed and left me feeling that they had indeed understood the essence of what I had been trying to convey.

To be sure, some students didn't hand in all of the required elements.

Many of the stories were heavy on data recitation and light on actual people affected by the issues the students were covering.

The graphics in many cases were quite basic.

But they took on issues that matter like child sexual abuse and voting rates and literacy and teenage pregnancy and the distribution of public money.

They carried out analyses and generated findings.

They reported based on those findings.

And they said something in their pieces.

In so doing, they started to change their orientation of what reporting is from simply asking people on different sides of an issue, "What do you think?" to going to those same people and asking, "Why do the day say this?"

It's a powerful shift, and, even as we're communicating across language and culture and generation and, often, Facebook, it's starting to happen.

That feels good.

So, too, did the feeling of recognition and warmth that you feel when you return to a familiar place in which you've started to build an emotional home, to forge relationships of some substance, to commit yourself and your heart.

I had that this morning when we greeted the security guards, when a tanned, relaxed head of the IT Department told me everything was fine for him until a professor asked him to do a Skype call on September 26-that's the date when Center for Public Integrity Data Editor David Donald is speaking to my students-and when a Spanish exchange student with Italian parents stopped by to see if we could grab a coffee next week.

His request, the signs touting Bachelet's candidacy, the anniversary of Neruda's death and the great poet's questions are not only the trifles that Dickens said make up the sum of life.

Each in their own way remind Dunreith and me that we are in a distant land where we have chosen to spend a significant chunk of time.

They tell us that life in each country has its own rhythm and flow.

They show again that there is something meaningful and real and true that can be communicated through the inevitably imperfect tools of words.

When I dreamed for years of what it would be like to be here, I didn't have a precise image in my head.

Today, when elections are gaining steam and I read the words of a beloved poet who died exactly four decades ago and I see that something central of what I wanted to teach has stuck with my charges, that picture becomes much clearer.

It's here.

Now.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 57: Good Things Happen When I Listen to Dunreith

Although it's not quite an unalterable a law as death and taxes, I have found over and over again that good things happen when I listen to my wife. Now, I have to be honest and say that sometimes my awareness that listening to her is a good idea occurs only in retrospect.

On Friday night, though, I acted promptly, and, in so doing, added to aline of examples that stretches back to September 4, 2000, the day we wed for the first time.

It began with a simple nudge to help a couple at the next table.

It ended with a two-hour conversation, a cup of coffee, and an entry into an entire world courtesy of two new friends.

Dunreith and I had stepped into Peru Gustoso, a Peruvian restaurant near our apartment, for a pisco sour in honor of my beloved mother-in-law helen.

The place was largely empty, and, of the eight customers, eight of us spoke English.

Dunreith noticed that the couple at the table next to us was having some difficulty communicating their order to the waiter.

"Help them," she told me.

The assistance I gave was meager.

I told the waiter, a gentle black-haired gentleman whom we had learned in previous visits manages the place that and who is the brother-in-law of the restaurant owner, that the señora would like her carne media, or medium.

It turned out that he had understood.

Dunreith and I turned back to our our pisco sour peruanismo, a delectable lemony concoction with a deceptively strong punch.

We clinked glasses in memory of helen and talked about how she would have stayed with us here for a month, soaking in every morsel of language and art and culture she could.

We were preparing to leave and asked our neighbors if the steak had indeed been medium.

This part wasn't, said the wife, pointing to a bloody section of meat she had left on an otherwise clean plate. But it was a big enough piece that I had plenty, she added.

And with that we met Brian and Chris Beaton, a down-to-earth Australian couple who were just in Santiago for the day before returning home after a two-week jaunt to Peru. We started talking about their trip to Macchu Picchu, the glorious train ride they took to arrive at the Incan ruins and our plans to visit there in December.

The pair, who exudes an easy comfort with themselves and with each other, were married in England in the 70s.

Just 11 people were there-a number that included Chris' parents, who wrote and asked permission to attend after learning of their daughter's plans. ("I did all the cooking," she said with a wry smile.)

Since then the couple has raised their two boys in their home about 30 minutes outside of Perth, the capital of Western Australia. The place is in the bush, with kangaroos walking or jumping freely around the area. Two of Brian's brothers lived nearby for years and had children of similar ages, so the cousins grew up together in a safe environment full of natural wonders.

Living there had its dangers, too.

The bush fires that have caused so much damage in many parts of Australia nearly got their home, too.

Chris, who conveys a steady strength and was wearing a light blue sweater over her white turtleneck, told us about filling their car with all the pictures and mementos they had agreed she should take in case the house burned to the ground.

You can replace a house, she said, but you can't replace photographs.

She packed everything in 15 minutes.

And she did it more than once, sometimes leaving the possessions in the car.

We talked about our boys, each of whom are young men who are making their way in the world. Chris glowed with quiet pride and anticipation when she talked about their oldest son getting married in February to his fiancee, a broadcast journalist in Perth.

The couple met at college in California while they were both scholarship swimmers. He proposed on the same spot where he first met his eventual soul mate in Malibu, California, but not before he asked her parents for their daughter's hand in marriage.

We talked about our time here in Chile.

I told them about my having watched the great Dennis Lillee bowl in the late 70s when I spent a year in Oxford, England.

That was a good time to be Australian, said Brian, who's tall and genial and was sporting a scarf and a black leather jacket.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaUw1ycAwj8&w=420&h=315]

We talked and talked, Dunreith and me standing all the while as if we were about to leave any second. (This had, in fact, had been our original plan.)

After about half an hour, Brian and Chris asked us to join them for a coffee.

Which we did.

The two of them, along with Dunreith, ordered a cortado, heavy on the milk.

Brian told us about his work as a documentary film maker.

He's been doing it for more than 30 years. In 1999, Brian merged his company, Reel Images, with Cecilia Tait's Tait Productions to form Artemis International.

In recent years the company has made the Australian version of "Who Do You Think You Are?" Originally a project of the BBC, the show traces famous people's family history. In England, this meant digging into the roots of people like Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling. The United States version has featured celebrities like Lisa Kudrow, Spike Lee and Chelsea Handler.

The Australian edition started with film icon Jack Thompson, whom I first saw as the widowed father of a gay Russell Crowe in The Sum of Us.

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

It has gone on to include other notable Australians like Olympic gold medalist Cathy Freeman, legendary wicket keeper Rod Marsh and actor Michael Caton, who played Darryl Kerrigan in the classic Australian comedy, "The Castle."

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

They're extensive productions.

Brian said research can take several months and involve a team of as many as 15 people.

The show has had a life-changing impact on many of the people who participate in the program, and has also helps pay the bills for the company's other projects, he said.

They're on a wide range of topics, many of which involve critical historical moments or key issues in Australian society.

Like the bombing of Darwin Island in Feb. 19 1942. that led to more damage than Pearl Harbor but had rarely, if ever, been talked about openly in the country.

Brian explained that the Japanese military had learned from their errors in Pearl Harbor and made the attack that much more deadly.

Or the film about Harry Carmody, who was one of the "Stolen Generation," those aboriginal children who were taken from their parents to live with white families.

Or the movie about three refugee children as they venture outside of the shelter of an intensive English language primary school and into mainstream Australian society.

The cups of coffee had long been drunk.

While we could have talked longer, Chris and Brian understandably wanted to go to their apartment to rest before their long journey home the next day.

We exchanged contact information, pledged to keep in touch,hugged goodbye and went our separate ways.

Dunreith and I had not eaten dinner, and the supermarket we had planned to visit was closed. But somehow that didn't matter as we walked down Andres Bello Avenue and back to our apartment.

Listening to Dunreith had unlocked a chance meeting that led to a shared evening, a slightly smaller world and broader horizons.

I'm glad I did.