Chilean Chronicles, Part 91: Becky Simpson's Counsel and a Full Life

In the nearly quarter century that I knew her, Becky Simpson, known to many as the "Mother Theresa of Applachia," taught me many lessons. She taught me that visions can come true after she had had an image of a mountain of food, a mountain of clothing and a molehill of money-and all three happened at the Cranks Creek Survival Center she co-founded with her husband Bobby.

She taught me about how far a sense of righteous indignation at society's inequities and a seemingly bottomless well of compassion and giving can flower and touch people from around the world.

She taught me that fierce and gentle can exist in equal measure in the same person.

She taught me that meaningful moments shared cut across all kinds of lines.

She also taught me about how people can endure and move through unimaginable suffering and come out bruised, but intact, on the other side.

This last lesson came after I asked her how she had been able to survive so much-a third grade education, the death of her younger brother and one of her six children, a profoundly damaged back, the most grinding of poverty, Bobby's blindness, floods that wiped out her home and a devastating car accident are only among the most noteworthy-and still continue both to extend an open hand to help those who needed it and to fight for justice.

How do you do it? I asked as we sat around the kitchen table where we spent many, many hours talking.

I was waiting for a lengthy explanation of social justice tactics.

Becky gave me nothing of the sort.

Rest and try again, she said, her clear blue eyes filled with hard-earned wisdom.

I'm trying to draw on Becky's counsel these days, when things are popping on many fronts, to put it mildly.

I'm working to pull my Data Journalism course together for the final month and to work with potential replacement Daniela Cartagena to make sure that she has what she needs to feel oriented and to continue the burgeoning tradition we're starting to establish at the University of Diego Portales.

I'm coordinating a presentation of my research into the impact of the landmark 2009 Transparency Law on the country with Antonio Campana, Yunuen Varela, and the rest of the folks at the Fulbright Commission.

I'm writing one post a week for Hoy in both Spanish and English, and working to maintain a similar pace with the Huffington Post in English.

I just sent off tonight an 8,000-word chapter that Dunreith, Gabriele Thimm, Dad and I wrote about our trip in May 2012 to Dad's hometown in Germany for a book based on the Engaging the Other conference at which we presented in South Africa in December 2012.

Dunreith and I are working out the logistics for trips that we'll take to Peru, the desert in northern Chile and the glaciers in the southern part of the country during the month that Aidan is here.

After receiving an email from high school friend Tamera Coyne-Beasley about the possibility of our class holding a 30th reunion, I reached out on Facebook to classmates to see if there was any interest in having such an event. This sparked a chain of events that has led in the past two weeks to the formation of a Facebook group with more than 150 members, the discovery that our class has had $559 since our tenth reunion in 1993, and the impending delivery of a class directory courtesy of the Brookline High School Alumni Association.

I'm gearing up for my brother Jon coming here for a couple of weeks for us to work on a journalism project, all the while trying to keep this space going.

This says nothing of following up and making plans to learn from and collaborate with, the talented, dedicated, courageous and inspiring journalists I met at the Global Investigative Journalism conference last month in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

And I'm trying to keep my writing going here and in another book project.

I don't offer this list either to brag or to complain.

It's hard for me to express how fortunate I feel on so many levels to be with Dunreith at this point in our lives and in the nation's history.

Rather it's to say that tending to all of these varied projects can leave me feeling alternately drained and scattered and to my head swirling with the myriad details to which I need to attend.

Which brings me back to Becky.

This afternoon Dunreith and I slogged through about three hours worth of checking out websites, reviews and options for each of the three trips we're taking starting at the end of this month.

My eyelids were starting to hang heavy as we sat on the lower level of the Starbucks on Pedro de Valdivia Street.

My response time and accuracy was diminishing, my irritability rising.

I've got to head back to the apartment, I told Dunreith, who was feeling the same way.

We loaded up our computers and cords and adapters into my red backpack, walked down Providencia Avenue, greeted the doormen and gratefully laid down on our bed.

The pain in my jaw that accompanies my starting to meditate began its inexorable rhythm.

My breath grew deeper.

My thoughts started to slow down.

I woke up forty minutes later.

My head was groggy, and, within 20 minutes, it started to clear.

After an hour, I felt fully recharged.

I kept contacting people to interview for the project.

Dunreith and I had dinner and watched the latest dark episode in the third season of Los 80, Andres Wood's look at a pivotal decade in Chilean history through the eyes of a middle-class family.

I called mentor and friend Paul Tamburello and filled him in on my doings.

I went downstairs, pumped away on the exercise bike and stretched on the rug-covered floor.

I came back up to write this piece.

It's close to 1:00 a.m. and I'm starting to fade again.

It's time once to more to heed Becky's words.

It's time to rest.

And, in the morning, to try again.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 90: Stumble Stones and Schools in Argentina and Germany

Dad noticed them before I did. The three square and rectangular plaques on the ground outside of the Nicolas Avellaneda school in Buenos Aires' Hollywood Palermo neighborhood.

Lacquered red, blue, green, orange and yellow tiles surrounded the bronze-colored capital letters.

Aqui estudiaron, they said.

Here studied.

Then came the names of the students who had attended there followed by a date.

Mauricio Borghi, September 26, 1974.

Jorge Daniel Argente, July 17, 1976.

Horacio Elbert, December 8, 1977. (Dirt covered the bottom part of the "R"in his last name.)

The third plaque explained row-by-row who they were and what had happened to them.

Popular Militants

Disappeared and Detained

By the Terrorism

Of the State

Neighborhoods, Memory

and Justice

Dad, his partner Lee, Dunreith and I had just come from consuming a parillada, heaping plate full of beef, sausage, chicken, and sausage that was so large one of my friends from high school declared on Facebook that she had gained five pounds just looking at it. (To be fair, Dunreith had very little, if any, of the meat.)

Jenny Manrique, an accomplished Colombian journalist and a friend from the Dart/Ochberg community, was our guide.

Although our bellies were more than full, we were strolling down the street in search of ice cream when we discovered the plaques.

Stumble Stones in Essen-Steele

Their placement in the street reminded us of the five square, bronze-colored Stolpersteine, or stumble stones, we had seen last year outside of my great-grandfather's and namesake Joseph Lowenstein's house in the Essen-Steele community in Germany.

In simple letters they spelled out the names, year of birth, place of deportation and death location for five of our relatives who had lived at the house before being killed during the Holocaust.

Papa Joseph, as my great-grandfather was called, had his medical training acknowledged before his name on his stone.

So did his son, Dr. Rudolf Lowenstein

Rudolf's wife Margarethe Lowenstein, born Katzenstein, and their children Clara and Klaus Martin.

Two simple words were engraved above each name.

Hier wohnte.

Here lived.

Along with my brother Jon and our son Aidan, the four of us had gone to the home with Gabriele Thimm, a Germany teacher who is unflaggingly committed to her students' knowing the truth about their country's genocidal history.

It was the first time Dad had been there in 73 years.

The last time he had been there was as a four-year-old child in desperate need of having his appendix removed.

His father Max, a disabled World War I veteran who had lost the full use of his right arm, and, later his hearing, had taken his younger boy from doctor to doctor in the town where his family had lived for nearly a century and a half.

None would operate on a Jewish child.

Papa Joseph, Max's father, apparently prevailed upon a non-Jewish colleague to perform the operation on the kitchen table in his home.

Just weeks later, Dad was sent on a train called a Kindertransport, or child transport, to England, where he joined his older brother Ralph.

They lived there for more than a year before rejoining their parents, who had very fortunately escaped after the war began, in the United States.

Dad's silence about his childhood when I was growing up had left me hungry to know him and that time.

In 2004 I had visited the stately, banana yellow, three-story building that Papa Joseph had owned as part of that quest.

The stones had not been placed there yet.

That happened in 2006, when Gabriele and her students participated in the laying of the stones for Joseph, Rudi, Margarethe and Clara, who among them represented three generations of Lowenstein family members. (The students’ parents sponsored Klaus Martin's stone.)

In the colors and words and names of Buenos Aires I saw the reflection of our German relatives.

Words and images on the wall

The marking of those who had been killed by the state was the first, but not the only, similarity between the two places.

Images of 10 pencils, arrayed like hour signs in a clock, were painted in the same colors bordering the plaque around a multi-colored equal sign.

Cursive letters framed the pencils with the words:

In the Public Schools

the rights

education identity

justice recreation

liberty

are equal for everyone

Painted onto a dirty white wall, the words are a creed, a call to go beyond the act of remembering who had been there during the dictatorship to endorsing and transmitting values to young people now in the same school so that such abuse of the citizens by its leaders not happen again.

Ever.

A mural in Germany

Dad's return trip to Germany had many memorable moments.

We visited both of his former apartments.

We met a non-Jewish family with whom our family had maintained a friendship and correspondence for more than 80 years.

We went to the Jewish cemetery, where generation after generation of Lowensteins had been buried. The graves and the burial ground were intact, even though half of the Jewish community had been murdered during the Hitler years.

We were welcomed into Papa Joseph's home by the Fuchs family who showered Dad with gifts and kindness.

We attended a surprise birthday party for Dad, an event during which we learned that our family had owned property at a nearby farm called Hemmerhof.

But perhaps one of the most memorable experiences was attending the two "Ceremonies of Life" that Gabriele had spent months organizing with some of her students.

The young people read, sang, and showed documents as they took the audiences through the history of the Jewish people, the Jewish community in Essen and our family before explaining how all of them were impacted by the Nazi regime.

At the end of the presentation, Dad rose and spoke.

He had agreed to answer questions, and he did.

But before that, he read from a statement in which he announced that he was not accepting the honorarium he had been offered by the community.

Instead, we had spoken as a family and had decided to create the Lowenstein Family Award for Tolerance and Justice.

This June, Dad, Lee and I returned to Essen for the first presentation of the award.

The event took place during the school's tenth birthday celebration.

Principal Elvira Bluemel greeted us and showed us around the building on the way to the ceremony.

She also showed us a mural the school's art teacher had worked on with his students.

Painted against a mustard-yellow background, individual puzzle pieces, which were in many of the same bright colors as on the Argentine school, spelled out the words "Tolerance"and "Justice."

The interlocked puzzle pieces had been placed there by a group of stick-like figures who were underneath the words, suggesting that each person had a role to play in creating and maintaining the values espoused in the award and identified on the wall.

Just having the words was not enough, Frau Bluemel told me. We have to act in accordance with the ideals.

Thus, thousands of miles away, separated by time and culture and language, citizens and educators in both lands had made the decision to create memorials for those among them who had been killed during a dark time as well as to articulate the beliefs to which we all need to aspire to act and to instill in our young people.

Returning to Dad's hometown with him was one of my life's most powerful experiences.

It furthered my faith that we can structure our lives around our deepest dreams and most basic values and that it is possible to connect across all kinds of divides.

Perhaps even richer, realizing the dream in the context of Gabriele Thimm's tireless work with her students and the Essen community played a critical role in converting a personal journey of family return into a forum of public healing for both sides.

In so doing, it created the opportunity for us together to write a new chapter to the old story.

A chapter based on an open acknowledgment of the past and the commitment that it not be repeated.

A chapter that lets the youth know we are there for them and that they can choose a different way by acting in accordance with the values painted on the school in Argentina and on the wall in Germany.

I don't yet know the people from the Nicolas Avellaneda school in Buenos Aires.

But I will.

Soon.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 89: October Behind, November Ahead

Our journey just keeps expanding.

If September was about an unprecedented eruption of memory on the fortieth anniversary of the Pinochet coup followed by a week-long celebration of the nation's independence, October was marked by journeys to countries and places we had never been.

We flew first to Rio for the Global Investigative Journalism Conference.

Traveling to Brazil was by itself a remarkable experience, and what struck me even more was being in a community of 1,300 investigative journalists from 90 countries around the planet.

It was like a wedding in which all of the guests loved to dig dirt on public officials, Four days of conversations begun and interrupted, but no one took offense.

Though these interactions I met colleagues whose work in countries where, as opposed to the United States, there are no laws requiring authorities to produce the information they request.

Journalists whose work in revealing the truth about what is happening are met with threats or blackmail.

Like a female journalist from Azerbaijan whose revelations of malfeasance by the president's family prompted authorities to plant a hidden camera in her bedroom and record her intimate moments with her boyfriend.

Or a young woman from Iraq who conceals her identity to preserve her safety.

Or a new friend from Brazil who traveled up and down the nation's borders to expose the trafficking and abuse of children.

Their dedication and courage and resilience moved and inspired me.

I returned from Rio to teach, but Dunreith continued to Brasilia, where she spent rich and relaxing days with her former student Veronica and her family.

A week later, we flew to Buenos Aires with its wide tree-lined boulevards and European-influenced elegance to meet Dad and Lee before they embarked on a 17-day tour that will take them down to the continent's southernmost point and around into Chile.

We saw the groups of mothers who have marched since the beginning of Argentina's Dirty War, waging a ceaseless struggle to learn the whereabouts of their disappeared children and husbands and brothers and sister, calling over and over again for those who ordered and carried out these heinous actions to be brought to justice.

We visited the detention center at ESMA, the former naval school, the largest of the country's network of hundreds of sites where Argentines were tortured and killed.

About 5,000 detainees entered ESMA.

Only 200 survived.

But we also visited Cafe Tortoni, the continent's oldest cafe that oozed with Old World charm and swagger, a place where poets and artists and writers and dancers and plain folk have come for more than a century and a half.

We had lunch at El Ateneo, the former theater turned bookstore that in 2008 was named one of the world's most beautiful bookstores.

We had a parillada, a plate of all kinds of meat, with Colombian friend and fearless journalist Jenny Manrique in the Palermo Hollywood neighborhood. The plate was filled so high with ribs and chicken and sausage that a friend of Facebook deadpanned that she gained five pounds just by looking at it.

I visited and learned from the folks at La Nacion, the country's second-largest newspaper and a place where the data team is showing remarkable persistence and creativity in accessing, cleaning and displaying data online and in the newspaper.

All of us soaked in the energy and openness and generosity of the Argentine people we met and whose eyes showed their pleasure when we told them how excited we were to be in their country.

We also traveled to Colonia, Uruguay, a town of just 25,000 a ferry ride and a country away from Buenos Aires. Together we strolled along the cobble-stoned streets in the community that alternated between Portuguese and Spanish control nine times during the years 1680 to 1825, when the nation won its independence from Spain.

We spoke with our tour guide Maria, a woman with short, pulled-back brown hair and a blue pants suit, about why Uruguayans twice had voted against reversing a law that granted amnesty to the leaders who ruled the country during the dictatorship from 1973 to 1985.

There was a war, she said. People did bad things on both sides.

And, at the end of the month, Jon and I learned that our application to gain funding to use the upcoming elections here in Chile to explore the degree to which the country's past lives in the present had been accepted.

Each of these experiences, each of these journeys to places which for years had only been places on a map and not somewhere that we would actually visit, has meant something.

Each conversation and encounter with someone with whom I have a shared passion for story and uncovering and sharing truth, has mattered.

They've mattered because they've contributed to a continually widening and deepening yet also shrinking sense of the world and of the interconnection of people who come from different backgrounds and cultures and classes and races and languages, but who share values and commitments and beliefs.

October's behind us.

November begins today.

I'm optimistic that the expansion will continue.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 88: Far Away From Home, But Boston Still In My Heart

I turned 10 years old the day that Carlton Fisk hit his legendary home run in Game 6 against the Cincinnati Reds. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQzL34qH7uo&w=420&h=315]

I had just turned 21 when Bill Buckner committed the most agonizing of all Boston errors in another Game 6, letting a routine grounder go through his legs and opening the door for the New York Mets to escape from twice being one strike away from defeat and eventually triumph in Game 7.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18caPNisP2U&w=560&h=315]

And I was in the waning days of being 38 when my brother Jon and I watched Aaron Boone hit a blast off of Tim Wakefield in extra innings to send the Yankees to the World Series-a defeat that prompted our middle brother Mike to call and howl in anguished tones, "The Holocaust. Rwanda. The Yankees over the Red Sox. Must evil always triumph over good?"

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnNaSXS7hAs&w=420&h=315]

For decades, generations really, being a Red Sox meant both being intensely knowledgeable about the team and the game-while we were growing up, Mike and I particular waged fierce battles daily at the breakfast table for the Boston Globe's sports section-and being witness to our beloved team losing in the most ignominious fashion.

No lead was safe enough.

The Red Sox had an uncanny ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Being a Red Sox fan, at base, was synonymous with suffering, with being good, but not quite good enough.

Those days are gone.

Long gone.

Riding the arm of John Lackey, the bat of Shane Victorino and the irrepressible leadership and unprecedented slugging of David "Big Papi" Ortiz, the Red Sox rode into history with their third World Series triumph in a decade, 6-1, over the St. Louis Cardinals.

The victory culminated a turnaround from last year's cellar-dwelling performance and ended a swoon that had begun in September of 2011 and that included the release of beloved manager Terry "Tito" Francona and the departure of fellow Brooklinite and wunderkind Theo Epstein.

Here in Chile, Dunreith and I weren't able to watch the game.

But we followed it.

We are up way beyond when we should have turned in, following every out as the Sox moved to a conclusion that in retrospect almost seemed predestined.

The pain caused by the three consecutive Game 7 World Series defeats and the home runs by Yankee journeymen Bucky Dent and Aaron Boone has been healed for nearly a decade.

After years of abuse and being forced to move his family from New England, Buckner was brought back for Opening Day the season after the Sox terminated their 86-year drought in 2004 by sweeping the same Cardinals.

This year is extra special, though, because of the damage done to the city and the region by the Marathon bombings.

Big Papi's defiant and profane declaration about the city that labeled itself "Boston Strong" shortly after the bombing was yet another example of his perfect pitch with the region.

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

The World Series only burnished his legend further.

My brothers and I are middle-aged men now.

Mike and I are closer to 50 than we are 40.

I was startled to realize this morning when I read on ESPN.com that the Series would be clinched in Boston for the first time in 38 years, the article was referring to 1975, not 1967.

Mike and I are husbands and fathers, while Jon is an internationally known and recognized photographer.

I spoke with each of them separately via Skype after the Red Sox victory.

Jon was in Chicago, Mike in London.

We whooped and yelled and laughed and reminisced about the bad old days and speculated about whether Big Papi will make it to the Hall of Fame one day.

We exclaimed that this team of bearded men was actually a likable bunch of guys who had stayed strong and played clutch and deserved the championship they had won.

Jon kept saying how excited he was.

Mike had stayed up to 3:30 a.m., even though he had a meeting in four-and-a-half hours. Far from the anguish a decade ago, his voice was filled with joy.

As you grow older, you learn that other things in life are more important than the fate of your home team.

But wherever you are physically, the ties that bind you to your roots only grow deeper.

So, too, does the gratitude you feel for being around to remember the earlier times, to savor the new victory and the tradition that continues to be created, to understand anew that the past is not destiny and to connecting yet again with my brothers in distant lands over what used to matter most of all.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 87: Students Progressing in Data Journalism Class, Channeling Paul Tamburello

I love to teach.

It's a passion that stretches across three decades and the past millennium back to high school, when I thought it would be fun to be a teacher someday and spoke to teachers about what and why they did.

In 1985 I worked with three- to five-year-olds four days a week at the Bellehaven Child Development Center in East Menlo Park.

I only was there for a quarter, but it was long enough for me to feel that I was where I belonged.

The following year, after my parents were in a near-fatal car accident, I returned home to be with my family.

Pierce School Principal Al Fortune invited me into his office, expressed his concern in a surprisingly quiet tone and offered me a job as a recess aide.

Touched by his gesture, I accepted on the spot.

I only learned later that the reason the job was open was because the previous recess aide had fled her post after having been pushed into the snow and pelted with snowballs by members of the eighth grade class who were labeled by adults throughout the building as "the worst class in 30 years."

The eighth graders were as advertised, eyes glittering with malice and the knowledge that they had toppled the last authority figure.

Nevertheless, I loved working with them and the rest of the grades.

After graduating from Stanford, I returned to Pierce for my most formative teaching apprenticeship: a two-year stint in Paul Tamburello's fourth grade classroom-the same class where I had been a student a dozen years earlier.

To this day I still draw on the lessons I learned in Paul's laboratory of teaching excellence.

He taught me how to help students chart their progress, how to cultivate a healthy sense of dramatic occasion and humor even as you're pushing the students beyond the limits of what they think is possible.

He showed me how and when to be firm, and how you can at times win by losing.

The more power you give out, the more power you get back, he would say.

Paul continually displayed an organic sense of learning, creating whole units from a student's comment that reinforced essential skills while showing his charges that they could follow their curiosity wherever it lead.

Above all, Paul demonstrated over and over again the importance of witness, tenacity and perspective.

I've applied those lessons in the quarter century since I finished what he called my "post-graduate degree in fourth grade."

Most recently, that has taken place in my Data Journalism classroom here at the University of Diego Portales in Santiago.

It took a while to sort out exactly who on the roster actually will attend the class on a regular basis, and we've gotten there.

It also has taken me a couple of months to fully understand the implication of the Chilean university system for students' attendance and delivery of the assignments I've given them.

As opposed to the United States, where students take anywhere from three to five classes, here students take as many as eight or nine classes.

This has all kinds of academic consequences for them, not the least of which is that they calculate exactly how many classes they need to make to reach the 60 percent departmental requirement to pass the course.

I've adjusted to this environment by assigning three cumulative projects throughout the semester, by working to make the class as stimulating as possible, to alternate between exhorting the students to attend and noting their absence, and, at base, to accept whoever comes that day as the lineup we have to work with for that session.

As Paul did throughout his teaching career, I've worked to link what we do in the class to the larger world. I do this so that students understand why they are learning what we are doing and so that they have tangible examples of where they can go.

Like Paul, I bring in guest speakers to expose students to the community of people throughout the world who share our love of data.

Today, the invitado, or guest, was Joe Germuska, a former history major from Northwestern who played a key role in the development of the Chicago Tribune's NewsApps team, and who has been, since December, working at Northwestern University's Knight Lab. This interdisciplinary space seeks to help advance news media innovation through exploration and experimentation.

He also helped me get here by introducing me at the June 2012 IRE conference to Miguel Paz, the founder of Poderopedia, a site that traces relationships between Chilean elites.

Miguel connected me to Carlos Aldunate, who wrote me the letter of invitation that was a requirement for becoming a Fulbright scholar.

Joe told the students about his background, talked them through a number of projects he had helped develop like the Chicago Tribune's crime site and CensusReporter.org, a tool he worked on that tries to make Census data more accessible to reporters.

He talked about the importance of placing data into context and of making information as accessible as possible.

He stressed the integrated approach to planning and development, saying they are related, not separate, stages.

At base, Joe emphasized the need to be skeptical, critical consumers of information and technology, and the role that programming skills can play in assisting.

The students applauded Joe's comments with genuine enthusiasm.

From there we went over yesterday's visit to La Nacion, the newspaper in Argentina I visited yesterday. I passed out stickers that Gaby Bouret and other members of the data team had given me.

We went over their midterm projects.

I told them in general what they had done well in comparison with the first one they had completed about a month earlier. I also went over the elements I liked from each student's project.

With some it was their graphic.

With others it was the map they had created.

Still others wrote a fine summary, opening paragraph or conclusion.

Projects' structure, writing skill and the fact of passing the work in at all each generated praise.

The students clearly understood better how to do data-oriented journalism, even if the depth of their work was not what it could be.

I told them other areas where they needed to improve and shared what I would do to raise the quality of my work with them.

One thing I had not done as well as I could have was to give the students sufficient time to work on the practical tools I had shown them.

So, after explaining how I was going to give them more time, I did just that.

The students spent the end of class starting with the assignment.

These are all strategies I absorbed during my apprenticeship.

It's always a positive sign when students voluntarily stay beyond the scheduled time the class ends.

That happened today with close to a dozen of them.

As they walked by me on the way out, they did a combination of shaking hands, exchanging high fives, or, in the Chilean custom, kissing me on the cheek.

Their eyes danced with pleasure.

So did mine, both because of the progress they are making and because of the space we have created amongst us.

In this space failure is a virtue and all are accepted.

In this space we learn from each other and the best idea wins.

In this space we work to support each other.

I am deeply grateful to all those, including Joe, who have helped me be here and have this opportunity.

I'm profoundly appreciative of my students for how they've engaged this new and often challenging class.

And I feel doubly blessed to have learned how to teach in Paul's class more than a quarter cenutry ago and to still be challenging what he shared with me all these many years later.