On Connecting People: Gabriele and Pumla Meet in Essen.

When I was in high school I used to get friends together for Chinese food.

A lot of them.

I’d call up 20 to 30 buddies and invite them all to join me for lunch at Shanghai Garden.

A series of elements about these meals appealed to me.

Of course there was the food.

I liked the role of being what we these days would call the convener.

But, perhaps above all, I enjoyed bringing people together who otherwise would not know each other and seeing what happened.

I liked having the jock meet the kids we called the freaks meet the geeks.

Today, more than 30 years later and thousands of miles away, something similar will be happening.

That’s because our friend Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela is traveling to Essen to meet Gabriele Thimm.

I first met Pumla more than a dozen years ago, when she was in Harvard on a Bunting fellowship.

She’s a psychologist, a former member of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the author of a riveting, disturbing yet ultimately uplifting book, A Human Being Died That Night, her memoir about her conversations with Vlakplaas killer Eugene de Kok and his search for understanding and redemption.

She’s also one of the world’s foremost authorities on issues of reconciliation and healing after mass violence.

Last year, Dunreith and I flew to South Africa to attend, present and facilitate at the third Engaging the Other conference that Pumla calls together and coordinates every three years.

While there, we, along with Dad via audiconference and Jon via his photos and Gabriele through a statement Dunreith read, talked about the trip we had taken in May 2012 to Dad’s hometown of Essen.

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

The experience would have been an extraordinary one in any way, and was made that much more so by the actions of a German teacher fiercely dedicated to her students’ learning the truth about her country.

This brings us to Gabriele.

She reached out to me a little more than two years ago after reading a story I had written in 2004 about searching for our family’s roots in Essen.

Gabriele explained that she was organizing a memorial event around the anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom in the community. One of the stops would be at my great grandfather and namesake Joseph’s stately, three-story, yellow house.

Would we be able to attend? She asked.

I consulted with our family.

We were not able to make the event, but sent a statement and some family pictures.

We also shared in the note our intention to join the members of the community at some point in the not distant future.

Last May, Dunreith, Aidan and I boarded a plan and converted that aspiration into reality.

Dad and his partner Lee joined us shortly afterward from France, where they had been spending several weeks.

Thanks largely to Gabriele, the week was a time that surpassed any expectations we could have had in advance of the week.

We visited Dad’s former apartments.

We met the non-Jewish family who had held our Jewish family bible and with whom the Lowensteins had had an 80-year connection.

We also attended a pair of ceremonies that Gabriele organized with the students.

One took place at the former synagogue turned cultural center in Essen, while the other occurred at Gabriele’s school.

Both talked about the history of the Jewish people, the history of Jews in Essen, our family’s history and how all of these intersected with the Nazi regime.

Dad spoke at each event.

At the first one he announced the creation of the Lowenstein Family Award for Tolerance and Justice, which would be given out in subsequent years to worthy students.

This year, Dad, Lee and I returned to Essen to give out the first set of prizes.

We have written a chapter about the project for an anthology Pumla is editing.

We’ve begun conversations with Gabriele about how to expand the award to more schools.

And, a couple of weeks ago, Pumla contacted me here in Chile to say that she was going to Dusseldorf near Essen. She wanted to visit Dad’s hometown to learn more about our story and our project.

I put Pumla and Gabriele in touch with each other.

They’ve taken it from there.

Last night Gabriele wrote us to say that everything is lined up for Pumla to come to the town to see the school, meet the students, visit a family house and hear the rap that a group of students wrote about the Lowensteins as part of their participation in the project.

I don’t know what will result from this meeting, just as I didn’t know what would happen in the early 80s when I brought my friends together.

But I do have faith that something organic and positive will emerge.

I do believe that we will continue to work with each other and to help the project grow so that we can try to leave a better world for our children and unborn grandchildren.

And I do know that we’ll continue to weave the different strands of our life together, however disparate seeming, as I started to do more a continent and three decades ago.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 100: The Joy and Honor of Working with Jon Lowenstein

Our time in Chile has been an extraordinary and expansive time for many reasons.

Dunreith and I have been animated by a sense of adventure that’s been heightened by having sold our house the day before we flew to Santiago.

We’ve been treated with enormous and continuous generosity by colleagues, students, taxi drivers, and Chileans of all stripes, ages, classes and political backgrounds.

We’ve had the chance to travel within and outside the country to places that in some cases we had dream of going for years, even decades.

We’ve also had a heavy dose of family.

We flew to Buenos Aires to meet Dad and his partner Lee for five days before their two-week cruise in Argentina and Chile.

We’re about three weeks into a more than month-long stay with Aidan, who’s fresh off a fantastic semester of study and travel in New Zealand.

We also had my brother Jon here for two work-filled weeks.

Jon likely would have come here to visit us anyway, and having a professional purpose clinched his decision.

That came in the form of our successful application to the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. We put in a proposal that said we would do a three-part series for the The New Yorker’s Photo Blog, a similar project for Vivelohoy, and a number of blog posts for a combination of the Huffington Post, the Ochberg Society, Hoy and my personal blog.

Jon and I have collaborated before.

We’ve covered police brutality on Chicago’s South Side.

We participated in a fellowship where we did a project about the experience of undocumented Latino migrants who become disabled on the job. (This was the one for which I taught myself Spanish.)

We’ve traveled to the far reaches of Northern South Africa to cover life in a rural community there and the efforts of Evanston resident Ann Covode to bring a library and other educational support to the children in the community.

It was during this project that, after a formal ceremony and introduction, one of the teachers told us in front of the staff that they had prepared a delicacy for us to eat: a cow’s hoof.

Last year we flew to Dad’s hometown to photograph and write about his return there for the first time in 73 years.

These have all been remarkable experiences, and the work we did in Chile was our most ambitious yet.

Over the course of a series of conversations, we defined our scope.

We would look at Chile’s past, present and future 40 years after the Pinochet coup.

The past would involve going to memory sites like the Museum of Memory and Human Rights and Villa Grimaldi, interviewing survivors and activists who had lived through the time like Ana Gonzalez, a feisty 87-year-old with bright red fingernails whose husband, two of her sons and a pregnant daughter-in-law were murdered by the government during the dictatorship, and talking with memory scholars like friend Hugo Rojas.

The present consisted of covering the first round of elections that pitted nine presidential candidates against each other, including frontrunner and former president Michelle Bachelet of the Nueva Mayoria, or New Majority, and childhood friend Evelyn Matthi of the conservative Independent Democratic Union.

And the future including talking with young, digitally-savvy Chileans who grew up during and after the dictatorship and who are working to improve the country.

People like Jaime Parada, the son of Pinochetistas whose parents joined neighbors on the street in weeping the night in October 1988 that Pinochet lost the plebiscite that would have kept him in power.

Last year Jaime became the first openly gay public official in Chilean history when he won a Councilman position in the wealthy, politically conservative Providencia neighborhood. Since his election he’s worked with reform Mayor Josefa Errazuriz to push for, and win, a battle to change the name of one of the community’s major streets from Avenida 11 de Septiembre, a name that honored the Pinochet coup, to Nueva Providencia, or New Providencia.

People like the light-blue shirted volunteers of TECHO, a non-profit group founded in 1997 by Father Felipe Berrios and some young Chileans to help individuals and communities fight poverty. Since its inception TECHO has evolved from doing construction work to a more ongoing and holistic approach in which they work with community members to diagnose, and then set a plan to meet, the community’s needs.

Together we went to a campamento, or shantytown, in the La Florida neighborhood that cropped up after powerful floods devastated the area in 1997. The volunteers there were in the process of setting up a community center; other campamentos with a TECHO presence have tutoring programs, a library and micro-enterprise stores.

Being able to do work that you love is a tremendous gift.

Doing that work with one of your brothers for one of the world’s top magazines is even greater.

Indeed, many of the day that Jon was here, before I left the apartment, I’d say to Dunreith, “I’m going over to Jon’s apartment. We’re on assignment for The New Yorker.”

And a riveting assignment it was.

Together Jon and I went to Algarrobo to interview Hernan Gutierrez, who was 13 years old when he witnessed decapitated bodies floating down the Mapocho River shortly after the coup.

We spoke with Mario Hernandez, who told us about waiting on Salvador Allende and Pablo Neruda as well as serving high-ranking members of the dictatorship.

We went to Villa Grimaldi and spoke with Carlos Contreras, who still had the chess board he made out of cardboard to play with fellow inmates when they were detained in 1974.

We attended the end of campaign event for presidential frontrunner Michelle Bachelet, listened to her race through her speech and met former President Ricardo Lagos.

I shook his hand and told him that I had seen his finger years earlier. (His finger-wagging calling out of Pinochet was seen by many as a critical moment in the “No” campaign.)

We went together to the Open Mind Fest that was sponsored by MOVILH, one of the nation’s leading gay and lesbian activist groups, that stretched across four city blocks. Jon shot picture after picture of the drag queens who were the unofficial stars of the event, of young lesbian couples holding hands and of the youth dancing and swaying and vibing at the four stages set up along Paseo Bulnes.

Jaime Parada told us that MOVILH held the event near the presidential palace and congressional offices to remind politicians of the community’s clout.

The message appeared to be heeded, as five of the nine presidential candidates attended the event.

Beyond all that we did, the project was a chance to learn from Jon, who is one of the planet’s top photographers.

He shoots and shoots and shoots, getting closer and closer to the action, swerving as he identifies an opportunity to make a picture, letting the place speak to him, always thinking about how he can be do better.

Jon’s been shooting seriously for more than 20 years, and continues to expand his skill and scope. His passion for photography, storytelling and documenting what’s happening in the world remains undimmed. If anything, it’s only grown stronger with the passage of time, clarity of vision and commitment to his craft.

We didn't only work.

Together with Dunreith, Dad and Lee, we'd have lengthy dinners topped off by nightly servings of ice cream. We'd carve out space to laugh about family stories and discuss the latest developments in the NBA.

I don't want to suggest that the collaboration was easy at every moment.

It never is with two strong-willed people, let alone two brothers with more than four decades of history.

And there’s no doubt in my heart and head that working with Jon was a joy and an honor, and something I’ll remember for as long as I can remember.

Living in Chile has been magnificent, and the project with my brother is a big part of it.

I can’t wait for the next one.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 99: On Alejandro Arellano, San Pedro de Atacama and Freedom

There are many types of freedom.

Freedom of speech.

Freedom of assembly.

Freedom of movement.

And, for me, one of the most basic types is the freedom to live life as you see fit, based on passion, responding to each moment, secure in yourself, and able at different moments to laugh and love and sing and learn and share.

Alejandro Arellano is one such free man.

Dunreith Aidan and I met him in San Pedro de Atacama, the desert in Northern Chile that stretches hundreds of miles and is the world’s driest.

Alejandro was our guide during two of our three days we participated in tours with Cosmo Andino, one of the many companies that operate in the town whose population has exploded about fivefold in the past decade.

With him we covered varied terrain-we went to the rocky Valley of the Moon and saw the sun set over Death Valley, traveled the next day to salt flats and lagoons, and saw a traditional village to boot-and even more varied conversation topics.

Alejandro’s sturdy, with strong arms and a bit of a stomach. He’s got indigenous, Chilean and Irish blood-the latter is reflected, he said, in his reddish that is just beginning to be flecked with grey. (It adds to the package for the women, he told me, leaning in as if he was sharing a secret.) He speaks Spanish fluently, English more than comfortably and apparently can handle himself in Swedish due to having lived there for several months.

Sitting to the right of the driver in the front seat of the 18-person bus, he leaned forward to point out and give explanations for what we are seeing, like how there are three different types of flamingos in the area and why the old ones are the only ones that are visible.

During the course of the two days, in cheerful, upbeat tones he told us at different points about the surname he shares with Sergei Arellano, a high-ranking, “half-sociopathic” Pinochet general, and the gods and demigods and sacred beings of the Atacamian people.

He told us about the optic colors and how the astronomy sites in Chile are helping us understand about the other galaxies that exist and the 29 dimensions that exist, rather than just the 4 that we know about.

He mentioned several 10- and 20-day hikes he had taken recently, describing with relish squeezing cacti to extract every last ounce of fluid.

He also shared about how he came to San Pedro a dozen years ago from the Elqui Valley. The musicologist soon realized that the Kunza masters were aging and their music was in danger of being extinguished if no one recorded it.

During the past decade, he’s sought them out and employed the traditional knowledge he had learned from his grandmother, a shaman, to earn their trust. He’s recorded and documented their art, played the instruments, and taught young people how to play them, too.

Alejandro recently finished a major publication that documents and summarizes what he’s learned.

He’s done it all for free, using the money he’s earned from guiding to support this passion.

Alejandro does a lot more than talk and record his own and others’ music.

He insisted on helping the women descend from the bus-“My mother taught me to be a caballero,” he explained-and, when Dunreith struggled with the altitude, he waved me aside and told me to take his seat in the front of the bus.

“Don’t be jealous,” he said with a smile before applying pressure to her temples.

It helped relieve her pain.

The guiding schedule is determined daily, so Alejandro often doesn’t know what he’ll be doing the next day until the evening before.

But that doesn’t bother him. At all.

He offered us a ride back to our hotel, which was near his home and about six kilometers outside of town.

We walked behind him on the dusty main street.

Alejandro didn’t just walk, though. He strode drown the middle, greeting and shaking hands with those people he knew along the way, sauntering with a swagger that was not aggressive, but based in a firm conviction that he belonged.

We arrived at his car, a dark 1992 Chevrolet jeep that was caked in dust.

Before the three of us got in, Alejandro moved the extra tomatoes, bread, water and other supplies from the back seats to what my brothers and I used to call the way back.

The seats weren’t real comfortable, but the car got us to where we needed to be.

We stopped at a grocery store around the corner from the truck.

Alejandro ran in and surfaced a minute later, toting a many-gallon jug over his right shoulder like a trophy.

I don’t have water at home, he told us. There were a lot of people, but they let me pay tomorrow.

I’m a regular customer, he said.

He told us later that he didn’t want to wait in because he knew Dunreith still wasn’t feeling well.

We drove to the cabana where we were staying.

Along the way, Alejandro tarted talking about the interrelationship between indigenous cultures and music, how the Incans read music in spirals, and how you can hear the contributions each group made when you listen closely.

He believes that textiles reveals the same web of relationships, but they’re a mystery that no one understands yet.

We arrived at our cabin and dismounted from the jeep.

I enjoyed the conversation, Alejandro told me.

So did I, I answered.

I tried to give him some money for the ride, but he wouldn’t take it.

I do this for amistad, he said.

For friendship.

We exchanged a man hug, and then Alejandro Arellano rumbled off down the road and into the distance, 12 years into his time in San Pedro, new adventures ahead, free as anyone I’ve ever known.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 97: Data Journalism Class Ends

Although generally joyous, the end of school years also have a twinge of sadness. Our time together-and, with it, my chance to directly impact the students-has ended.

Life goes on.

Last Tuesday marked the addition of a new group to the list: the 20 or so students in my Data Journalism class at the University of Diego Portales.

It's been close to three decades since I first worked with three- to five-year-old students at the Bellehaven Child Development Center in East Menlo Park.

I still remember their eyelashes, their angelic expressions and the silence that greeted me after I had biked away from Stanford's leafy luxury and toward their grittier neighborhoods.

I didn't know what I was doing with them.

I didn't know why so few fathers came to get them.

But I did know that I was where I belonged.

Since then I've worked with students of all kinds of ages and backgrounds in Boston suburbs, Appalachian classrooms, and one of South Africa's first private multi-racial schools.

This group was special, though.

It was both my first crop of Chilean students and my first Spanish-language class.

We adjusted to each other as the semester unfolded.

I learned both how to explain the requirements with more clarity and to convey my insistence that they attend class and do work in order to pass. I changed the assignments from a series of smaller items and what amounted to a continent-wide fishing expedition around lotteries to three projects of increasing scope, rigor and sophistication.

For their part, the students had a series of experiences-projects, articles, guest lecturers-that allowed them to better understand the sensibility I wanted them to develop and the world of data journalism they could enter, not just the data analysis skills they needed to acquire.

But I didn't just talk to the students about data.

I told them how I had wanted to go to Chile for many years and how I had applied to the Fulbright program four times before being accepted.

I told them about how extraordinary what was happening in the country before the September 11 anniversary of the coup, how significant the presidential elections were.

I also talked to them about my tremendous fortune in being there with Dunreith, about being able to work on a project for The New Yorker with my brother Jon, who shared his work and talked with the students twice. I let them know how much it meant to me to have Dad there, who told them about the importance of being actively involved in both sides of a mentoring relationship.

Finally, I urged them to give themselves enough time to do the kind of work of which I knew they were capable and to finish strong.

On Tuesday, they did just that.

One by one they stood and delivered at the front of the room. They talked about their data sets, their maps, their graphics and the law they chose to evaluate. Using Powerpoint or Prezi or a Google Docs, students who had had no idea of what a database was at the beginning of the semester explained how they had acquired and analyzed their data.

Dunreith and Aidan arrived about two thirds of the way through the class.

My family I said.

Please give them a round of applause.

The class complied with gusto.

The last student finished about 10 minutes after our scheduled time, and I moved forward to the front of the room for the last time.

I apologized for the lateness and asked them to think back to August, when they knew little to nothing about data.

I told them again how much I had enjoyed working with them and how being there and working with them was the realization of a dream for me.

I told them that I had learned that it's possible to live from dreams and values, and that I hope they felt the same way.

I explained that they had had the opportunity to meet some of the people in the world who do the best work in this area.

And your brother, one student called out.

And your father, said another.

You're almost there, I said.

I'm proud of the progress you've made, but you're not done yet.

You can finish strong.

I believe in you, I said. I'm available to you as a resource now and in the future. And I'll be in my office tomorrow if you need help.

Then I thanked them and told them they could go.

The students applauded and started to leave.

I stood by the door.

The male students and I hugged each other on the way out.

The women and I kissed each other's cheeks.

Then it was over.

Grading and deciding with Dunreith and Aidan what to do next awaited.

As always, I had the knowledge that I could have done better.

Vulnerability in the knowledge, too, that life continues its ceaseless forward flow. The end of the class anticipated, in a small but real way, the ultimate ending we all face.

Drained.

But I also felt good, deep down good, at the knowledge that I had given my best, at what we had done together and at the transmission of a spark that I believe, at least for some, will not soon be extinguished.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 98: On Angela Bachelet Jeria and Bearing Witness

Bearing witness is the call and burden of the trauma survivor, but not all choose to accept it.

Angela Bachelet Jeria has done just that, though, for nearly 40 years.

The trained archaeologist’s life was changed permanently and fundamentally by the Pinochet coup in September 1973.

Her husband Alberto, an Air Force general, stayed loyal to President Salvador Allende and the Constitution.

For that decision he was detained and tortured for several months. In 1974 he died of heart problems that Judge Mario Carrozo said were caused by his torture.

The death of a husband at the hands of his former comrades and friends would have been more than enough for many to bear, and her troubles were just beginning.

On January 10, 1975, along with her daughter Michelle, a popular and politically active student, she was blindfolded and taken to the notorious Villa Grimaldi compound, according to the website ThisisChile.cl. It that was the largest of the network of such sites run by the DINA, or Pinochet’s secret police

Mother and daughter were separated.

Both endured interrogation and torture.

Michelle Bachelet was confined to a cell with bunk bed with eight other female prisoners.

Angela Bachelet Jeria was held in “the tower,” an infamous area within the camp that is located near a pool where the torturers’ children used to play. She was kept for nearly a week without food or water.

Both women were transferred to the Cuatro Alamos detention center, where they stayed until the end of January, the web site said.

After being spared death due to their connections with high-ranking military officers, the pair were released and lived in exile Australia, and East Germany.

Jeria, the widow and torture survivor, worked from abroad to bring about the demise of the regime that had robbed her of her husband and the country of a democracy.

She has continued that fight through Pinochet’s defeat in the 1988 plebiscite, through the restoration of democracy, through her daughter becoming the nation’s first elected female president, and through the flurry of memory-related activity around the fortieth anniversary of the coup in September.

I first saw her at a memorial event that she attended at Villa Grimaldi in September with her daughter. The former president’s emotions were visible as she wiped a tear from her eye, even as a bevy of cameras recorded her every move.

Looking fit and trim, with a full head of brown hair, Dr. Jeria seemed less visibly impacted by her latest return to the place where she had suffered so much.

But I wondered what was happening within her.

On Monday, I got a chance to learn the answer.

I saw Dr. Jeria, who had been erroneously introduced as the mother of the president, not ex-president, at the launch event for the 2013 annual report of the National Institute for Human Rights. Established during her daughter’s term as president, the institute issues an annual review of the state of human rights in the nation.

The event had had an uneven cadence.

Director Lorena Fries had delivered a frank assessment of the problems that still remain in the country, with the treatment of indigenous people, the practice of torture on those who are incarcerated and the issue of abortion heading the list.

President Sebastian Pinera arrived late, received a copy of the report and appeared ready to head off the stage before being asked if he would like to deliver some remarks.

He pulled a sheath of paper from a suit pocket and proceeded to deliver a nearly hour-long list of his administration’s accomplishments in the area of human rights as well as his top legislative priorities. This included lengthy sections on abortion and the nation’s indigenous which just minutes before had been among the chief topics in the report that he had praised and whose leader he had approved for another term.

A steady stream of whistling, heckling and banner raising accompanied the president as he spoke. He appeared to take note of the disruption, looking up at times from his paper and raising his voice, and generally he ploughed forward, seemingly unperturbed, if not openly indifferent.

The large security men in dark suits and neatly coiffed hair seemed far more uncomfortable, looking actively torn between restoring order by forcing the offenders to leave and exercising a restraint based on their knowledge that to do so would go even more directly against the event’s mission than the presidential appropriation of the stage he had been given.

Pinnera’s address ground on and on before he concluded with a call for everyone to remember that they were all Chileans and should not let differences stand between them.

The applause he received was tepid at best.

Dunreith and I moved gratefully into the reception area. I secured and gulped down a wine glass full of orange juice.

Then I saw Dr. Jeria.

Well dressed as always, this time in a brown pants suit.

I walked over and introduced myself, explaining that Dunreith and I had been in the country for five months and that I was at the tail end of a stint as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Diego Portales.

I told her that I had seen her at the Villa Grimaldi commemoration, that I admired her courage in being able to go back to the place that had been a site of such intense suffering for her.

She smiled, revealing a row of clean, white teeth that sat atop unreceded gums.

What had that been like, I asked.

Unlike the concentration camps of Eastern Europe, the camps here were destroyed by the perpetrators, she explained in a smooth, deep, melodic voice.. By going, we say that it happened and shouldn’t happen again.

We do this even though returning means that the memories of that dark, distant time are triggered anew.

Going there meant that she had to “revivir,” she said.

To live again.

I told her about our family’s history in Germany, how we had lost family members in the Holocaust, but also how we had returned with Dad in May of last year.

I let her know how much it meant to us that Dad had found it within himself to go back, to put himself back in that zone and time of memory and forgetting, how he did it in large part for us.

Dr. Jeria listened, nodding sagely and answering again in that even voice. For a minute I felt young and small, like I was talking to a grandmother who understood everything.

She asked me for a card and read it after I handed it to her.

More people were gathering around her to hug and embrace, to gain strength from her unbowed generosity and clarity of purpose.

I caught her eye again and told her it was good to meet before we left.

She smiled again and we squeezed each other’s hand.

Angela Bachelet Jeria was in the process of fulfilling her duty of memory and truth for the day.

More awaited.