The Changing Lessons of the Germany Project

The lessons keep on changing.

In May 2012 we returned with Dad to his hometown of Essen, Germany.

Although he had been on a train that stopped there in the summer of 1965, when Mom was pregnant with me, he had not set foot in the community for 73 years.

Thanks to the tireless work and dedication of Gabriele Thimm, a remarkable educator fiercely dedicated to her students' learning their nation's history, the week we spent in the community was drenched in meaningful moments.

We visited Dad’s former apartments where he had lived for the nearly five years before his parents sent him away to safety on the Kindertransport program-an action they took without knowing if they would ever see him again.

We met the non-Jewish family who had, at great personal risk, held our family Bible for years and with whom we had maintained an eight decade correspondence.

We attended a surprise birthday party for Dad during which our host Norbert Mering took us to another property our family had owned until the early part of the twentieth century.

Courtesy of Cultural Center Director Uri Kaufmann, we entered the Jewish cemetery where generations of our ancestors were buried. The increasingly modest graves were symbolic of the declining fortunes of the Jewish community.

We were treated as honored guests by Dirk and Susan Fuchs, who owned the first of three floors of a stately, yellow building that served as home and workspace for Joseph Lowenstein, my great-grandfather, the family patriarch and my namesake who was deported to Theresienstadt before being killed.

Dad spoke little about his experience when my brothers and I were growing up in Brookline. When we asked him, he said he didn’t remember. Yet when we watched the first episode of the mini-series Holocaust, he shut the television off quickly.

That silence, that blend of the absence of information and clear emotional distress left me with a hunger to know Dad and that time.

I took many actions to fill that void.

I visited and interviewed elderly relatives who had fled the Nazi regime as adults, and thus had more and clearer memories of Germany than my father. I read voraciously about what many Germans called “the period of National Socialism.” And I worked for years for Facing History and Ourselves, an educational non-profit organization that has students study the choices people confronted before and during the Holocaust to understand their own lives. Yet something stayed locked.

No matter how many times I visited my great aunt Ilse Goldberg in her one-bedroom apartment in Queens, where she lived for the last 25 of her 103 years, no matter how many explanations I read of the Nazi’s rise to power, no matter how many survivors' stories I listened to, a visceral understanding of my family’s history remained elusive.

By going to the community where Dad had lived, I hoped, I would learn about who my ancestors had been and how they had shaped me.

We talked about it for years, and even gotten to the point of choosing dates.

But somehow something within him held him back and didn’t allow him to go.

Yet after my stepmother Diane died in July 2010, something changed.

When I raised the topic a couple of Decembers ago, Dad responded positively.

Each aspect of the trip layered onto the wonder of it happening it all to embody the fulfillment of long-held dreams and an affirmation that it is possible, when one works hard and persistently, to build a life out of one deepest dreams and most basic values.

The trip also had a pair of Ceremonies of Life.

One was at the Cultural Center, while the other was at Realschule Uberruhr, the middle school where Gabriele teaches.

The ceremonies began with a family picture from the 1920s.

Papa Joseph was there with his four boys-Max, Rudi, Albert and Ernie. So, too, were my great-grandmother Clara and Rudi’s wife Margarete. The men all wore suits.

They were a typical looking German family.

The program put the picture in the context of the family’s history, talking about our ancestors Abraham and Moses Lowenstein and showing their arrival in Steele through documents and pictures.

The text went back into the past of the Jewish people up to the destruction of the Jewish temple, moved to the Jews in Germany and Essen, and then back again to our family.

A student named Melina explained why she and other students had participated in the ceremony.

“This is neither because we feel like offenders nor because we feel like victims, but because it is our concern to remember those people who lived in Essen as respected citizens, as friends, as acquaintances, as sport comrades, as parents, as employers and employees, in fact as citizens of the city of Essen,” she read.

The program took us through the rise of the Nazi Party, the Kristallnacht pogrom, the creation of the Kindertransport program on which Dad and Uncle Ralph escaped, and his departure from the country.

The ceremonies showed that it is possible to face the darkest chapter of a nation’s history, to acknowledge what happened, and, in so doing, to work to prevent an inoculation of future such events.

That a community can confront what happened in part to release the shame and demons and to insist that it will not happen again.

And that a teacher of courage and conviction and commitment can help a family convert a long-held dream into a forum for public healing for both sides.

At the ceremony Dad announced that we would be forming an award in the family’s name that honors young people who act toward Tolerance and Justice.

This June, he, Lee and I returned for the award presentation.

It was another extraordinary experience.

We saw the multi-colored mural made by human shaped figures with puzzle pieces that spelled the German words for tolerance and justice.

We heard a rap sung by a dozen or so male students that recounted the history of our family.

We watched a haunting, but ultimately uplifting video that started with black and white photographs of children on the Kindetransport standing with suitcases in their hands and numbers around their necks.

The film explained that Dad and his brother Ralph were two of the 10,000 children in the program and that Dad had returned last year for the first time in many years.

Black and white changed to color.

We also saw people we had met the year before. The pace was more relaxed than last year, the feel more of a reunion than a highly charged and emotional journey.

Whereas last year’s event what healing can come when someone who fled as a child returns after many years to that community with an open hand, this year’s presentation demonstrated the role that members on each side can play in bringing healing where there have been great wounds.

The dignitaries who signaled its importance.

The children who gave up time they could have spent with their friends.

The adults who attended and supported the effort to understand and to learn.

The principal who endorsed the project.

The project will unfold in as yet unknown directions.

More students are participating in the contest at Gabriele's school, and we are talking about creating an association to involve more schools in the project.

Former Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela visited the school and the community earlier this month to learn about what is happening and how we are doing what we are doing.

Like a kaleidoscope, the lessons I derive from it will continue to shift and evolve, too.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 104: Returning Home to Chicago

We're in the air from Toronto to Chicago.

We've left Santiago, site of fulfilled dreams, 80 degree Christmas Days, our impossibly dusty postage stamp of an apartment, and the consumption of more pisco sours and glasses, well, bottles, of red wine than we could have ever imagined, and are heading back to the Windy City that has been our home since 2002.

With grins that stretched beyond our ears, Dunreith and I deposited the check from the house sale we completed the day before we left on our Chilean adventure.

It far exceeded our greatest expectations.

We had the great privilege of being in Chile as the nation confronted, more directly than ever before, the still raw wounds from the Pinochet coup that happened on September 11, 1973.

We attended vigils and memorials events and plays and conferences and documentary films and panels and book launches, all of which were dedicated to grappling with the enduring impact of the overthrow of democratically-elected Salvador Allende and the brutal aftermath.

I've lived in the United States close to 50 years, but never before had I witnessed the concentrated and unified focusing on a single event in our nation's history the way Chileans from Arica in the north to Punta Arenas at the end of the world turned their attention to the coup.

In October we witnessed the jubilant eruption of emotion issuing forth from Chileans who hugged, kissed, screamed and honked their horns when their beloved soccer team punched its ticket to the world's largest sport event, to be held next June in Brazil.

In November we went to election events and talked to voters of all persuasions and ages and sides of the political spectrum during what turned out to be the first of two rounds in the presidential elections.

And in December we traveled to Torres del Paine, a national park of unsurpassed and staggering beauty that recently was named the eighth wonder of the world, when Michelle Bachelet made history in becoming the first candidate ever to be elected president twice in the post-democracy era.

Beyond these momentous months in Chilean history, we received an enormously generous reception from Chileans with whom we had some connection-we met everyone from dear friend Marjorie Agosin's seemingly inexhaustible supply of cousins and former students to a female anesthetist Dad had helped train nearly 30 years ago to our colleague, friend of a friend, guide/secret weapon Alejandra Matus-and those whom we had the good fortune to meet through our travels.

My Data Journalism students at the University of Diego Portales gradually understood my Spanish, my teaching methods and the concepts and application of this type of journalism in a process that left both sides feeling enriched for the encounter.

My research into the landmark 2009 Transparency Act, after an initial shift in focus, led me to talk with journalists, lawyers, non-profit executives, government representatives and plain folks in a project that gave me a sharper sense of the law's as yet incompletely realized potential.

Dunreith and I traveled to the vineyards of the Central Valley, to the coast cities of Valparaiso and Vina del Mar. With Aidan we flew to the searing desert of San Pedro de Atacama, the world's driest such space, and to Patagonia, a place Dunreith had longed to visit for years.

We also ventured to Rio, where I had the honor of attending, teaching and presenting to colleagues at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference doing investigative work, often at great physical peril, throughout the world.

We flew to Buenos Aires, where we met Dad and Lee before they set off on a two-week tour to Southern Argetina and up through Chile, and strolled together down elegant, inordinately wide, European-style boulevards, ate ice cream at Cafe Tortoni, the continent's oldest cafe that oozes with swagger, listened and learned for three hours at ESMA, the largest of the Argentine dictator's network of detention centers, and feasted on the sights and food of El Ateneo, the former theater that has been converted into one of the world's most spectacular bookstores.

Jon and I had the tremendous fortune to receive a grant from the Pulitzer Center to do a project about the impact of the past on the present in Chile 40 years after the coup. Together we worked long hours over the course of two weeks for a three-part series that ran on The New Yorker's Photo Booth and on Hoy's website.

The family visits over our final six weeks in the country helped confirm to me the possibility of weaving together the people and passions and dreams and values that I hold most dear. Perhaps, greatest of all, it's fortified my increasing conviction that this way of living was not only possible, but could in a very real sense become ordinary.

Now, we are returning to Chicago, the city from which we have left, where we raised Aidan from a boy to a man, and where we have spent the vast majority of our married life.

I am, and will always be, a Bostonian at my core.

I had too many seminal events, from the Blizzard of 78 to the 1975 World Series to growing up amidst that inimitable accent for it to ever be otherwise.

But if Boston in my heart, Chicago's in my guts.

The people's straightforward manner and generous spirit, the city's sense of itself as a place of story and legend, the passion that Chicagoans bring to their sports and their politics and their brats and their neighborhoods, its industrial past and tortured history with race and segregation and immigration and labor that make it what the late, great Studs Terkel called "the true American city", have all gotten in deep, and are not going anywhere, either.

I'll miss our life in Santiago and our travels throughout the country and continent, to be sure.

And I'm excited to fly over the leafless trees toward the dirtied snow and land at O'Hare, to walk in the 20 degree weather and see our breath and our circle of friends and family again, and to bring a fresh, broader perspective to my ongoing love for the city.

We don't know our exact next steps, or, frankly, where we're going to live after we stay at my brother Jon's place on the South Side.

But we do know without any shred of a doubt that, as always, the adventure will continue.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 103: Getting Ready to Go

I left Brookline for my freshman year at Stanford more than 30 years ago, but I still remember the night before my departure as if it occurred yesterday.

It was late September 1983, and my friends had all begun their own college adventures.

I had visited Hisao Kushi at UMass-Amherst and witnessed a memorable hall orientation at Boston University where best friend Vinnie D’Angelo had been booed on his arts floor for asking about an intramural soccer team.

The evening before I left, I read a letter I had written in Europe to each member of our family in which I told them what they meant to me.

I cried after I finished.

Later, when it was dark, I biked around the town where I had spent all but one of my nearly 18 years.

I biked up Sumner Road and past my friend’s house that had been a virtual Den of Iniquity toward the end of senior year while his parents were away for a month in Europe.

I biked past the castle-looking home on Buckminster Road where we had climbed up the fire escape countless times to visit Hisao and by Vinnie’s home on Tappan Street where I had spent countless meals and evenings.

None of them were there.

Even though I was sad at leaving and scared about what lay ahead, it was time to go.

The memory of that evening has come back to me the past couple of days since we returned from close to a week in Torres del Paine, a national park of staggering and unsurpassed beauty that in November was named the Eighth Wonder of the World.

The other Fulbrighters who were in Santiago, with whom we ate and drank and swapped stories about students and travel notes, have all gone.

My Data Journalism class wrapped up a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve completed my students’ grades.

I’ve worked with the woman who will teach the course next and spoken with a colleague who will be the department’s point person with outside folks for things data related.

A student is putting the final touches on a video he’s done about the project Jon and I did about Chile’s past, present and future 40 years after the Pinochet coup. When completed, it will fulfill the last responsibility to the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting that supported our work.

I’ve looked into the issue of the impact of the 2009 Transparency Act here in the country and delivered a pair of presentations and ensuring conversations about what I learned earlier this month at the Fulbright Commission.

I hit the 100-blog post mark on this series earlier in the week, and have written and submitted a book proposal to the publishing house at the University of Diego Portales.

Dunreith and I have traveled to Brazil and Argentina, the countries we set out to see before we arrived.

We have gone with Aidan to San Pedro de Atacama, the world’s driest desert, as well as to Patagonia, a region she had hungered to see for more than three decades.

We’ve had the great fortune to be here during an extraordinary time in the nation’s history.

Since landing here in mid-July, we’ve witnessed the build up to, and commemoration of, the fortieth anniversary of the Pinochet coup.

We’ve eaten anticuchos and drunk a terremoto at the fondas that mark the nation’s weeklong celebration of El Dieciocho, the Chilean version of Independence Day.

We’ve seen the eruption of raw and pure emotion when Chile triumphed over Ecuador and secured its place in the 2014 World Cup that will be held next June in Brazil.

Together with Jon I attended the final event of Michelle Bachelet’s campaign in Quinta Normal on November 14, talked with dozens of voters during what turned out to be the first round of presidential elections and witnessed the counting of ballots by hand in front of cheering and jeering supporters at Estadio Nacional, the National Stadium.

We’ve had the remarkable gift of two weeks with Dad and his partner Lee, two weeks with Jon, during which we worked for The New Yorker, and more than a month with Aidan, who is fresh off an expansive and energizing semester in New Zealand.

That we’ve done all this while having sold our house the day before we left has only added to the sense of adventure and affirmed our ability to stretch and reach and push and make our dreams real.

Indeed, our time has been so abundant and so rich, the connections we’ve made have felt so authentic and close that the fact of our leaving makes me sad, just as my departure from Brookline did 30 years ago.

There’s an additional layer.

I can scarcely believe how fast the intervening years have passed, in part precisely because the memory of the night before leaving for Stanford remains so fresh.

But whereas then I was more concerned then with possibilities, exploration and self-discovery, now the details of memory, the fulfillment of inner mandates and the desire to leave something enduring and meaningful behind have ascended.

I also know more viscerally than before that only too easily I will blink again and another three decades will have gone by. If I’m still around, I’ll be that much closer to the end of my life.

Not having a place to live and the prospect of facing our chaotically-filled storage adds further uncertainty and anxiety.

The sadness and unease produced by these emotional, existential and logistical concerns do not erase a central, unalterable reality.

Our stay here is over.

Our next adventure lies in front of us, about to begin in a few short days.

It’s true that may return to Chile, perhaps as early as next summer.

And, for now, just as it was those many years ago, amidst the gratitude and wonder, it’s time to go.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 102: Culminating Thoughts on Transparency in Chile

Our days left here in Chile can fit on one hand-we’re flying back to Chicago and the United States on December 25-and I find myself in the summing up and looking back place that often is precipitated by the ends of experiences.

As I’ve written before, and really throughout, these chronicles, there have been many rich, meaningful and memorable aspects of our time in the land of Neruda and Mistral, Allende and Pinochet.

Friends.

Colleagues.

Students.

Travel adventures.

A profound sense of living out of our dreams and values.

There’s also been the research I’ve done about the landmark Transparency Act that was passed in 2009, a few years after the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights found in favor of former presidential candidate Marcel Claude that a right existed to government information.

Among the key components: the creation of an independent Transparency Council to which individuals and groups can appeal if their request for information is denied and accountability not just for functionaries, but for agency leaders who do not supply the data or documents that had been sought.

My goal as a Fulbright Scholar has not been to simply teach a course and conduct an investigation, but rather to spark relationships and bring people together who might not otherwise know each other so that those connections can continue after Dunreith and I return to the United States.

As part of that effort I participated a pair of conversations hosted by Fulbright Commission during the past couple of weeks. My colleagues at the University of Diego Portales and other journalists, folks from the Chilean government, people involved in transparency work in the non-profit sector, members of the Hack/Hackers community and staffers from the U.S. Embassy attended the events.

A research plan evolves

After thanking everyone for attending, I shared my original plan for the project.

Modeled on James Painter’s work on climate change coverage, I had intended to look at a year’s worth of coverage of El Mercurio, the country’s largest paper, before and after the law’s passage to determine what, if anything, had changed.

After arriving here, reading the paper on a more regular basis-it treated the fortieth anniversary of the Pinochet coup like a soccer news brief-and watching El Diario de Agustin, the documentary film that exposed the paper’s complicity with the Pinochet government, I decided to go in a more qualitative direction.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wvo0939_bSc&w=560&h=315]

Instead, I approached the topic like a beat I would cover. As part of that commitment, I reported on what I did as I went along, using the iterative approach endorsed by dear friend Fernando Diaz.

As a result, I met with journalists at different levels of prominence and stages of their careers, with non-profit folks like ProAccesso, a group that does legal work on transparency, and Ciudadano Inteligente, a group that works to empower citizens through technology and access to information.

I talked with elected officials like Mario Gebauer, the mayor of Melipilla who had filed a lawsuit pushing for the emails of public officials to be public record.

I met with folks in the computer coding and hacking community as well as with people from the Transparency Council, the organ whose establishment was a key component of the law.

And I interviewed people from the Transparency Commission, the government’s organ dedicated to these issues.

I took other actions, too.

Within the country I attended and presented at Data Tuesdays sponsored by Fundacion Inria Chile, a French non-profit organization, and taught at the Winter Data School held at the University of Diego Portales where I taught. During our Data Journalism class I had students write letters and brought in a bunch of guest speakers, many of whom talked with the students about the importance of acquiring publicly available data.

And, with the help of lawyer friend Macarena Rodriguez, I filed an information request and appeal.

Outside of Chile I attended the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Rio in October and met with members of the data team from La Nacion when we traveled to Buenos Aires.

I blogged throughout about what I learned from these interactions, which took place during a time in which Chile not only marked the fortieth anniversary of the coup, but continued its ongoing transition from a closed and isolated dictatorship to a fitfully emerging democracy more connected to the world through technology and the global economy.

In addition to the specific area of transparency under the law, Chile was going through all kinds of openings from the past and into the present through the work people like the young volunteers of TECHO, who work in a holistic way with poor communities to identify and confront a plan to meet the challenges they face.

Or with people like Jaime Parada, the nation’s first openly gay public official who was elected in 2012 as councilman in the wealthy and politically conservative Providencia neighborhood.

Or members of MOVILH, one of the nation’s most visible and active gay rights organization.

Or Nancy, an Aymara woman who scours the Internet to send up north to members of her community about the devastation mining is doing to their land, who makes traditional handcrafts and is starting to teach her children the language that previously was banned.

Many of these individuals and organizations are part of a transition from an earlier concept of human rights as being individually based and consisting of dictatorship-era violations like torture, detention and disappearance to a more ample and collective vision that include the rights of people with disabilities and members of the LGBT community, the right to a clean environment, and even to Internet access.

I learned a lot through my research.

The good news first

The first part was that there was a lot of good news and positive developments around the law and infrastructure, which, along with Mexico, are among the best in the continent, according to transparency guru Moises Sanchez.

There are a core of people involved in the issue, many of whom expressed optimism and enthusiasm about the direction of transparency in the country.

The number of requests filed by citizens over time has grown to tens of thousands field per year.

It’s both an anti-corruption tool that is a central part of the government’s approach toward transparency and one that has the potential for historic reconstruction to gain a fuller and deeper understanding of what happened in the country during the earlier and darker time of the dictatorship.

The government has posted close to 1,100 data set on its data portal, and is working to integrate those sets with each other and with information from the country’s 15 regions.

The Council’s budget has gone up each year of its existence, increasing by more than 50 percent from 2010 to 2013.

The large papers appear to be using the law more frequently.

There was a Supreme Court decision in November that reversed its earlier position and said that emails from public officials are public record.

And the leadership of journalism organizations like Investigative Reporters and Editors and the Chicago Headline Club are willing to support continued efforts in this area.

Many challenges exist, too

At the same time, the law has many challenges, according to the people with whom I spoke.

Before its reversal, the Supreme Court had issued two decisions saying that public officials did not have to supply emails that had been requested-a position that was backed on the editorial pages of leading newspapers like La Tercera.

Many journalists are not using the law for a number of reasons. Some expressed the feeling that they could choose to wait close to a month, and very possibly longer, for information they could more easily obtain through their sources. Others said that some journalists feel they are betraying their sources if they request information through a freedom of information request-an attitude that suggests that their the relationship with a government official is more important than the public’s right to know.

There is a perception among many that law is the tool of the country’s elite, many of whom are male, educated, wealthy professionals with Internet access.

In 2011 President Sebastian Pinera, in a decision many considered to be politically, chose not to renew the terms of Raul Urrutia and Juan Pablo Olmedo on the Transparency Council, even though the Senate had endorsed their continued service.

The council is not officially linked to civil society, even though that option exists.

Many of the organizations engaged in transparency work have few resources and are isolated from each other. In many cases, there is little outreach.

As I experienced personally in my request, the process can be extremely slow on potentially sensitive data request, with government officials invoking concerns of national security and saying they have too much work to fulfill the request.

Finally, while the judicial and legislative branches have to publish information, they are not subject to the same disclosure requirements as the executive branch.

Based on this balance of positive and negative developments, I suggested that people consider working on legislation to address their concerns, collaborate more actively with each other, dedicate more resources to outreach, encourage the Council to develop an official link with civil society, and connect with people outside the country who are doing the same work.

I concluded by noting the following:

The law is still young, but has tremendous potential.

There has been significant progress, and the value and spirit of the law has yet to be truly realized.

The actions of the people in the room will play a role in the degree to which the potential is converted into reality.

I’m honored to be part of that dialogue.

From there, I opened the floor for discussion, which in both cases was lively and wide ranging.

I don’t want in any way to romanticize or elevate what occurred.

As always, the work of making a lofty promise real falls to those who live in that time and who must decide whether it is worth the effort, whether we want it enough.

It’s true that Dr. King said that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b80Bsw0UG-U&w=420&h=315]

But he also said and wrote repeatedly that there is nothing inevitable about time’s passage and social progress.

Time itself is neutral, he said.

I did some research.

Two groups gathered and listened and dialogued with each other.

Folks who did not know each other now have met.

We've made a start, and we'll see how far we go from here.

I know that I’ll continue to work on this issue.

I'm transparent about that.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 101: Memories of South Africa at the End of the World

Even though close to 20 years have passed, I still remember the moment I first saw the exact point of land that marked the southernmost point in Africa, the place where the Indian and Pacific Oceans converged. The Cape of Good Hope.

It was October 1995, and I was participating in the Fulbright Teacher Exchange Program at the Uthongathi School, one of the nation’s first private, multi-racial institutions.

Kay Wise, one of my colleagues at the school, and her partner, Suri Chetty, had invited me to spend our 10-day break with them driving from Durban, where they lived and just south of the school, which was in Tongaat.

In so doing, they gave me a gift that continues to enrich me.

I had already taught about the European sea exploration and the quest for an all-water route to Asia for years.

Seeing and standing on that place where Vasco da Gama had built on the knowledge generated by his countryman Bartholomeu Dias to be able to essentially round the corner and start to head up the other side of Africa changed my understanding of what history meant to me.

Part of the appeal of the discipline, stretching back to eighth grade in England, had been the memorization and alignment and interrelationship of names and dates and people and places. I could still rattle off the success of kings and queens who ruled in England during the 17th century, with the notable interruption of Oliver Cromwell’s “Roundheads” that I had learned in Pete Noll’s history class in Oxford, England during my eighth grade year close to two decades earlier.

But standing on the Cape of Good Hope, thinking about what that moment had been like for da Gama and his crew, changed things for me.

It allowed me to place myself in history and to begin to integrate my understanding of what had happened so many years ago with where my life in the present.

I had been drawn to South Africa by what I had perceived as the unalloyed moral clarity of apartheid, and that moment, and that unanticipated lesson, have stayed with me since.

Fast forward 18 years.

I am no longer a single young man, but a middle-aged husband and father who is now the same age Mom was when she and Dad had their near-fatal car accident in February, 1986.

Whereas that year, shortly after our Cape Town visit, I turned 30 and finally felt in my bones that I was no longer 12 years old, now I am far more aware of life’s finitude.

Yet the memory of that integration of place and history and possibility has stayed within me, acting at different times as anchor and spiritual North Star, reminding me of what has happened before and thus what can be true again.

The power of that experience has surfaced again in recent days, when Dunreith, Aidan and I traveled to Punta Arenas, one of Chile and Latin America’s most southern places, before driving to natural marvel Torres del Paine, a place of staggering, unsurpassed physical beauty and wonder.

When we called about getting GPS for the car we were renting to drive north to the park, the gentleman on the other end of the line informed me there was no such option for the cars in their office.

There’s just one road here, he told us.

He wasn’t lying.

The green road signs from Punta Arenas heading north have the word, “Route of the End of the World,” near a white star.

A couple of nights ago, Dunreith and I walked for about an hour along a boardwalk.

We passed a basketball court with three netless hoops in a row at the ocean.

A father watched his young son ride his bike back and forth on the middle court.

Although it was close to 10:00, the light was still strong.

A rainbow traced an arc over a boundless, cloud-filled sky.

The blue water of the Pacific Ocean whipped with a wind that stung our ears.

As with South Africa, the main pull for me of going to Chile had not come from wanting to see that place, but from a desire to witness the people of a wounded land move into that enduring pain during an extraordinary moment in that nation’s history.

Yet the fact of being so far from my original and adopted homes mixed with the joy of being with my family, the increasing appreciation of precisely how special each moment is, and my memory of the earlier time of being in a different part of the end of the world.

The sun finally started to fade, and Dunreith and I started to walk back toward the cabin where the three of us were staying.

The wind danced on her forehead, brushing aside her hair just for a moment.