somebody please cut me off

There is a huge school supply store near Estación Central that Allyson and Rad took our group to to stock up on supplies for class.  This place is like a Staples on Latin American crack with several floors lined with shelves full of every kind of stationery and art supply possible.  Santiago has a little klepto problem and so they have to take extra precautions to prevent theft, especially in a store aimed towards kids in need of the coolest pencil case.  All the guys in our group had to put their backpacks in plastic bags and getting dry erase markers was a process that involved ordering it from behind the counter, having it placed in a numbered box, and then getting the locked box back at checkout.  Had I'd known dry erase markers were so valuable, I would have brought down a box in bulk and made a few extra bucks on the school supply black market.  After the big 8.8 earthquake in February, all the stocks fell off the shelves and the store was closed for about a week; this happened to also be the week before the Chilean school year started and so when they finally re-opened, there had been a frenzy inside and families lined up around the block just to go in.  


If you know me at all, you would know that these kind of stores are my version of a candy store.  I cannot control myself with so many kinds of paint, colored paper, and glue sticks available.    It was much less frenzied when our group went, but I probably would have fought a 9-year old for the last box of crayons.  I ended up spending about $40 for two big shopping bags of treasure.  No big deal though, I am now the kid with the coolest pencil case.

All shopping baskets should have a rolling option.

amazing race chile

6 missions, 6 teams of 2 volunteers, 1 city, 1 goal.


We had an epic race across central Santiago in search of specific sites and answers to trivia questions complete with an almost photo finish at the final checkpoint between Team LittleTang (Corrie and I) and Team Figjam (Brandy and Chris).  I say almost because 20 ft from the finish line, we realized Jeremy and Sharon were already there, arriving just three minutes before us thanks to their use of the city taxis.  But before this sorely disappointing revelation (as expressed on Brandy's face in this picture),

it was a neck and neck scramble from trying to find who designed a train station by asking random staff at said station (in Spanish of course) to ending up on the same final train car together, busting out the doors as soon as they opened, shoving on the stairs out to street level, and skipping the crosswalks in front of oncoming traffic (I looked both ways first, I swear).


All for a gift bag full of school supplies.  Still, the race was incredibly fun and Corrie and I deserve some extra points for playing hard--not taking a single cab and running the entire thing.  Chris and Brandy took one cab and Jeremy and Sharon did the whole thing in one.  Nothing like an Amazing Race Chile to remind you that your legs muscles need some work once in awhile.  Surprisingly, mine held up pretty well for not running in who knows how long.  I credit the adrenaline.


Our missions:

1.  Who designed the Estación Central?  Gustave Eiffel

2. Take a picture at the top of Cerro Santa Lucia.

3.  Go to Plaza de Armas and take a picture with Pedro de Valdivia.

4.  Go to La Vega (produce market) and find out how much for a kilo of grapes.

5.  Picture at the best place in Santiago to get a Terremoto (a wine and pineapple ice cream mix): La Piojra

6.  Final checkpoint:  Take the metro to Salvador estación and meet at the fountain in Parque Forestal.

The top 6 finishers!  Go Team LittleTang!

6.1 mag aftershock hits the same night I claim to not have felt anything yet

For those of you who received my Japan updates, you may or (more likely) may not remember that a 4.9 quake hit my city, Yokohama, the same night I wrote that I hadn't felt any yet.

Well, the exact same thing happened here last night in Chile. I was sleeping and I was roused gently from my sleep by my room shaking back and forth. I'm a ridiculously deep sleeper so it was strong enough to wake me up but still pretty peacefully. Groggily, I thought, "Oh, that's a quake," rode it out, and then rolled over back to sleep. I hope no one ever depends on me to get them out.
Some others in my room were a little more jolted and panicked by the experience but we all eventually were able to go back to sleep.

Turns out, it was a pretty significant 6.1 with the epicenter down off the coast of Concepcion, where the bulk of the big 8.8 damage was and still is. But in case you were wondering, everyone's fine, there were no reports of damage to life or infrastructure, or tsunami threats.

Here is an article with more info if you're interested:
http://www.mysinchew.com/node/36991

Amazing Race Chile today! Go Team LittleTang! (A fusion of mine and Corrie's last names, Tang and Littlepage)

Besitos

buenas dias from sunny chile!

After another long journey from Boston to Dallas and a 10-hour, red-eye from Dallas to Santiago, I arrived a tired girl to my new home for the rest of the year: Chile. New country, new continent, new people, new job, new language, new food. New everything. I met my WorldTeach (WT) group at the airport because I took a separate flight from the group flight but they both arrived at about the same time. Rad, our ever-exuberant orientation assistant, found me at the terminal exit and brought me over to the rest of the group and Allyson, our field director. Rad, who is from southern California, is really cool, has taught with WorldTeach in both Costa Rica and in Chile, and now lives in Santiago. She's probably one of the most hilarious people I've ever met. Allyson is from Virginia and taught with WorldTeach in Chile last year and decided that this country is going to be her home for awhile.

The group of 13 volunteers (originally 17 but 4 backed out because of the terremoto and other reasons) represent a good amount of the US and a wide age range with the youngest being 22 and the oldest in her 60's. Our motto is "You can't shake us!" referring to the fact that an 8.8 magnitude earthquake just two weeks before our arrival date couldn't deter us from this experience. Everyone is cool and each contributes a very unique personality to the whole. My roommate for this month of training, Leigh Ann, is from Florida and used to work as a parade dancer for Disney World's Animal Kingdom. Our other suite mates, Corrie (Virginia), Allison (Virginia/New Orleans), and Susan (Kentucky/Alaska) all share our two little connected rooms with one bathroom and no storage space with us. The triple is in between our double and the bathroom and I have certainly done my share of tripping over suitcases, walking into the (useless) wardrobe, and waking up all three girls in the middle of the night on the way back from the bathroom. We are living in the Hotel Plaza Londres for 2.5 weeks during WT orientation in El Centro right smack in the commercial center of Santiago but it's most definitely a hostel more than anything else. The neighborhood is quaint and made up of just two intersecting cobblestone streets lined with Spanish colonial-style buildings. Funny thing is, it's the only spot in the entire city that looks like this. But I'm not complaining, it makes you forget that you are in a big city after all.

After settling in the first day, we jumped right to work. WT has done a fantastic job with orientation and training so far and is really preparing us for what is to come when we move to our placement towns and begin teaching. The most emphasized mantra has been "be liquid" since the terremoto, the recent changing hands of the government, the new culture, and the fact that this is Chile and Latin America are all going to require extreme flexibility from everyone. I think we are doing a good job of being liquid thus far. In this first week and a half (feels more like three), our schedules have been stuffed full of activities including, but not limited to:

-Sessions about culture shock, history of Chile, the (very broken) education system, the terremoto (I will elaborate on things I've observed and learned in a later email in an attempt to keep this one relatively brief. But relative only to my own history of emails which means this will probably end up pretty lengthy anyway.)

-A screening of Machuca, a Chilean movie about two boys of different social classes during the time right before Augusto Pinochet and his military regime took over in the 1973 coup and which I highly recommend

-A human rights tour of the city based on the dictatorship

-Spanish lessons 3 nights a week, 2 hours each. My Spanish, which is extremely basic, will need some serious work over the next 8 months. It's not really facilitating my learning by spending all my time in my bubble of American volunteers. But I'm sure that will change once I move in with my host family, although Chileans tend to have thick accents, slur their words, and cut out letters on a regular basis. Also, there is a phenomenon in Chile relating to the Spanish language called chilenismos - the fact that Chileans make up words and phrases and give them brand new meanings understood ONLY in Chile. "That's silly, Heather, every language has their own quirks." you say? Well this one has enough of them to fill a half-inch thick book full plus hundreds more that aren't there because a new one is made up literally everyday. Learning espanol from Chileans: Here goes nothing!

-A full week on classroom management, the culture of the Chilean youth, lesson planning, writing two practice lesson plans, and each volunteer teaching a demo lesson. During this week, I was particularly grateful I came with some teaching and planning experience because it was completely overwhelming with information. Some other volunteers were severely stressing, but I somehow I actually felt pretty relaxed about the whole thing (perhaps it's me really taking "be liquid" to heart), but I'm sure they're feeling very close to how I felt before I started teaching in Japan. And I'm also sure that the anxiety will sneak up on me once I'm actually put in a classroom full of Chilean teenagers. They are pretty much the same as other teenagers: they can smell your fear.

Today was our first day off since we arrived and we took full advantage. I went to cheer on a group of volunteers who ran a 10K this morning and then climbed up Cerro San Cristobal, the tallest point in Santiago where there is a huge statue of the Virgin at the top. It being Palm Sunday, there was also a big outdoor mass going on. This is a sprawling city in a valley between the Andes and a coastal mountain range. Unfortunately for these reasons, the smog and air quality here is pretty horrible and seeing the thick gray layer of air that blocks the view of the mountains that should otherwise be right in your face was a little depressing. If you like breathing, don't live in Santiago. Also, museums in Santiago are free on Sundays so we went to see some Incan artifacts at the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino. Very cool displays of old Incan textiles, pottery, and jewelry.

Next week is a lot more relaxed with activities such as Amazing Race Chile, Cueca Dance Lessons, and a trip to the classroom supply store all on the menu. The week after, we move hostels and join the rest of our fellow Ingles Abres Puertas volunteers for the Ministry of Education orientation for a week before moving to our placements.

Like I said before, I'm going to cut this email off now and talk more about the culture, people, and the earthquake later. I just finally got a chance to sit down and write an update to let you know what I've been doing and that even though there have apparently been several aftershocks since we arrived (one even in the 6 point range), I haven't felt anything (bad thing?). I'm safe, careful, and excited to explore my new life here.

Here is the link to an album I've uploaded some pictures from the first week or so here. I'll have more to come soon.
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2507328&id=900881&l=32aaa74812

I will also update my Picasa website frequently with more detailed albums of things I do here, as I did in Japan.
http://picasaweb.google.com/tanghr

Cuidate y muchos besitos

For Anthony Bourdain fans out there, if you caught his episode in Chile, you saw that he visited a certain type of coffee shop nicknamed "cafe con piernas" or "coffee with legs." These are all over the place and earned their name from the novelty that the coffee is served by leggy waitresses in short, tight dresses. I get Japan flashbacks every time I pass one.

chile, here i come! (7.2 magnitude aftershocks and all...)

Saludos!

Just an update on the status of my volunteer gig that I was supposed to leave for next Tuesday (March 16): It's on! I just found out on Wednesday that the Chile Ministry of Education is going ahead with our program and sending us on schedule...allowing me roughly 6 days for preparation...Good thing I wasn't planning on packing until the day before anyway. Besides that minor detail, I'm pretty much all set to go. For those of you who are wondering about the strong aftershocks that are still hitting the country, the program has removed all the volunteers from the most seriously-affected areas and placed everyone in the Santiago Metro area and the Valparaiso region just northwest of Santiago by the ocean, a bit further north than the quake epicenters. I will certainly still feel them, quite possibly pretty strongly, but hopefully nothing too serious. My earthquake training from Japan might help me out here. :)
I will be participating in a 3-4 week orientation in downtown Santiago immediately after arrival and then moving to where ever my placement will be (I still don't know yet!) I'm excited, a bit nervous for the new work, a little sad I'll be gone for awhile, but ready to take on whatever South America tosses my way. I'm sure I'll have a lot to write home about once I get there and settle in so look out for another update in the near future!

Hablamos luego

Torres del Paine in the Chile Patagonia

mambo! from tanzania!

I just returned home from one of the most incredible places I have ever been to.

All hyperbole aside, I can safely say that visiting Tanzania was truly unique from anything I have experienced before. Maybe it was because everything was such a drastic opposite of what I had grown so used to during my time in safe, efficient, and shy Japan. Not to say that Tanzania isn’t safe, but any place is an automatic raised sense of awareness now after living in Japan, especially any place new. In terms of efficiency and shyness, let’s just say that things move at a much more relaxed pace, and you’ll never meet so many people so eager to say hello to you. Two weeks in the country wasn’t nearly enough time for me to really learn the way of life or get to know the people, but jumping right into and navigating through this friendly and welcoming culture allowed me to get pretty close in the short time I had.

And just in case context isn't enough, "mambo?" is the equivalent of something like "what's up?" in Kiswahili, the main language spoken in Tanzania (English is used in business and higher education) and pretty much everyone uses it to greet each other casually, friends and strangers alike.

I actually created a fully-captioned album showing little bits of everything I did in Iringa in order. Since I’m going to talk about the whole trip in one email, I won’t sugarcoat it, it’s going to be long. If you don’t feel like reading it all, you can just look at the pictures for the short version! (the links for them are at the bottom). I won’t write too much about what I did (mountain biking, camping, teaching, SAFARI, just to name a few) because the pictures do a better job of showing that, but I will write about things I saw and felt that I found interesting and some of my thoughts on them.

I went to visit Adam, my boyfriend of about two years, in Iringa, a town tucked away in the beautiful southern highlands of the country. He is working at Iringa International School (IIS) as an English, History, and Humanities teacher for the year. The principal even let me teach a few art classes while I was there. Most of Tanzania is pretty hot and humid, but up in the hills, the climate usually remains a perfect 84 and sunny during the day and 66 and clear at night with barely a trace of humidity (that’s 29 and 18 degrees for you metric folks). The time I visited happened to be the tail-end of their “rainy season”. I use that term lightly because after experiencing rainy seasons in Japan (overcast and steady rain for weeks), this weather was pretty dry in comparison (nice for most of the day with maybe a downpour for an hour or two in the morning or evening). But even this was enough to have the hillsides green and the amazing varieties of trees and flowers beautifully in bloom.

The journey there was one of the more grueling ones, even though the time change was only a jump eight hours ahead of Boston time. A chronological list is probably the best way to tell it:

-6.5 hour flight from Boston to London on Sunday evening at 7:30.

-Arrived at 6am on Monday, London time (1am Boston time) and started my 11-hour layover in the city. (Only about 4 real hours in the city with the travel time and the airport time. I tried to sleep as much as I could on the flight to offset the jump ahead in time but there’s only so much you can doze off in an American Airlines economy seat.)

-9 hour flight from London to Dar Es Salaam (Dar), Tanzania at 6pm London time (British Airways economy is much more comfortable with individual TVs!)

-Arrived in Dar at 6am on Tuesday, Tanzania time (3am London time)

-A sweaty and bumpy 9-hour bus ride over dirt roads and tarmac, through villages and a national park, past fields and up steep slopes from Dar to Iringa with only one 10-min breakdown in the middle which was extremely lucky so I was told repeatedly by the locals

-Arrived in Iringa at 7pm on Tuesday

Total travel time: 43 hours.

I know trying to read all that is probably making your head spin so the point is, I got there and I was exhausted and pretty dirty.

Adam lives in a gated and guarded flat (apartment) complex in a quieter part of town, but just a short walk from main streets. Many expats live in this type of housing, but the majority of locals make their homes in basic one or two room bungalows made of mud, concrete, or brick with thatched roofs, especially those in the villages outside of town. Screened and glass windows are rarities in these types of houses. Each village also seemed to have its own small plots of farming land along with some livestock, and the few houses that bordered the main roads doubled as small produce stands and convenience stores.

In the center of Iringa is the farmer’s market. Ohh the market, with its endless piles of every vegetable and fruit imaginable, mounds of spice varieties, beans, rice, and live chickens waiting to be killed and plucked. Everything in this market looked delicious and I wouldn’t have minded going there every day for fresh ingredients for dinner. The vendors sitting in the middle of these piles were friendly in the bargaining process and often included an extra little something as a gift if they liked you.

The butcher shops were a little more suspect for me, even being used to hanging-COOKED-meat butcher shops in Chinatowns. These were just one-room establishments with a window facing the road where the butcher took orders. Behind him would be huge slabs of raw carcasses hanging from the ceiling or lined up on the floor, all unrefrigerated and teaming with flies. Should someone order something, they would use bloody machetes and knives to hack pieces off to weigh on the scale. My stomach is pretty strong, but not that strong and I wanted to avoid any extra one-on-one time with the toilet while I was there so I politely declined their invitations to try their meat and opted for the frozen chickens in the shops.

Their version of a supermarket is basically a single 20x10ft room lined with various non perishables, some made in TZ and some imported from the UK, Australia, or India. Most other types of shops along the dirt roads are just alcoves lined with shelves, many of which sell essentially the same things.

Tanzania is heavily influenced by the Muslim faith but many other religions are practiced as well. It has a large population of Indians, Middle Easterners, and Europeans, from descendents of long family lines to those there on business endeavors and so the food options deliciously reflect these multicultural backgrounds.

As for daily life in Iringa, you learn to live and be happy with less and to make your own fun. There are no bright lights, arcades, cinemas, or shopping malls and for that, it felt like a relief from constant noise and stimulation. ‘Less is more’ definitely applies here, for me at least. It was really nice to get outside and explore, meet people, read, write, sketch, and study. There isn’t much to do around town after dark and it’s not a good idea for a girl to walk around alone at night anyway, but the laid back evenings were just as good. Here are a few things that we have and take for granted in developed countries yet wasn’t so awful, you could even say nice for some, to be without in Iringa:

-There are no bright lights, arcades, cinemas, shopping malls. (Great!)

-Adam didn’t have a TV, but even if he did, a satellite dish is required for anything in English. Tanzanian soap operas are only good for a laugh at terrible acting and trigger-happy tacky sound effects. Five minutes of that is plenty enough and I had to endure three hours of it while waiting at the bus station in Dar.

-Internet is a pretty interesting process as well. Instead of paying for a subscription to unlimited bandwidth as we are all used to, you buy gigabytes of it as you would purchase a prepaid calling card. It’s transferred to your home modem and deducted as you transfer bytes using the web. This pretty much rules out any kind of streaming video or large downloads because those will eat up the bandwidth for the month quick.

-Hot water needs to be switched on and takes a few hours for the tank to fully heat up. Any water that goes into your body ie. toothbrushing, veggie washing, and drinking needs to be from the purified water tank. Adam kept bottles of it by the sink in the bathroom.

-Machines. Or lack thereof. Almost everything is done by hand here. Vacuums, kitchen appliances, dishwashers, washing machines, and dryers are few and far in between. Adam and his flatmate, Elizabeth, have a housekeeper named Rehema who inexpensively comes three days a week to clean, do laundry, and cook dinner. And boy can she cook! In the two weeks I was privileged enough to eat her food, she made chapati, cheeseburgers, cinnamon buns, and various Tanzanian meat, veggie, and rice dishes, all from scratch including the hamburger buns!

The locals here have been living this simpler way of life (even more so than what I described) for ages but I have never met a friendlier group of people who seemed so content with so little. Of course, the conditions of life here on the other hand, also mean more vulnerability to disease, sickness, and starvation. On a few occasions, some kids followed us around the market area begging for food or money as we being foreign, were automatically associated with being rich as well. We gave them fruit and bought them some milk for which they were extremely grateful and waved happily and emphatically goodbye to us when we walked away. Malaria is always a risk though less so in the higher-elevation highlands (we had mosquito nets and daily malaria medication anyway) as are food and water-borne illnesses. I was required to have all my routine vaccinations as well as those for malaria, hepatitis A&B, seasonal flu, H1N1, typhoid, and yellow fever before I left. Also, the Iringa district has the highest prevalence of HIV/AIDS in the country. Maybe on the inside, there is suffering and hardship, things I wasn’t able to see in my very short time there, but everyone I met on the streets and in the markets was never too busy or hardened to crack a wide smile and positively answer back when I said “Mambo!” The children were especially friendly and their open curiosity was a breath of fresh air.

A short little story about these good people:

We took a bike trip to a campsite about 10km outside Iringa town and on the way home, I got a flat in my front tire (not uncommon on these dirt roads). We stopped in a village by the road to see if we could get some help with the tube or with a pump. The few men hanging around the front were happy to try and help but could only find a rusty old pump to try to get a little air back in to hopefully get me back to Iringa. They took turns trying to pump and little by little, more people came around from the inner section to watch. I guess they don’t get white boys and Asian girls with flat bicycle tires from leisure riding visiting their village too often because by the time they did what they could with the tire, a good 20 people had come out to catch a glimpse of the “action.” After more smiles and thank you’s and about 40 cents of gratitude money exchanged, we went on our way again. With some speedy riding and some hitchhiking with a friendly pick up truck (bikes in the bed, Adam and I up front with the driver, and the two other guys who had been riding in there now hanging off each side, standing on the foot steps) up the giant, narrow hill to town, we made it back with no more issues at all.

I didn’t leave Tanzania completely unscathed as my stomach has been acting up and generally uncomfortable for a week since my last day in the country. It’s nothing serious though and a small price to pay for the great experience. Two weeks is much too short and I would definitely go back in a heartbeat--my visa is for multiple entry...

As for my volunteer position in Chile, my departure date has been March 16 for awhile but with everything going on after the earthquake, my program has put us on hold until they can sort it all out down there. So as of right now, we are in a wait and see situation. Hopefully, we’ll find out soon!

Sorry for the longest email in history and good on you if you actually made it down here. There was just a lot to talk about.

As a reward, here are the links to my photo albums:

London Four-Hour Speed Tour
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2502308&id=900881&l=4628bd69c0

Karibu Tanzania!
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2502318&id=900881&l=f6c4f5149e

Those albums had a picture capacity so I also have my Google Picasa website. I haven’t loaded the pictures on there yet but when I do, there will probably be a few more that I left out of the albums above but no captions on these sadly.
http://picasaweb.google.com/tanghr

¡Muchos besos y feliz primavera!