My Cultural Deep End

On Wednesday my aunt and I traveled to the remote Mapuche community of Trilawapi, (don’t hold me to that spelling), to help women from the last of the three weaving groups in the area. This community is located in one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. They are in the heart of the Andes mountains at the foot of a volcano. My aunt warned me that these people were extremely poor, but very hospitable. Anytime you visit a Mapuche home they are insistent on feeding you. Depending on their situation, this could range from a little meat to a huge plate of rice with a hot dog or egg on top. If we do get meat in a Mapuche home then we more than likely got their meat for the month. Regardless of what they put in front of you though, you have to eat it. There was a fair chance we would get meat on this visit though because a pack of pumas had come down from the higher mountains and killed, not eaten, but killed a herd of sheep in the community. They owners didn’t have a choice but to divide the sheep between the rest of the families.

The roads in this area are nearly impassible by car and so we had to park at the top of a very large hill and hike down to the house. When I say hike, I mean that for the first half we were practically sliding down on our behinds it was so steep. Our guide took us over several rustic wooden fences and through several small fields. We got to the house, which by North American standards would be a run down shed, sat down at the table, and our guide, Tomas, offered us some chicha, (apple cider). Now, there are two kinds of chicha. There is chicha dulce, (sweet apple cider), and chicha fuerte, (hard apple cider). He didn’t mention what kind it was, nor did we think to ask, but he poured us two large glasses. I was a little wary to drink mine, but my aunt all but chugged hers. When I saw she was fine, I took a gulp and did my very best not to make a lemony pucker face. Not only was it rather tart, but it was also well on its way to fuerte. I managed to get my first glass down and, for reasons still unknown to me, accepted when Tomas offered to refill our glasses. We took our time with this glass, and when we finished we notice something. You see, it was about 3:00 in the afternoon and neither of us had eaten since breakfast at 9 that morning. We drank two glasses of chicha fuerte on completely empty stomachs. My head was just slightly spinning.

When lunch came, sure enough, we all had a piece of lamb, a leg of a chicken, and 3 small roasted potatoes. Not to mention tomato salad and a basket of home made bread which had been made just for us. It was a ton of food! Halfway through they brought out the traditional bread of the Mapuche, also made specifically for us, and is evidently very labor intensive. Of course, we had to eat a piece. After lunch, Tomas, one of my uncle’s bee keepers, brought some of the honey he had just harvested. We split another large piece of bread to try the honey. By this time, I was about to pop I was so full. This, plus my lightheadedness from the chicha, led me to start considering what the culturally polite way would be to excuse myself and go throw up. Once we had forced down the bread and honey, wouldn’t you know it but they brought out some corn dumplings! After half an hour, and numerous refusals to drink more chicha, my aunt made a highly sarcastic comment about how they never feed her. Haha! Unfortunately, she had forgotten that sarcasm has not reached Chile, nor the people living in the mountains. Sure enough, 10 minutes later we both had a fried egg sitting in front of us. We were about to be sick already, but somehow managed to swallow that thing.

It was beginning to get dark and we needed to head out because we still had to walk back up the hill to the car. Despite our best efforts to excuse ourselves however, we couldn’t get out of there. They wanted us to stay the night and knew if they just gave us more chicha we wouldn’t be able to get up the hill. At one point, Tomas didn’t even ask, he got out two glasses and asked how much we wanted. My aunt said half a glass, and Tomas complied by filling them to the brim. We were finally able to get out of there just as the sun had gone behind the mountains. Getting up that hill, we were practically running to get up before dark. As soon as we got in the car, we looked at each other and cracked up. Even Barb said that was the worst food experience she had ever had and we were both sick for the rest of the night.

My broken heart

When I went out this last week to another community to dye wool, I was expecting somewhat of the same experience that I had with the first group of women in Lanco. I was anticipating a bit of a difference because Lanco is a small Chilean town, while the community we went to on Wednesday was a Mapuche community on one of their reservations. Needless to say, I was not prepared for what I saw there. This was not a jolly group of women all coming together for the communal experience of dyeing wool. This was a group of women who were coming together for the sake of their livelihood. In Lanco, the selling of wool, clothing, and weavings is more of a supplemental income they can bring home. Those women are married to working husbands and their involvement in the weaving project is a good way for them to ensure that their head stay above water. For the women in the Mapuche community of Repocura, this is their only source of income. Many of them are married, but their husbands aren’t working. These men can only get jobs as day laborers for construction companies, but with the global economic crisis, nothing is being built and there is no work for these men to do. It is now up to the women and their wool to bring money home. Unfortunately, with the state of the economy, their merchandise isn’t selling. These women live in conditions I have only read about. Most of them speak mainly Mapudungun and little to no Spanish. They live with the rats and the fleas, no electricity, and no access to clean water. Everyday they have to walk to a well to get water. In the summer time however, the well dries up and they have to get their water from the river. All of their washing and bathing is also done in the river.

This specific community has been the subject of numerous sociological case studies due to their inability to work together as a group. The women in this community fight, bicker, and back-stab each other constantly. Large missions organizations, like World Vision, have tried to help these people, only to ditch them when their efforts failed due to the women’s inability to get along with each other. My aunt and her mission came in as sort of a last hope for these women. She introduced them to the weaving project and before long they were fighting amongst themselves and trying to get each other kicked out of the weaving groups. One woman even bought another woman’s weaving, turned it in to my aunt as her own, and had it sold it in the states for twice what she bought it for. When all this started, my aunt had them all over to her house for dinner, sat them all down at the table, and had a little come to Jesus meeting. She explained to them that their bickering had driven off major organizations and she was the last chance they had to receive help from anyone. Basically, they had to learn to resolve their issues and keep their personal lives outside the weaving group or they would have no chance to succeed. Giving them the option to change for themselves and empowering them to solve their own issues without trying to solve the problems for them, enabled these women to rise up and form one of the most successful weaving groups.

Barb considers one of these women, Elcira, as one of the greatest successes from the weaving project. Elcira was orphaned at the age of 2 when her mother died. She was "raised", and I use the word loosely, by her older sister. By the time she was 14, she was already pregnant and living on her own. Barb suspects that this pregnancy did not come about from any relationship with a boyfriend. She lived with her son in a tin room in the country. At times, she was forced to go out in a field, pick grass, boil it, and feed the water to her son just to avoid starvation. She did survive, her son grew up, got married, and now she lives on the same property as her son, his wife, and their young daughter. She got involved in the weaving project and turned out to be, what Barb determines, an expert weaver. Of the 30 plus women involved in the project, there are only about 4 who would be deemed expert weavers. These women truly are artists while the rest of the work would be considered to be more artisan weavings. Elcira, is an artist. Her weavings sell immediately in the states for $100-$150. From the sales, she has been able to build herself a house, which is actually just a bigger room made of wood instead of tin, and use her old room as a workshop. She now has electricity and is awaiting the sale of more weavings in order to finally get water and glass windows put in. At the moment, the windows are just covered in plastic and she still has to walk to a well for water and bathe in the river.

These women are depending on this project for their livelihood and it broke my heart to see them so disheartened because they aren’t making any sales. People in the states are disappointed that they can’t afford as extravagant of a vacation this year because of the economy, when these women are wondering how they will feed themselves and their children if no one is buying their merchandise.

Busy, busy, busy

After a couple weeks of wandering around the house doing random little projects, feeding the boys, and being kind of an assistant to the housekeeper, my schedule has all of a sudden grown wings and flown off with me desperately trying to hang on. I now have on my schedule: teaching my cousin's English class twice a week, English tutoring with two girls once a week, traveling out to various locations to dye wool, preparing for various meetings, and traveling out to a different girl's club each week to do an English lesson. Great milk of magnesia! Thankfully I'm not teaching all of my cousin's English class as I previously thought. Since he already speaks English my aunt and uncle have gotten permission from the school to come in while the rest of his class is in English and do private spelling, reading, and pronunciation lessons with him. He's completely fluent, but since he has grown up speaking Spanish as well as English and the only English he has been exposed to in his life is spoken with a Texan accent, he has some trouble with his "r"s, but we're working on it.

Though I am enjoying my time here, I have been a little bored. The only social network I really have is my aunt, a 4 year old boy, and a group of women who get together once a week for tea. Even my aunt and uncle are saying that I need to get out and get a life. Don't get me wrong, I want to get a life, but it's just a little difficult and intimidating when I don't speak the language. I find it to be slightly helpful when you can actually talk to the people you're trying to befriend. Novel idea isn't it? Thankfully, the director of the boy's school has a couple daughters who have spent some time in the states and they have a group of young adults that get together. I'm going to visit their church on Sunday and hopefully get hooked up with a big of a social group while I'm here. For some reason the whole hanging out witha 4 year old all day just isn't giving me the social interaction I'm craving. Who'd of thunk it?

My Chile legs

Today was a wonderful day. One of the things that my Aunt does is she has a group of weavers who dye and process their own wool into naturally dyed and hand spun yarn. This yarn is then sent to the states where it is sold. This becomes a nice suplimental income for these women who live in rather poor communities. Today my Aunt and I went down to the town of Lanco, about an hour south of Temuco, to work with a bunch of women while they dyed wool. It was such an interesting thing to see. You actually take the wool, wash it, grind the dying agent, put the wool in the water with the agent, let it boil, then take it out to dry. They taught me how to grind one of the dyes, mix it, and then to seperate it and actually group/comb the wool. I felt like such a hippie! It was awesome. All of their dying agents are completely natural. The Mapuche originally had a lot of red in their weavings, but for a long time the red has completely disappeared from their dying scheme. My Aunt was curious as to where the red went and so she did some research. Turns out that one of the only sources of true natural red in the world is called cochineal. It is a beetle that when dried and ground creates a natural red that is used for dying wool. This beetle has long disappeared from Southern Chile, but they are able to buy it and once again use it to dye their wool. One of my jobs today was to grind it into a powder. Really interesting to actually be grinding dried beetles into a powder.

In the middle of the day we broke for lunch, and then again for a light snack in the evening. This brings me to my second subject. Why a person who does not eat gluten or dairy cannot survive in Chile. Bread is a staple down here. During our break I sat down and one of the women handed me a bun and some sliced cheese to put on it. I graciously accepted, not wanting to be rude, and ate the bread and cheese. No sooner did I finish than another woman brought out a loaf of bread that she had made, sliced off a large slice of bread and offered it to me. I said no thank you and explained that I had just eaten some bread. She gave me one of the most intimidating looks I think I have ever seen and basically said, though in not so many words, that I was going to eat the bread. What was I to do? I had no choice in the matter! My Aunt said that basically, if I wanted her to still be my friend, I was going to eat the bread, which I did. Sheesh! So there you have it. To anyone who does not eat gluten or cheese and yet wants to come to South America, you can try to stick to your diet as long as you can, but you will eventually be force fed white bread and cheese by a group of Chilean women.

Why I am so glad I didn't go to college in Chile

In the U.S. we are familiar with the idea of freshman initiation. This usually involves some sort of a feel good "Welcome to college!" type thing. In Chile, their freshman initiation is called hazing. That's right. All the universities participate in collectively hazing all of their freshman, without exception. Hazing at the local university looks something like this. It all starts first thing in the morning when the boys are stripped of their shirts and painted on with various words, pictures, shapes, and all that is ridiculous. All the freshmen must then smash numerous rotten eggs on their heads before being taken out into the street. Once the freshmen are all spread out on the various streets surrounding the university, the all must give up one of their shoes. All the shoes are then taken to a central location and the freshmen must stand out on the street all day with one shoe, painted bodies, rotten egg drying and simmering nicely on their noggins, and beg for money until they have earned enough to take them to the aforementioned central location to retrieve their shoe. Sounds like fun huh?

Last night my Aunt and I went over to one of her friends house for once (Spanish for 11, but also the name of the evening meal). This family lives in a surprisingly clean home that is about the size of my family's living room and kitchen combined. They are such wonderful and fun people, but they have had so many difficulties in their lives. The husband, Enrique, is an amazing graphic designer. He is entirely self taught, but because he doesn't have a college degree in graphic design he can never earn more than minimum wage. They have a 1 year old daughter named Anita who nearly died over Christmas. Though she is fully recovered, the whole family has to head to the capital of Santiago tonight on the all-night bus to do further testing. You can tell they are tired, but even so, they are just a joy to be with. My Aunt was able to help them get a plan together for their trip to Santiago. She's one of those people who speak truth into your life. A lot of the time this means you want to smack her because she's telling you something you don't want to hear, but at the same time you know she's right and you benefit from it. That is what she does for a lot of these people. She gives it to them straight and in return helps them to develop as people. As the newest gringa in town, I am usually the butt of all the jokes. This doesn't bother me and I'm able to laugh along with them and deliver a good performance, but it's a bother not being able to defend myself. Oh I can understand pretty much all of the conversation and the jabs in my direction, but all I can do is sit there and make faces. Even my Aunt takes these opportunities to tease me relentlessly. She admitted that she had to get her jabs in while she could before my language skills developed and I'm actually able to defend myself. Just you wait Aunt Barb. Just you wait. That's motiviation enough for me to learn the language.

Well, I have succeeded in becoming "not pissed off". As much as I hate to admit it, I think this was a necessary step for me to take to really feel like I can connect with the people. My piercings were something that set me apart from the rest of the women here, which I liked. It was my way of saying that I was not going to give up who I was just because I was living in their country. I liked who I was and didn't feel the need to change, but having given that part of me up and left myself open to change has allowed me to let myself connect with these women in a way that I don't know would have been possible otherwise. God really can bring something good out of a situation which seems to just be entirely crappy.

This weekend, my aunt and I went on a retreat with the women who lead the various girls clubs. There are a few different clubs in various local towns which minister to girls aged 6-12. This is really the most ignored age group that you can find in Chile, and probably in the U.S. When they are little girls they are cute and we love them, but then girls go through an obnoxious/awkward stage where they are kind of not seen as needing much love. Then as soon as they hit puberty and start to um...develop, then they begin to receive all sorts of attention, especially from boys, that they didn't have before. As a result, they are all getting pregnant at 14 or 15. These clubs are designed to mentor and love these girls in ways that they aren't getting at home in the hopes that when they get older that they will realize their own worth and not go looking for love in the wrong places. All of the women at the retreat this weekend are really funny and so passionate about the girls in their groups.

As a rule, Chileans are not quick to warm up to people, but once they do, they stay very warm and friendly. All the women pretty much ignored me for the first night, but the next day they were laughing and making fun of my terrible Spanish. They just love to torment the little gringas. F.Y.I. I have had to un-senitize myself to the word gringo becuase here it is a very endearing term which basically just means you're not from Chile and probably white. All the women are so motivated to help these girls and even want to start doing etiquette and modest fashion classes for these girls so they will realize they are worth something. It's a wonderful ministry, and even though I'm kind of the gopher for them all right now, I'm very excited to see what these women will come up with and where this whole thing will go.

My own individualistic nature.

I never necessarily thought of myself as an extremely "over-Americanized" person. When I think of the stereotypical American that the world thinks of, I think of a narrow-minded person who has no concern for anything outside the borders of the U.S. This is not the kind of American I am and I am very proud of that, but I have found that this does not exclude me from having been raised in an individualistic culture filled with individuals who don't care what other people think. Some people may know that I got my ear pierced a few days before I left for Chile, a little over 2 weeks ago. Why we get piercings I don't honestly know. I just like them. I think they're cute and honestly, it may be that I like to feel that I'm a little bit edgy. Piercings in Chile, even on the ears, have a very different meaning and my earrings have been the subject of great debate for the past couple days. Young people in Chile are forming what they call tribes. It's basically groups of kids who dress the same way, are extremely promiscuous, and are basically social rebels of the worst kind. It is typical of these tribes to have piercings similar to the ones I have. My aunt and I have had numerous conversations regarding this issue, and by conversations I mean her lecturing and me trying my best to not burst out into tears. I have not always been successful and have been crying on and off all day. It comes down to this. If I do not take out my brand new piercing I will not be allowed to be involved in the girl's clubs, I will be left out of the leaders retreat this weekend, and I will not be allowed to teach my English class in the private Baptist school. This is basically everything that I came here to do. I may as well just go home if I refuse to take out my earring. My own individualistic nature caught me by surprise when my aunt was explaining to me what my earring communicated here. Basically it tells people that I'm rich, promiscuous, and don't care about anyone. Ironically, I didn't, and still don't, care. I don't care if people get the wrong impression of me, especially when I can't even talk to them. I know that I'm not trying to communicate those things and I felt that other people would just have to deal. I know this makes me sound very shallow and self-absorbed, but I have nurtured this thing for 2 weeks. I have cleaned it, dealt with the pain, and even changed my sleeping positions for the sake of this stupid thing, and now all of that is going to be in vain. I will have nothing to show for it. It came down to me having three options. One, I could refuse to take it out and, for all intensive purposes, go home, I could take it out on my own, or I could have my aunt take it out for me. Well, trying to remove those things is like trying to impeach a president. It does not happen easily, and with all the pulling, my newly pierced ear swelled up and refused to let go of it at all. That is how I ended up being forced to choose option number three. My earring was removed, against my desire, by my aunt and two pairs of needle-nose pliers with our maid supervising and holding my hand. Now, where does this leave me? Basically, pissed off. Trying to get over it, but pissed off all the same.

Well I am feeling a lot better now that I've been in one place for more than a day. I started actually doing some work this morning and I'm feeling more at home here. Yesterday I went on my first solo adventure. I walked a few blocks to the store, bought hair spray, and came back. Very exciting. This has it's pros and cons. Pro: I now have a greater sense of independence. Con: now that my aunt and uncle know I know my way around they keep sending me on errands. I don't really mind because it gives me a chance to get out of the house, which I don't do very often. I actually started working this morning doing tasks for the various girls club. They're trying to get a little library set up for the girls, but right now it consists of a bunch of books in a box. My job has been to catalogue the books and come up with some kind of a system of organization. This weekend, my aunt and I are going on a retreat with some of the other club leaders, so that should give me an opportunity to expand my social horizons. Though life here, in the middle class part of town, isn't much different from my life in the states, there have been some things that are taking getting used to. For instance, you throw away your toilet paper instead of flushing it. There is no central heat, all the homes are heated in the winter with wood burning stoves. There is also no hot water. Well, there is hot water, but you have to actually light a little thing, called a califone (sp?) that draws the water in and heats the water, then when you're done you have to turn it off. Very interesting. Overall though, I'm really beginning to get the feel of what I'm doing here, and that will only increase and the English classes I'm teaching begin in a couple weeks.

I am finally back in Temuco after a very long week of traveling. This week, though I guess you could say we were all on vacation, was very tiresome for me. The day after I arrived here I was whisked away on the rest of the family vacation. As of now, the majority of my time has been spent in a hotel on the coast. Now, don't get me wrong, I loved being on the coast. It's absolutely gorgeous, but I have been feeling like a person without a home for the last week. I hadn't had a chance to settle in anywhere, I didn't know what I was doing, where I was going, or what to expect when I got there. Now that we're back and I actually have a chance to get my suitcases unpacked, I'm feeling a little more settled, but I'm finding the thought of spending the next five months here just a little intimidating. My brain has gone on Spanish overload and I'm half convinced I'm never going to be able to talk to anyone. People who know me, not necessarily even know me well, but just know me, know that I love to talk, and being somewhere where I spend a great deal of my social time sitting quietly and watching other people talk has been a bit depressing. I know I'll adjust, but it's a little overwhelming at the moment. This whole feeling is not helped by the fact that the majority of the conversation I have during the day is with a four year old. As cute as he is, he's not very good for intelligent conversation. I am missing my family and friends and having a social life. There are some people here my Aunt wants to introduce me to and hopefully that will provide me with some sort of outside activity, but I'm just a little lonely at the moment.