gathering ourselves for the trip down south

Our little stay with the family of ¨Granja Orgánica¨ has ended after 2 weeks, which brings us to the end of week 3 of our Chilean Adventure. We´re now in week 4 and receiveing the warm and generous hospitality of a Bahá´i family in yet another communa of Santiago, called Quilicura. The Kings. They are a Bahá´i pioneering family from North America with 3 teenagers: Noel, Forrest and Kaleb; all very patient and generous with our little Hero, so all´s well. Ingrid and Jerry both teach english, Jerry all over Santiago, Ingrid in a school, and she´s organized for us to go and sing for and interact with a couple of her classes today, which should be fun! Looks like that´s the kind of thing we´ll be getting up to until Friday at least at which point ¨Lilian¨ from ¨Escuela Feizi¨ is ready to receive us in Temuco...

Some more reflections on Chile: We noticed especially in our first week wandering all about the city and hearing various radio stations and cd choices in restaurants that the music tastes were sort of stuck in the 80s, which is great! in the hostel they were constantly tuned into a station 103.3 i think it´s an internet radio station with nothing but classic indi - rock/pop/folk; Beck and Bjork featured a fair bit and a whole lot of 80s and 90s gold! Then in an italian resto that we went to it was nothing but U2. Even a few ¨recent¨ songs by local artists have that heavy synth and drum beat going for them. A local suggested that it may be because they didn´t really experience the ¨80s¨ pop culture while it was happening everywhere else so they´re making up for it now. no complaints here!
Also, Chilenos have some strong qualities which are becoming clearer to us now: one, they are very hard-working. They´ve lived through a ´military´ government into a pretty poor ´independence´ and they´re used to a ´living´ being a struggle. But they haven´t been waiting around for hand-outs. They´ve all just got up and done something! Thus all the vendors i mentioned in the previous blog of reflections; people doing something/anything for a buck. Every ¨micro¨ we got on to go to or from Talagante people would get on to sell either chocolate bars or drinks and then one guy got on and launched into a very dramatic monologue, ending crouched in the stairwell, clapping for himself!
Graffiti and other is very prevelant but not very creative, and a very lovely man called Alix who gave us all a hitch from the farm to Santiago had some interesting insights for us on that and a few other things besides: Namely, that when you´re oppressed or poor or both there isn´t a whole lot of time and energy left over for a luxury like developing your arts, when one can rarely live off them. Therefore, that whole scene is not very rich. there are a lot more tradies than artists and actors. And one will mostly see political statements sprayed on the walls and a whole lot of tags.
Education is not free, and not remotely subsidised by the government. Those who want to, and whose parents have not been able to save enough for the SEVEN years that it takes to gain most ´professions´, they live and work abroad to save up enough for their education and gain a second language in the process. That´s what Daniel from Santiago was starting to do in Sydney. So in that sense, people get to be quite self-sufficient from early on i guess...
However, apparently there is also a strong culture of community support in times of trouble(through the years of military oppression and perhaps also because of this lack of government assistance, if not because it´s a natural impulse in this particular people); it is true that there are almost no beggars to be seen sitting around asking for money, and among those that we have seen none have had a visible disability. Apparently support for people with a disability is really strong, stemming somewhat from this culture of spontaneous community support.
ooh!! Dogs! There are dogs everywhere!! The streets are covered in them, and they´re almost all big dogs, like German Shepherds and such (and domestic dogs too are all big, i´ve seen only one small dog, and it was the unwanted stray dog at the farm called Biodiversidad) ; they look well-fed too, although they clearly live on the streets. Someone told me people like to give them food, so there´s a kind of reciprocal relationship there. AT one intersection, i counted 10, either sleeping or prowling the sidewalk, or having adopted the doorway of any given shop. They own certain streets and give cars a hard time, like a gang protecting its turf. The dogs of Santiago, like the cats of Haifa.

well... got to go now. Breakfast for little poppet and then it´s off to school with us! More photos and news soon.