Desperate...

I don't know what made me think that it would be easier to keep up with this from New York....I'm actually spending less time with the laptop, but am no less inspired by life. Just can't seem to keep up. So a list-style post today:

• Saying to a Home Depot employee "If I were the duct tape, where would I live?" is not cute, and will not go over well.
• Costco is the absolute best place in the world to get photos developed. Two 12x18's are well worth the membership fee.
• My friends and family are wonderful, supportive people.
• New Yorkers love photography taken by children.
• You should never assume what language someone does or does not speak.
• I will find a job that pays well.

Anything you learned this week? Let me know....

Crocodiles are Scary..

Today was the greatest day. I had all of these plans: meetings, grad school applications, random work. My phone is ringing off the hook. At a certain point, when I realized that there was a marathon on of the entire 3rd season of Project Runway, I just stopped. I decided that working at my laptop for 12+ hours everyday since my flight out of Santiago was just not normal. This blog post will be followed by the sweet click of my little Dell closed, for the night at least. Tomorrow, well...that's another story altogether.

...and have a drink with me

I walk into my favorite Irish coffee shop/bar in Riverdale. A weird man is having a beer at 20 minutes to 11. He's not Irish, and seems generally confused by life. In the other room, children are singing "You are my sunshine", because this place hosts 'Mommy and Me' on Wednesday mornings, as it turns out. This is honestly painful to watch/listen to, and even though I work with kids and have learned to appreciate many of the random things that make them happy, I have also come to appreciate how many dance recitals, school plays and chorus rehersals my parents had to sit through. My parents are saints.

Home Stretch....

Four days to go, so much to do, and not enough time to feel the happy-sad-confused that I usually feel while I'm awaiting my flight from the Santiago airport. I so desperately want to go home, see my family, sleep in my old bed and have a real pint of real beer. And perhaps some Bombay Sapphire. And some Chianti. So maybe I just want to go home to drink.

But I'm also sad to leave these new people that I just me. They're amazing, and inquisitive and funny. They can't wait to get to work, they play all of our stupid get-to-know-you games, and they don't complain. They come from all over the world. They are the epitome of what I always imagined this experience to be.

They also ask me to translate everything, and don't understand the use of the word "po". I explain to them that I often, especially in collectivos, pretend that I don't speak Spanish, or English. Most people think I'm German, and most people don't speak German, so that works for me.

I asked my friend at lunch last week why people think it's ok to interrupt any conversation that I'm having, in any language, to ask we where I'm from. I could be pouring my heart and soul out to someone in a restaurant, tears in my eyes, and a man at the table next to me will turn to me and say "Where are you from?" No "excuse me" no "sorry to bother you", just the basic presupposition that if I am speaking English, or poor accented Spanish, it is ok to interrupt me.


So my Peruvian friend set it straight: "Who are they?", he asked.
"I don't know, just people. Whoever," I replied, ever helpful.
"Men," he laughed at me. "So, they're 'joteando'."

He's right, of course. It isn't just random people on the street who want to chat (they generally just stare). It's the jotes. Jote means vulture, and is the way to describe the men who circle you on the dancefloor, or at a bar or, apparently, in a colectivo. And the interruption is a lame attempt at flirting. What I always wonder is: Does this work? What would I want to talk to someone who's so rude?

And yet, we talk. We don't want to be rude, we don't want people to not like us. We're foreign, strangers in this country and any attempt to communicate can be a welcome change from feeling isolated.

Unless you decide that you only speak German.

A Donde Sea

Yesterday was possibly, the most productive day of my life. Maybe not my whole life, but certainly my Chile life. That's a lie, too. It was just a very very productive day, and I tend to exaggerate.

The new people are coming. In fact, some of them have arrived. We picked up our first at the airport in the morning, and installed him happily in the hostel. He had a book of spanish phrases he thought he might use, and I appreciated his effort (as did our Peruvian friend and driver). He was so excited. It was contagious.

New people means lots of communication. It seems like everyone needs to know which volunteer is going where (and why). And yet, even though Liz lead a great meeting on Thursday, only six institutions were represented. Sometimes the lack of effort is very discouraging.

Yet Liz and I decided that we should meet, personally, with as many institutions as humanly possible before the newbies arrived for their first day of work, timid and frightened and silent. The key to everything about intensive volunteer work is making expectations clear from the start. And talking.

We started in La Florida. I never appreciated the comuna when I lived there, how clean and suburban it is, its greenery. The neighborhood around the hogar we visited is particularly lovely, close to the mountains and full of talking babies. The fact that is was a perfect spring day only compounded my overwhelming feeling of joy and being around the kids.

After baby-time, we went to my institution. As it was after class time, and the atmosphere was a bit different. With no kids, and the sun going down, I felt like a kid in trouble sitting in the directora's office, and even though I explained that she will be getting 2 new full time and one part time volunteer, she didn't seem thrilled to see me. We needed a baby to come waddling in to lighten the mood; I maybe should have brought one with me from LaFlorida.

Leaving the school, still in LaFlorida, we walked towards Los Navíos, one of the toughest neighborhoods in Santiago. We should not have been walking, and with each passing block my happy world of La Florida, where I worked every day for months, became less familiar and more ominous. When I'm walking alone, I always assume I draw attention for being American and ignore it. With Liz by my side, I am reminded that my hair doubles and triples the stares and catcalls, as tells me that she can walk around alone without much hassle.

Thankfully, a taxi.

The lovely trees disappeared as we cruised down Bahia Catalina. The streets became more beaten down, with more potholes and roaming dogs. We arrived at the community center as it turned dark, the taxi driver concerned that he was leaving us in a place like this. "Are you sure you want to get out here?" he asks. "Yes," we reply, for what seems like the millionth time in the past year. "This is where we work."