Dbkrrrsh Goes to Chile

When I started to write Hungry and Alicia let me know she wanted to be in the novel, I didn’t want to give her that name as it’s so close to mine.  She insisted that was her name, though, so I thought, “Okay.”  As I wrote, I pronounced the name the English way, A-lee-sha.  I have a new identity now at St. Margaret’s.  You guessed it.  I am now A- lee-see-a because the “th” sound is difficult for many native Spanish speakers to say.  Actually, I’m “Miss Alicia.”  Or I’m “Miss Ali,” because that seems to be the other nickname that I’ve been given.

            There are about a hundred teachers at the school.  I’ve put about a dozen or so names with faces so far.  There are three teachers from England (I think, I’ve got a solid grounding on who two of them are), and the rest are from Chile. Though the school is a “British school,” all meetings are conducted in Spanish except for the ones conducted in the English department.  I’m sometimes getting the “gist” of things, but it is only a rough approximation.  We had an in-service about bullying today, and because the main ideas were projected with an LCD player I was at least able to follow along with my electronic dictionary.  What I’m excited about is that at times I’m finally catching whole phrases (not often, but at least it’s a beginning) and I’m getting the object pronouns in the right places.  Sort of.

            I’m also learning a lot of new jargon for the British structure.  Forms are used instead of grades, or the word is used interchangeably.  Once the girls pass eighth grade, they have IB levels.  I’m teaching 3^rd level A2, the highest group of what would be juniors in high school for us.  Infant school is kindergarten.  The juniors are grades one through four.  The middles are grades five through eight.

            Some things seem to be universal.  As I mentioned, the talk today was about bullying, which the teachers perceive as a problem.  The girls seem to have the same issues as the kids did at the two schools I’ve taught at in California: neglect, emotional issues, tardiness, not being respectful.  Avril, the wonderful headmistress of the school, says she insists the girls stand up when a teacher enters the classroom—something I might get used to J. 

            I’ll teach the English IB curriculum.  The idea is to connect social and cultural issues to a text that is explored slowly and in depth.  The girls will do most of the research.  There will be a lot of writing, creative work, debates, etc.  I will only grade a few papers per report card period!  I’m sure I’ll look most of them over though and ask for revisions when it’s appropriate.  I’ve decided to start with The Crucible.  I want them to begin by researching how women in Europe were persecuted as witches.  If I remember my history correctly at this point, there were a few men who were executed in Salem as well, but I want to discuss how the values and beliefs influenced what happened.  I hope another group will be interested in exploring what happened during the McCarthy era.  I wish I could show Good Night and Good Luck, but finding a copy seems a bit overwhelming at this point.  Then we’ll launch into the play.  I read the introduction to Act 1 last night and wondered when I read the play.  I assume college.  The vocabulary is intensive, but these girls supposedly like to be challenged. 

            The other books we’ll read are The Handmaid’s Tale, To Kill a Mockingbird and I Know Why the Cage Bird Sings.  With the last of these, I hope to have the girls explore issues about the Mapuche, the indigenous people of Chile who mainly live in the southern part of the country.  There are other groups, but the Mapuche fought back against the Incas (their empire stopped at the Mapuche borders), the Spanish, and are still fighting against assimilation and to take back control of land they believe still belongs to them.

            The rest of my time I’ll spend doing “literacy” with the juniors.  I wish, wish, wish that I brought more teaching material with me.  I decided to go for survival stuff like a few more clothes, and thought I’d bring the extra things back with me next time I go to the U.S., as I wasn’t sure what my school day was going to consist of.  Tomorrow I’ll meet with the head teacher of junior school and know more specifically what they would like from me.  Their reading program in English seem to consist of copies of books a la the Wright Group and Rigby back in the whole language days.  I’m told all most all of the girls don’t have problems decoding.  I think doing Lindamood LIPS (without mouth pictures?) to help pronunciation will happen.  I keep thinking of the Houghton Mifflin frontloading materials I copied over that have sentence frames for different levels of English language learners . . . they’ll be here in time. 

            I need to find out if there are more books. I’d love to do some novel reading and exploration with the third and fourth graders.  I don’t think they’re there. The school is very beautiful and new and not paid for all the way, and from what I’m picking up, there isn’t money to buy this sort of thing.

            One of the biggest challenges for me is that I’m used to coming into work at least a half hour early.  More often, though, I work until four, four thirty, and sometimes later, getting things prepped.  I’ll be taking the bus with the students and other teachers, which is fabulous, but the bus will arrive just in time for school to begin.  There are few computers, so if I want to do research I’m not sure how this will work, as I don’t have Internet at home right now.  The Internet place around the block has its challenges, as there’s the Spanish keyboard. I don’t know how to do the @ sign for writing in email addresses. Often there is fairly slow download time, and then the web pages disappear and I have to get back on.  The teachers have left this week right at two o’clock, the end of the workday until students arrive next Tuesday. 

            Another change: the school provides a lunch! Salad bar, main course, dessert . . . but 2:00 is considered lunch hour.  I probably will be able to eat with the juniors (at noon . . . closer to our 11:10 lunch at Minnie Cannon) or the middles (1:00 ish) four days a week. BUT Thursdays, I don’t get it until two!  There has been a snack period this week about 10:15 where the NesCafe, tea, and some cookies come out.  I’ve brought cereal bars and fruit to keep me going, but I’m starving when I get home.

            I think I may have made a faux pas on my first day.  There were some supplies being passed out to the junior teachers, and I asked if I could have some.  I was told yes, so I picked up a box of pencils.  It turned out I could only have one.  I have one dry erase pen, and a red, blue, and green marker, and some tape, correcting fluid.  I really need to find chart paper somewhere as I use a lot of it.  At Minnie Cannon, I taught so many different levels, I didn’t have board space, so I often prepared what I needed the day before (or a few days before if I was lucky) and didn’t have to spend time writing stuff on my board or the ones in the classrooms I worked in. 

            Now for the wonderful part! Chileans (woman to woman, often woman to man and visa versa) greet and say goodbye with a cheek-to-cheek “kiss.”  You touch cheeks and make a kissing sound.  It’s lovely.  I hope when my Puritan work ethic kicks in and I’m feeling stressed for not having the space I usually need to think about my day and look over my lessons, I’ll remember that starting one’s day like this is probably much healthier.  My teaching will get done anyway.

            On the second day of work, we got on these great cushy buses and toured Valparaiso, a town that Chileanos think of as their San Francisco (I had compared Concon to Santa Barbara before I knew better.  It’s more like Sausalito.  The weather has been cool, foggy and misty like summer around the SF bay.)  Valpo is hilly like San Francisco and has a historical, yet Bohemian air.  If you read Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende, the book started here.  We went to an “ascensor,” first walking through a very long tunnel and then riding up an elevator to an observatory platform where we could see the whole city and far out into the ocean.  The set up also allows for the local people who live on the hill a way to get up and down with more ease. 

            We went to a monument to Bernardo O’Higgens, who is roughly equivalent to George Washington, and is a father, if not THE father, of Chile.  He led the revolution against Spain.  We then went to what might have been the home of the British Lord Cochran who helped in the fight.  We walked through the oldest part of the town where many of the buildings are being torn down for infrastructure and lack of resources to preserve them.  Natural gas is coming to Chile. 

            The next stop was at a monument for los heroes, the men who went down in a ship in a fight against Peru (1850ish? Can’t remember exactly.)  Vente-uno de Mayo is a national holiday (and my birthday!) that honors their loss of life.  Chile lost the battle, but won the war, by the way, thanks to the British.

            Finally, we were treated to a lovely lunch at the restaurante Bernardo O’Higgens, starting with our choice of soft drinks or alcohol, either a pisco sour, the national drink, or a vai’in— which I probably am spelling wrong.  I went with the vai’in, a vanilla flavored liquor.  I had to.  I never had a drink on teacher time before!  All I can say is, “Yum.”

            So, to sum things up, estoy nerviosa.  But I always am at the beginning of a school year, and somehow I survive.  At home, by the mid of October I felt I had my life back.  April is the new October for me, and I hope I feel more settled and secure by then.

       I love the murals in Santiago.  The city is covered with the same kind of tagging as any urban place in America, but the level of creativity seems to be higher here.  Amid what looks like gang graffiti there are message like this.  Respect is to love.  The magic is in your soul.  I like the vampirish like creatures looking on, as though the forces of darkness were taking heed of the message. There are occasional messages on walls proclaiming: Capitalismo es muerte. Other pictures that are intricate and fanciful lace the streets.  In the Bellas Artes area, near San Cristobal, the highest part of the city, and where one of Neruda's three homes is located, the mural art is taken to the highest levels, street after street, in a neighborhood full of houses where color and whimsy cry out.

Bill and I went to the immigration office today.  The nicest people work there.  I was told that St. Margaret's is the "most prestigious school in Chile."  Yikes!  Definitely not like the Title One schools I've always taught at.  We panicked when the forms and procedures were explained to even get a work permit under a tourist visa. Send my teaching credentials to the consulate in San Francisco just to get a stamp and from where they have to be mailed back to Chile?)  But then  I finally connected with the Sra. Avril Cooper, the director of the school, who said,"Relax, relax.  Our people are working on it."  Okay, sounded like good advice to us. So I'm sitting in a courytard writing now at La Casa Roja instead of dealing with bureaucracy.  Que beuno! (I need to find how to transform my keyboard in a Spanish one but that's a learning curve I  just can't take on right now.)

We went to lunch yesterday and today at two sidewalk cafes. A cute little dog, kind of a cocker spaniel/dachshund cross showed up at our feet yesterday.  Small and sad.  We thought she was a puppy until we noticed she'd recently had babies.  We named her "Cute Little F . . ."   Amazingly, there she was again today, at least two miles away.  She had to have crossed the freeway, going up the steps and across the bridge along with people traffic. She came immediately to our table, lay down, and fell asleep again.  We chose not to think of it as a sign, as we're weak where in the cute little doggy area of life.  And we need to get Wiley down here.  He'd probably be p.o.ed to see a strange dog in what he'd rightfully think of as his place.  After today, I'm not sure how much blogging I'll do. after today  My job starts Monday (trying not to panic-- I left a lot of my standby teaching material at home because of weight limitations on the airplane).  Our house in Vina is cute, but not the place we want to stay forever.  We don't want to connect Internet up, only for the two months we'll be there.  I may spend a lot of time on the weekend at the Internet place around the corner, but I could also be correcting papers.  Oh yeah, i've got another novel to finish.

One last thing! Great news.  Nicole, the publicity person at HarperCollins told me that a review posted by Emily Robbins, a thirteen year old reviewers from Readers Views, was picked up by Reuters and usatoday.com.  I can't stop smiling!

 

I chose this picture, though it has nothing to do with Santiago.  It does have a lot to do with being willing to venture to unfamiliar places both without and within.  Thank you, Mother Eve, for taking the first bite to a realized life.
   We have been in Chile for just over a day.  I'm sitting in an upstairs lobby of La Casa Roja, a hostel full of mostly young people from all over the world.  Loud music is blasting from downstairs. Voices of guests eating their dinners on the patio blend in, along with clinking plates and laughter.  Here, it doesn't feel I'm half a world away from winter, where the bells of my school ring, and my commute is driving up a mountain road.  The Germanic orderliness that the United States possesses isn't found in Chile. 

Bill and I stayed at this hostel for two of the weeks we spent here in July, so coming back felt like coming home in many ways. Out on the streets of the city, though, walking among the blankets spread full of bolsas and zapatos for sell, the crazy traffic, having a poor mother sing a song for some pesos to feed her baby, the reality that I have made a commitment to a strange new life is impossible to ignore. 
 
Ice cream is a real highlight. It's simply wonderful, very similar to gelato.  Most of the pastries, on the other hand, are heavy and unappealing-- which is a good thing because I have a weakness for them.  I'd rather spend my dessert calories on the helados.  

Took a trip to Vina del Mar today to rent a house that we found out about back home.  Outside of Santiago, it becomes desert-like, similar to the few un-watered parts of southern California that remain.  We passed chapparal and chemise, vineyards in the Casablanca Valley, slums on Valparaiso's hills.  

Chile is a poor country with an expanding "middle class," however you might define it, and the wealthy whose homes could be anywhere in tonier areas of the states.  Our new house is where a purse being snatched won't be out of the question, but that's probably the worst of worries.  I wish my work clothes had deeper pockets to hide my i.d. and what little money I'll carry.  I'll travel by bus or taxi to St. Margaret's, which has a gate models on Buckingham Palace, teaching girls who go home to fine houses, mas rica que mi casa.  

I've stepped out of the "garden," of what I have always known, into a world where more knowledge and experience will be gained.

I need to work on my book, but it's so much nicer right now to put my thoughts here.

 

I'm rewriting a series of meditations I did three years ago, a file I lost when I changed computers.  At the time, when I realized that I no longer had them, I was devastated, but now I see it as a gift.  FreeWillAstrology.com said last week that Geminis would find that mistakes and seeming backtracking would actually lead us to new and better things (paraphrasing this from memory).  Mercury IS in retrograde, after all.  I'm finding that the meditations, 22 in all, have not been a burden to recopy even in the midst of moving.  

I wrote them as a project with a spiritual mentor who wanted to redo her book on a Christian  Qabala.  I've always been a seeker and attracted to the mystical traditions.  This woman also introduced me to the Anglican visionary Evelyn Underwood, as well.  The project never really got off the ground as she found other scholarly pursuits drawing her more.   I spent a year of my writing life working on these instead of fiction.  My sister Gwyn passed away just as I had started, and now on retrospect I see that writing these helped me with her passing.  (As did my first novel attempt Heron's Path, a story of two girls who think they are sisters, to find one was really born to fulfill an prophecy, and who transforms and must leave the other sister as she flies off to the mythical "north."  I worked on HP for years, and I think by doing so I was able to accept Gwyn's death, perhaps more prepared for it than I would have been.)

The meditations take each of the major arcana of the tarot, or "keys," to different pathways on the Tree of Life, using correspondences or symbols that pertain to each particular card, working back from the Universe to the Fool.  I'm not an expert on the Qabala by any means, but my mentor  did say I had a  knack for using the symbols.  I hope to create a blog, using the meditations and the major arcana cards if I can get permission from  U.S. Games.  I'd like to also use my art as well.  That may be overly ambitious, but  then if it takes years to complete, who cares?

This is a MUCH different blog than my first entry.  I think I'll continue to post Deborah's adventures in Chile here in hope that I can do the voice recordings perhaps through Skype when I'm in South America.  I really would like to send them to my students as a hello and to use them to teach about a different culture.  So, this blog may be a bit schizoid.  I'll probably post the Deborah ones on myspace as well, without the audio of course.

VoicePost 511K 2:31

(no transcription available)

     My Earth name is Deborah Jones.  Back on the Home World I'd be known as Dbkrrrsh of the House of Mpfld.  I love dogs.  I've always wanted one but Mom and Dad always have said no because we're so busy preparing for the invasion of the Home World, who would have time to take care of one? 
       "I would!" I said.
       "You have homework to do, young lady," Mom and Dad said together.  I think they take time rehearsing things like that  to emphasize that the message they're trying to get through comes from both of them.
       "Lots of Earth kids do homework and take care of dogs," I argued with what I thought was my most logical voice.
       "There are no Earth children who have to do their homework, take care of a dog, and be ready to eat them if necessary," Dad said.
       "But we don't eat non-sentient beings," I said.  I was perplexed.  The "Jones Family Plan"  was to prepare Earth so that humans would be on the menu, not poodles and cocker spaniels.
       "There are many breeds that appear to be on the cusp of consciousness," Mom said looking up from her Avon order.  These days it seems she was always working.  "The Home World is hungry, and there are a lot of us.  A doggy dinner may not be out of the question."
       My stomachs felt like they all wanted to upchuck.  Was my planet so cruel that they'd eat Lassie?  Once again I wanted to be a regular human kid from Sacramento who ate what American sixth graders were supposed to eat: hot dogs on buns, not a la carte pooches as prey for the tentacle hords that would swarm the planet and eat anything with an I.Q. of 6 that got in their way.
     Not long afterwards, my Grandmother Pggsbtk, Pig's Butt to you Earthlings, arrived and announced that she and I were going to take a little trip to South America to scope out Chileans and their dogs.  This was a bit like market research.  She was trying to figure out which parts of Earth had the best tasting humans, and since she'd learned there were so many dogs in Chile,  why not start there? I bet my parents put her up to it because of my protests about Lassie.
     So, we arrived in Santiago last July which was the deepest part of winter there.  I sulked.  I didn't want to have anything to do with this trip.