almost back to work

Yikes. I may or may not have to be at school tomorrow for the start-of-semester teacher meetings. I can't imagine why I would, and neither can anyone else, but the forces of habit and duty are strong in Chile. (There's a meeting for all the teachers, which will be in Spanish I can't understand, about responsibilities I don't have. I feel like I could stay home and sleep in and I'd be fine.)

I trucked in to Santiago yesterday morning to be on the Volunteer Panel for the WorldTeach Semester volunteers. They were a little quiet about asking questions, but that's okay, because it was me, Bennett, and Jeremy, and I've started to realize the depth of chemistry in my volunteer group, because we can just go on for 20 minutes at a time telling stories or laughing amongst ourselves. Talking for 2 hours about our experiences was pretty easy.

(FYI, I write this blog in part so I don't spend days trying to tell everybody all my stories when I get back.)

I got to meet Ryan, the fabled old friend of my housemate Steve, and he's pretty great, both with and without Steve.

I got to meet Katie, finally! She also seems to be pretty awesome, and I'm glad we got along in person. I'm looking forward to taling to her more.

It's fascinating what a different group dynamic they have: it's hard to get this group to talk, whereas it's hard to get my group to shut up. I'm really interested to hear about their placements and their experiences of settling in and adjusting.

In the evening after the panel, we had dinner at Las Vacas Gordas, which, after the Mendoza trip, I now know is an Argentine restaurant, though nowhere do they tell you that. The filete parrillero was some amazing variety of grilled tenderloin.

Afterward, I figured I'd go home and sleep in my own bed; this was the weekend I learned that the last bus for Valparaiso/Vina del mar leaves at 10:30pm. I actually took a taxi home, of all things, for CH$10,000--the bus is CH$3200, so it wasn't so bad--and it was cramped, but only an hour or so.

It was, again, good to be home.

one last get-together

We had the WorldTeach Mid-Service Conference this weekend. There was one of the group almost no one had seen since we left Santiago in early April, so there was a real sense of completeness to have everyone together again. It's amazing to think we're halfway through the experience, and that this is the last formal gathering until our good-bye dinner in Santiago in November.

(For me, it's also amazing to think that I'm planning to go to Tassajara for three months after this. It's a long time away from Anna. Ugh.)

With everyone in the same room, both for formal sessions and not, we discovered that we've all had pretty much the same problems with teaching: we've made many of the same adjustments from what we learned during orientation in March, and to accommodate the realities of Chilean education. For example, Allyson taught us how to write good, simple directions for our activities, to help the kids keep track of what they're doing. But it turns out that having written directions doesn't work for any of us, so we don't do it.

The Spain vs. Netherlands game was technically amazing, though I went and took a nap for about an hour of it, because, well, I was tired, and I'm American and soccer just doesn't get my adrenaline up enough to keep me going. Spain scored the only goal with just a few minutes left in the overtime period.

I eventually decided to go to Valdivia, like Steve and Bennett, but rather than arrive at a new city at 12:45 A.M., I decided to spend the night in Chillan (with Jeremy and Leigh Ann, as it happened) and leave Tuesday morning. We had a nice dinner at the Sociedad de Empleados de Comercio--unions often run restaurants here, like a VFW hall or something--then slept peacefully at Hostal Canada' and had an uneventful departure for our 7-hour bus rides, them back home to Ventanas, and me to Valdivia.

cabin, snow, etc.

Vacation time! School ended on happy notes; I didn't teach any classes, just caught up with any remaining kids who hadn't taken my test.

WorldTeach has a non-optional Mid-Service Conference, but we're happily ensconced in a cabin near Termas de Chillan. I'm currently watching the World Cup final (Spain vs. Netherlands; no score yet, but Spain is dominating the game) in between munching raisins and peanuts and reading The Devil In the White City, a pretty good research narrative about all the crazy stuff that went down around the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. I recommend it, although there's a serial killer involved, so there's a few short grisly bits.

Termas de Chillan is the actual resort, and we're about 8km away. I'd made some motions toward going up the mountain, to check out the hot springs, but once you get a 25-minute walk from the cabin, you reach a sort of staging area, little shops with equipment rentals and snacks and hats and everything. From there, if you don't have a car, you hitchhike the remaining 7km, up a slow mud road. As I stood there in the sun, watching a couple cars not stop for me (including one that stopped for Brandy and Heather 30ft farther down the road, although it could be they just wanted to stop once? I dunno), I thought harder about what I really wanted to do with my day, and discovered that (a) I don't really like hot springs that much, and (b) it was going to take me all day to get there and back. And I was hungry.

Instead, I bought some homemade yerba mate, walked back to the house, ate sandwiches, and parked myself on the couch. It was lovely.

another temporary home

The hostel is an enclave: isolated from the neighborhood outside, with a large shaded patio-yard with comfortable chairs. Many of the chairs, and all of the table umbrellas, bear the logo for Brahma beer, which is also sold in the lobby, along with Escudo, Corona, and bottles and splits of red wine. Speakers play a party-oriented radio station during waking hours (the patio closes from 12-7am, so it's not entirely out of control, at least so far). We referred to the Hotel Plaza Londres as a "hostel" out of habit, but it was really a hotel. This, a Hostelling International establishment, is a real hostel. There are luggage lockers in the rooms and they sell beer and wine in the lobby.

Susan, the ASL interpreter, struck up a chat with the shaved-headed deaf Russian guy who was hawking up a lung in the bathroom this morning.

"And he knows ASL?!"

"No! It's really interesting!"

We had an earthquake last night, a cute little 4.5 that wouldn't have woken me except for the Chinese volunteers panicking very loudly about it in the halls. It was short, so when they woke me up, the building was finishing swaying and mostly I wanted them to shut up before I woke up even more. I did get a kick watching my half-awake mind try to get worked up and anxious about a big earthquake that OMFG COULD HAPPEN ANY MINUTE DIDN'T YOU FEEL THAT LAST ONE HOLY CRAP, which I'd notice, breathe, let go of it, watch it happen again. My mind goes into its loops sometimes when I'm sleeping poorly.

An hour after that, around 4:45am, a group of Chileans either started or ended their day smoking by their cars under our window.

Today was the first day of Ministry training. It's a bunch of really great people, but so far it's talking and PowerPoint slides. Good information, though not much new, but especially after the dynamic and interactive WorldTeach training, it feels a little...bureaucratic?

We already knew it, but it's increasingly clear that the extra money paid for WorldTeach is more than worth it, for the better training and the in-country support. It creates a funky dynamic with the other Ministry volunteers, who are here on more of a shoestring, jumping into even more unknowns than we are, and almost without a net. Benefiting from WorldTeach's special relationship with the Ministry, sometimes it feels like we're on a sort of Cadillac teaching program.

It's going to be a long week, and I'd like to be moving on to my placement.

teacher training, day 2: holy crap, I'm gonna die

Maybe not so dramatic, but I am feeling overwhelmed. Fortunately it's not just me, there's a group to share the experience with (more on that later, because it relates, as everything does, to Buddhist practice), and I'm not even the most overwhelmed. I can feel my shutting-down sleepiness that comes when I don't want to deal with something; but I have many years of training in working past it and staying engaged and in contact with what's going on, and that's critical to this entire adventure.

Tonight we did (some are still doing) our first complete Lesson Plan, which is one half of the Things That Will Save Your Ass In The Classroom. The other half is your Classroom Management Plan, which is the other reason everyone is feeling overwhelmed. It's a lot of information, but we're also heading into a school system that is alien at best. Of last year's 22 volunteers, everyone agreed that Allyson, our Field Director, had the worst class section: one kid jumped out a window (first floor, but still), and another time a kid answered a question and then casually hit another kid in the face with a chair. On the plus side, there are levers like taking cell phones (negative) and Frugele, for which they seem to have an irrational affinity. It's a lot to take in in two hours in a warm room.

WorldTeach has a Lesson Plan Template that helps a lot, where you write in the objective for the lesson and then work backwards. I actually feel really prepared from having spent those 17 hours or so watching the Advanced Beginner ESL class at the adult school: I've seen the different stages of an ESL lesson, and I know from excruciating experience how long everything takes. (Think 20 minutes to introduce 7 new vocabulary words, or 15 minutes to explain and model the directions for an activity.) I'm finding that with the guidance and the training, once my head was immersed in the material, ideas started flowing about how to generate the kind of experience that would lead to students learning the material. Not that they were all good ideas, but they were there.

Our schedule will probably be to see these kids once a week for 45 minutes. (Later, I'll write in detail about the very exciting Chilean school system.) That's not a ton of time, either for learning or building relationships. On the other hand, it usually means writing just one lesson plan per week, and presumably getting really good at it as we teach it one or two dozen times and adapt it for different levels.

So, yes. I'm not actually going to die. I'm really not even likely to fail, overall, though some crashing and burning seems inevitable. But as we get closer and closer to actually running a classroom, clarity and calm about that isn't always the dominant feeling.

staying in touch

We're at the Hotel Plaza Londres, which I recommend, and it has excellent free wireless Internet. It feels a little weird to use it two or three times a day, but it's possible I won't have that kind of access at my placement. Plus we have chunks of free time, I like keeping in touch, and I'm an introvert and we are doing a lot of group stuff. Seriously, I'm making an effort here. Totally worthwhile. But sometimes it's time to go be off by myself.

I caught Anna on Skype last night and we talked for a long while, which was great. I also broke the second ring she gave me. They were made of red carnelian, and they don't survive being dropped on tile or concrete floors, which is pretty much inevitable given my habit of pulling rings off and fiddling with them. Unless she beats me to it, I'm going to find something made of metal and pretend she gave it to me. I miss her, but I'm also doing cool stuff here. And then I'll be back. And then probably gone again. It's a strange set of feelings.

My little Asus Eee PC has turned out to be an excellent choice, for its size and portability and the amount I use it. When I woke up at 3am on the plane, I wasn't going to sleep again, so I pulled it out, booted up Linux and fixed a code problem. (Nerdspeak: my shell startup scripts seemingly worked fine on a console but crashed when I tried to login via GUI. I don't know why it was running them at that point, or why it was being so picky. Another problem identified by printing stuff to a logfile.) I have to boot Windows to use Skype at the moment, but that's a pretty fast thing, and for everything else I can use Linux without worrying about inevitable virus infection.

Speaking of infection, my lip is not infected, which is fantastic. The inside scrapes are vastly better (and smaller and shallower) today than yesterday, but still sometimes hurt enough to take my breath away. (That first bite of unfortunately-dry roast chicken takeout for tonight's dinner? Ow.) I expect they'll be healed in a few days. I'm planning to take the stitches out on Saturday, which will be its own exciting project.

Once the stitches are out, I think I'll try to make it to an aikido dojo.

My Spanish is very slowly coming back. I don't really need it: we're living in a little bubble of volunteers, which is important as we bond and get to know each other so we can support each other through the year. The times my Spanish feels more alive are when I'm off by myself, for all the good it does me, since Chileans remain only vaguely comprehensible aurally, and a lot of folks here in the city are busy and don't have a ton of patience for a gringo trying to negotiate meaning.

I like the volunteer group. They're not from my tribe, but they're interesting and surprising, and like any group of open people we're all adjusting to each other, just like my sangha did when I joined (and presumably now that I'm gone as well). The Zen thing just came up today:

"You practice Zen meditation?"
"Yep."
"Can you show me how?"
"Yes!"
"Oh, cool. Every other person I've asked has sort of said 'Uhhhh, not really.'"
"It's easy, you just learn and figure out a stable position to sit still for a while."
"Oh...it's sitting still? I can't sit still."
"Oh yeah. That's why we sit."

Which I think is the best answer to "I can't sit still, my mind is too busy". I wish it were original, but no.

We'll see how that goes.

orientation: day 1

We have orientation for two weeks, a whole stretch of interesting stuff: lots of sessions about teaching, but also Spanish lessons from some outside folks, and a bunch of stuff about Chilean culture and society. It's mostly our field director Allyson and her assistant Rad, with a few outside projects, like going to the Embassy, or a "human rights tour" from a socialist who was imprisoned and tortured under Pinochet. (Also a lot of hammering home the need to be careful talking about Pinochet, because the country is still divided on whether he was good or bad.)

We talked a bit about "icebreakers", which are ways to start off and warm up the start of a class. Apparently kids' other classes are likely to be sit-still lectures, so they'll love us; we're here because kids can study English for years in Chilean schools and not be able to get past "Hello"; and the English skills of our Chilean co-teachers vary widely, but could well be not so good.

We talked a lot about WorldTeach's mission in general and in Chile in particular. Pinochet decentralized the schools into the current division of public and semi-private (which are pretty equivalent) and private schools. The private schools are very expensive and to give you a flavor of the problem, 7% of Chilean students go to private schools, but provide 51% of the students at the University of Chile. One of the vols pointed out that Harvard and Yale could well have 50% private-school students, but the problem is that in Chile that situation represents the entire country and eliminates opportunities for other students, since there are only 25 public and 50 private universities in Chile, fewer than you can find within 15 minutes of Boston.

We looked at the mission statements themselves, which was interesting. I'm going to edit the one for WorldTeach Chile, since I find it a little abstract in spots.

Allyson and Rad gave us a passionate session about the earthquake they just lived through, to impress on us how it's affected the country--the southern regions closer to the epicenter are a serious mess, and apparently the government's relationship to everything outside Santiago can be like the government of Massachusetts's relationship to Western Massachusetts: sort of an afterthought.

And they're convinced we can teach. Which I'm sure we can. But that's next week.

Chile update

In the Annals of Improbable Outcomes, the Ministry of Education is only delaying our program by a week, so we're going to leave Miami as planned on Tuesday, and WorldTeach will provide us with an extra week of training in teaching, Spanish, and Chilean culture. (This is also an extra week of drinking Pisco Sours, and of me maybe being able to do aikido someplace.)

I stopped my preparations when I had 16 days left; now that I have 6, the schedule feels a bit tighter, and Anna and I had gotten used to having another week together, so that's a little weird.

But! Adventure!

Chile update

I know, lots of updates. I've been asking lots of questions and gotten good answers from the WorldTeach field director in Santiago and the program director in Cambridge, and they've also been communicating any new information as they get it. The short version is that, if you'll pardon the language, everything is fucked five ways from Sunday.

• The English Opens Doors office building sustained heavy damage, and they're still not allowed inside. Their database with the information on volunteers, host families, and placements is down.
• English Opens Doors has other volunteers already in-country--WorldTeach is just one source--and those people were assigned to regions VIII and IX, which were the ones hard-hit by the quake. Contacting those volunteers was a priority, and I imagine pretty difficult, but they're all okay.
• The Ministry has to contact our host families ("which in itself can be quite difficult") to make sure they can still host a volunteer; they have to make sure the placement schools are safe; and they'd have to find new placements (which is time-consuming) if original placements are no longer workable.
• Once the program is delayed, it can't quite be spun up on a moment's notice, so WorldTeach is thinking to give us 3 or more weeks of notice before any departure date. (I have a cogent argument for them that the 17 of us who have already quit our jobs and given up our apartments would be more than happy to pick up and be in Miami on a weeks' notice.)

The other volunteers have been sending email to the list, and except for a couple of older women, most of the rest do seem to be 25 and under, as you'd expect. They may be in worse shape than I am, since I have unemployment and money saved up, and I gave up my apartment to my girlfriend, so I have a place to stay.

From the sound of things, we're not going to get a departure date before May, and I'd be grateful if it were that soon. In the meantime, I'm doing some paid research for one of Anna's clients, and I think I'll take off on an extended road trip around the 23rd to visit folks in Colorado and the Pacific Northwest. I'm also looking around for volunteer stuff in the continental U.S. I can do for the next couple months.

("Virginia? Sure! Never been there! Just give me the address.")

Given how much I wanted to go and how long I've been unemployed, I'm doing really well, and largely on an even keel. That's not quite the same thing as "good", but it's doable.

Chile update

Current status: chaos!

Calmer than chaos; more of an opaque, abiding lack of knowing.

Summary:

• My flight on the 16th has not been moved or canceled.
• The English Opens Doors program still wants us to come.
• WorldTeach was assigned the Santiago and Valparaíso regions this year, and they weren't so hard hit by the quake. People went back to work a couple days ago and life was normalizing.
• If there's no established departure date by the end of the month, the WorldTeach program will be canceled. There are backup plans for providing us with volunteer opportunities, the earliest of which would be May, and Ecuador would be an option, as well as a possible delayed Chile stint.
  

That's about it. There's not a lot of hints in there about probable final outcomes. I'm asking the field director what's up with English Opens Doors that would cause delays; I don't know how this whole thing works, but my first guess would have been that 2 weeks before our arrival, most of the details would have been worked out already. (That could be wildly wrong for any number of reasons, or our host families' houses could be damaged, or...anything, really, which is why I'm asking.)

We're continuing with my good-bye parties, because I'm leaving for somewhere. Depending on the Chile delay, I'm exploring a Colorado-Idaho-Portland road trip. I'm done with having nothing to do: it's not good for me (or anyone), and I've spent 9 months unemployed to get out adventuring and I can't take waiting any more.

Chile update

The damage in Chile turns out to be worse than the initial reports. President Michelle Bachelet said they wouldn't need international aid, but asked for it two days later; one of the voices on the radio pointed out that it sort of symbolizes Chile's self-image, where they're tending to see themselves as a fairly developed country--which it is, in many respects--but in practice, they're not quite there yet. There's a vivid photoset up at The Big Picture, and the news out of Concepción and Constitución seems to get progressively worse. It's clear that Chile will be rebuilding stuff for a few years.

We don't know yet what this means for the WorldTeach program. I had a pretty bad day yesterday, because WorldTeach finally got some information and sent us a pretty grim-sounding email saying that the English Opens Doors program we're associated with is "suspended" and might be canceled. WorldTeach is scurrying, trying to assess things and working up contingency plans for us, including possibly diverting us to the Ecuador program, which would be a May departure, and I think they have other ideas they're tossing around.

What does "suspended" mean for a program that hasn't started yet? I asked the WorldTeach folks, and part of the answer is that the Ministry of Education staff can't get into their building in Santiago right now, because they're not yet sure it's safe. They have a lot to deal with, and probably getting a volunteer program running isn't a priority compared to getting the school year started in the midst of a natural disaster. WorldTeach also says that this year's placements are in areas that aren't severely affected by the quake, although last year's were (meaning people who signed up for another year in the same placement were assigned to affected areas).

At any rate, things are far more uncertain than anyone would like them to be. I'll write more as soon as anything concrete turns up.

By the way, we're waiting a couple days before canceling the going-away parties. If nothing else, we can all meet at the Dutch Goose and watch me drink.

I might suck at this

This is a brilliant blog post and video by a teacher, about creating a lesson from real-world data about the per-milliliter cost of various liquids. The writing alone is fantastic, and the video is pretty cool too. He does something I learned about in ESL class, which is to create an anomaly that the students can ask a key question about. In this case, he makes the Red Bull be $50, when a single can is about $3, and all he needs is for one student to go "What's up with that?". It's like the old saying that scientific discoveries don't start with someone shouting "Eureka!"; they start with someone saying "Huh, that looks weird."

One thing I'm prepared for as I go is that I might be a bad teacher. I don't think I will be, on average: I think I have a lot of patience with and interest in kids, and a lot of willingness to engage with them in whatever place they happen to be, and a real desire to communicate stuff in a way they can understand. Ren assures me that's the biggest part of teaching, and I can learn the lesson-planning stuff that scares me. That all seems true. But I think that some days, I'm going to fail. It's just going to happen. Kids will be fighting or I'll be sick or we'll be doing something hard or whatever, and it's just not going to work, and that has to be okay too. One critical lesson from performing on stage is that we have to be willing to fail, to go try stuff, not just willing to fail, but to fail big. And maybe I do that so regularly that it's worth labeling me a bad teacher. =)

counting down

My WorldTeach group travels to Santiago on a redeye flight from Miami, leaving the night of March 16th. It's only 10 hours to Santiago, but since I have to get to Miami first, that's going to be a long day.

I went and had my physical today, to get the health form signed for the trip. Last time the doctor talked my ear off about adjusting to his new practice situation; this time, his wife was just in the ER this morning (she's okay, "just" a kidney stone) and they had houseguests from Norway. I'm beginning to think there aren't any doctors around here who aren't kinda nuts, still accepting patients. At least he seems competent, and he's very nice, both unlike the last guy.

At any rate, we were chatting along correcting the many errors in the transcription of my history, and he was asking me a bunch of lifestyle questions again--which are all dead ends, because of my absurdly healthy lifestyle--and finally, after the actual physical examining was done, he asked what I usually have for breakfast.

"Oh, quinoa, it's a grain, and chard."
"Chard?"
"Yeah, it's a leafy green vegetable--"
"Yeah, I know what chard is. You eat it for breakfast?"
"Yeah."

Then he got the same look on his face that he got last time, which comes across to me like "You're in perfect health and I don't know why you're here or what to do with you," and then he stopped asking me questions and we finished up.

things I'll be learning

WorldTeach sent me this really great "Living and Teaching in Chile" booklet they've put together over the years. It's got all kinds of stuff on Chile, the dynamics of WorldTeach's involvement there, the education system, the culture, and tons of excellent and helpful quotes from volunteers throughout, including a number of them that contradict what WorldTeach says (which is on purpose: WorldTeach places a really high value on volunteer feedback).

I'm anticipating a lot of challenges with the language. It's sort of how, if you say "fanny pack" to an Australian, you will not get the desired reaction, because fanny is a synonym there for "vulva".

My favorite so far: Pico means "penis" and gallo is "teenager", so pico de gallo (one variety of Mexican salsa) is probably not what you what at that particular restaurant.

This is typical of the comments about winter:

Okay, no matter how much everyone tells you how cold it is, there's still a little part of you thinking, "I'm going to South America, how cold could it be?" And, I'll tell you--VERY cold. Bring sweaters, long underwear, boots, hats, mittens, and hot water bottles...and, be prepared to still be cold. And, I'm from Minnesota.

This all seems a little confusing until you get to the part about how Chilean buildings have neither central heating nor insulation. On top of that, the culture contains some nigh-medieval ideas about how diseases spread, so at one school site, they left the doors and windows open, "because germs spread much more easily in enclosed spaces".

Also, my intuition was right, and I have a lot of clothes shopping to do before I leave: I need some decent sets of actual professional-looking grown-up clothes, like khakis and stuff. I've been meaning to do that for years, so that's okay, and when I get back it will help me when I go back to work.

We're getting into the home stretch before departure. There's a famous Zen koan called "Proceed On from the Top of the Pole" (Gateless Gate Case 46, if you care):

Sekisō Oshō asked, "How can you proceed on further from the top of a hundred-foot pole?" Another eminent teacher of old said, "You, who sit on the top of a hundred-foot pole, although you have entered the Way you are not yet genuine. Proceed on from the top of the pole, and you will show your whole body in the ten directions."

We spend our lives on top of the hundred-foot pole. We don't always realize it, but every day, we can't control what's happening; every day, consciously or not, moment by moment we are letting go and stepping off our pole, into the unknown, making our decisions and hoping the consequences resemble our intention. Most of the time it's a small step, but sometimes, like with me right now, it's a big one. We never know how things will turn out.