Is the world ending?

Chile has gone a little bit insane. Is the world really coming to an end?
I had the most bizarre day yesterday. There was another student education protest and this time they changed the route so that they walked right past my house and congregated in the park. I went home early simply because of the number of people congregating making it difficult to get anywhere, and the possibility of trouble later... The march was something to see - 100,000 people filing past my house on Espinoza singing and playing music and chanting for 3hrs.... All very peaceful. Then about an hour after the last person passed the trouble started. We were able to watch from our terrace as a large group of delinquents systematically broke down poles, raided rubbish bins, and commandeered advertising and almost anything that would burn to make a barricade in the middle of 10 de Julio and set it on fire. We could also see the police congregating a block away just waiting and watching. All the kids were picking up stones and branches ready for a fight. Then a police van came racing through from behind the barricade and the students, at which point the students all let their rock missiles fly to come hailing down on the van, quite frightening. The van didn't stop, but went racing down as far as the police, pulled a U-turn and came racing back into the crowd. A sort of decoy I guess to try and get the projectiles launched before sending in the cops on foot, who came running in behind the van. I still saw at least 4 cops get severely hit by stones, one in the head which laid him out on the ground. The protesters didn't hang around but more or less took flight, and then the tear gas van arrived and doused the whole scenario (including us as we were making a hasty exit inside) with gas, though it really only served to make the cops cry as the protesters were already gone and barricading some other nearby street.
And we didn't even have the worst of it. They burnt a car in a neighbouring street, and when one of the residents of a high-rise building dropped water on some of the trouble-makers they responded by sending stones through the windows followed by burning objects. Luckily that was a couple of blocks away from us (though Zeli admitted to me that perhaps her yelling at the kids to stop pulling down the traffic signs wasn't the smartest move and I may have been right to tell her to shut up!)
One of my teachers rang me in the morning to tell me she couldn't get out of the bank. I cracked up laughing (extremely supportive when she was panicking) and asked her if she was lost... Turns out one of the unions is on strike there and they have barricaded the building so you can't get in or out. She managed to get out (not sure how, I suggested a window but as you can imagine banks tend to have bars over their windows). But there are no more classes in the bank this week..... And I was speaking to one of the secretaries and she aid that all the employees were barricaded inside until 7.30pm because the protesters wouldn't let them leave. Pleased it wasn't me....
In the evening I went to a gallery opening, and coming out of the metro in the uptown area was a surreal experience. When I left my metro station there were rocks flying through the air, tear gas, water canons and people running in all directions coughing and choking on the putrid air. The streets were full of burning debris, rocks, glass and general rubbish. When I came out of the metro uptown there were people sitting on the sidewalk in t-shirts drinking coffee. I could fill my lungs with relatively clean air and didn't have to keep looking around to see where the next flying object might be coming from and the shops were open rather than boarded up as if preparing for a hurricane! The journey was 20min but it could have been from one decade to another the change was so dramatic. The strangeness didn't stop there. We went to the gallery opening on Alonso de Cordoba, a street I was not familiar with. We were driving along and there were people out walking their toy poodles. jogging in the park, and shopping. The most impressive moment was when I spied a fifty something woman about town walking out of a shop, followed by a small peruvian woman (clearly her helper) struggling to control 20 bags branded with high fashion designer names. The poor young women made it to the car, where she proceeded to start loading the bags in the car, only to be interrupted by the need to open the door of the car for the lady about town, who was only holding her handbag.
The gallery was really interesting, great art, free alcohol, intimidatingly dressed people, and I felt that at any point I may make a mistake and knock something over or use a paper-towel that was actually part of a sculpture to wipe my hands. Arriving home in the taxi later, after being gassed again and having to take several detours around burning barricades, I couldn't help thinking that maybe the burning in the streets, has something to do with the lady and all her fashion branded bags.
At least I didn't spend the evening in London....

The right to protest

Since arriving in Chile over two years ago I have been tear gassed 6 times. Three of these have been in the last week. Tear gas was not something I had any experience with growing up in small town NZ, or even living in Melbourne Australia. I attended the odd protest for education or the environment, but there was never any threat of me being blasted by a water canon, or finishing my day with nose and throat burning and my face wet from my weeping eyes. Here in Chile I have never officially attended a protest, and yet I have been gassed six times. You would wonder how this could be?

Firstly, there are many more protests here than back in Oceania, and this year especially they are supported by thousands of people (two of last weeks protests yielded 30,000 and 40,000 people respectively). People here are angry, and want to be heard. And the police are all to keen to keep it all under control, in so much as they often seem to pre-empt the trouble by firing gas into the crowds before there are any real problems. This in its own right frustrates people, and they fight back. In the ensuing carnage normal people get caught up, hence I have been gassed 6 times. I am certainly not saying that the protesters have no role to play in this – there is a small percentage of the marchers who are very destructive. Walking down one of the pedestrian streets after one of last weeks manifestations I saw (through my streaming eyes) all the park benches in our local park destroyed, the glass recycling tank overturned and all the glass smashed and spread across the road as a sharp centimetre thick blanket, traffic lights not only torn from the pole, but the pole itself snapped in two, and the smouldering piles of whatever they had decided to burn in the middle of the street. It seems a little ironic to me that these protesters who are generally asking for better working conditions, or more money for education (both extremely valid points of conflict here) would want to cause what must be thousands of dollars worth of damage to highlight their plight.

The other part to this story is what exactly these people are protesting over. One part of the protests is about education, and in this respect it seems to me that they have every right to be upset. Chilean post – graduate education is the third or fourth most expensive education in the world (when compared to GDP and cost of living). The other big protests are about the approval of a project to build five hydroelectric dams on two rivers in Patagonia. I find these protests and this story more interesting.

Firstly, I would like to state that coming from NZ, I am quite used to hydrodams. It is the way that we generate the majority of our power. We use the lakes for recreation and irrigation, and apart from some problems with flow on the Waitaki river, as far as I have seen they haven’t caused any particularly negative effects for the regions. I was not old enough to understand the controversy surrounding the Clyde dam, but my parents tell me there was some (they had to move a whole town to make way for the flood waters). Now however, it is one of the best equipped towns of the area.

The proposal to build dams here in Chile has split the country, with the upper classes generally defending the project as progress, and the working class protesting against it vehemently as destruction. I have searched for literature on this project and it’s impact, but have turned up short. I have asked my friends who are against it what they are against and they invariably answer that it destroys the environment. However, when I ask how it does this or what the alternative is they tell me that that isn’t their problem. I find this strangely contradictory. The long and the short of it is that Chile needs energy to grow, not today, but in the future. That current energy sources are fossil fuels, nuclear or sustainable energy. I am sure that my friends don’t support either of the first two proposals, which leaves us with the sustainable sources, wind, water or sun. They argue that the dams represent a major destruction of the landscape, and they are probably right, but so do the other two alternatives. Wind farms are ugly, and Chile only has reliable wind along it’s prized coast – are they telling me they want hundreds of turbines as a backdrop to their summers on the beach? Or would they prefer to fill the Atacama Desert with large solar panels. I don’t understand.

Some people tell me that Chile doesn’t need any more energy. This is clearly putting their heads in the sand. Although government estimates may be top heavy, wouldn’t it be better (especially for the lower part of society) to have an abundance of energy and therefore choice, which may actually push the prices down, rather than an increased demand and diminished supply which is guaranteed to only allow those who can afford it to turn on the lights.

I think it is relatively clear where I stand on this issue, and until someone can provide some form of proof and education on this issue (which is sadly lacking in all forums) I will try and stay out of the tear gas, and quietly shake my head at the antics of those who believe in their cause.

I can't watch the news anymore. I don't know if this makes me a terrible person, but to me, it just seems like there are too many terrible things in the world to cope with. In some ways, I have been insanely lucky. I missed both the earthquake in Chile and the one in NZ, but have been put through that horrible agonising wait for information on people twice now. Again, I am lucky that no one close to me was killed, but this time round it has been people I know hurt or trapped, parents killed, and houses destroyed. I am lucky it wasn't worse. But people here don't understand that this was a devastating event in NZ. Then something like the Japan earthquake hits, and I just can't watch. I can't feel for them too, and then I feel guilty and selfish.

Then the phone goes, and it is my Mum. She never rings me, only when something bad happens. So I know something bad has happened, and she informs me a friend has passed away. It just seems like the black clouds never clear, and everyday there is more thunder and rain. I believe that good people, who live with positive energy get the positive energy back, so where is the sunshine? I could really use some.

The world shakes...

It's the message that you don't want to receive, but is necessary. "Massive earthquake here, we are all ok but Chch is devastated".
This was what I got, 10.30pm when I was travelling home on the metro from my last class. The thoughts that were streaming through my head had a nice logical reasoning to them, which I would attribute to my scientific left hemisphere, processing and weighing. This message is from my Mum, so I assume "all" means my direct family. That is good news. But Chch devasted? That doesn't sound so good. However, Mum can be prone to over-exaggeration, so maybe it isn't that bad. But she wouldn't want to scare me too much as I am overseas so it could well be accurate, and so many of my friends live in Chch. Conclusion, get on the internet pronto, but there is not internet at my house at the moment, so get off the metro and find an internet cafe.

6.3 - that doesn't look too bad. We have aftershocks bigger than that here in Chile, so hopefully it was just Mum's exaggeration. The light of the day after, in the office on the internet reveals the horror of the truth. Mum wasn't exaggerating - it is devastation, and death, and the earth really does seem to have moved.

People here don't seem to understand. How can they not understand?? It seems they hear 6.3 and write it off as a storm in another land (as admittedly I did to start), but for me, waiting to hear from the other side of the world about friends trapped in buildings, other peoples' parents, and friends seemingly missing, the pavement seems to be tilted upwards, and I am one of those poor people struggling to push through the dust. The photos become like some torture session that I oblige myself to sit through every morning and every afternoon, and the wait is long.

Two weeks later it seems that all my friends are going to live, but the axis on which they live has been forever altered. And I think everyone waits in dread for the "final list". There only exists about two degrees of separation in Christchurch, and it's close relationship with Ashburton only moves the separation one degree further. It seems like the world shook just a little too close to home.

The drawbacks of being someone's boss

I am enjoying my new job. It has lots of challenges, it is varied, and I still get to teach. I spend my day organising other peoples' schedules (which sometimes results in me remembering theirs and not mine), thinking up new and interesting ways to organise materials in our office, creating new materials, and liaising with students and teachers. Unfortunately this means that sometimes I have to speak to teachers about serious issues, about things I don't necessarily want to discuss with them. This is part of my job, but not part that I am very good at. It upsets me, and I find it difficult to portray the seriousness of some of these situations. It is something that I am learning, but it always makes for a hard day. Let's just hope that I don't have to do it too often in the future, and that this has just been a particularly bad month!

Primavera

Spring, a word that conjours a coil of metal ready to release all of it's energy, is the perfect word for this time of year. The catalyst of the change of general attitude is the national day of Chile, the 18th of September, which sweeps the country in happiness, and drapes her sometimes drab winter buildings with the bold colours of her independence: the white of the fading snow, the blue of her depthless sky, and the red of her soul and the blood of the people. In spring, this blood courses stronger, thicker, among the brotherhood who reside in her body. The women swing their hips a little more provocatively after shedding their winter cocoons of trousers in favour of skirts, and the men vocalise their appreciation with the virile of freshly sexed adolescents. Life is celebrated, as it should be after the darkness of the andean winter, and the good things - family, dancing, conversation, food and drink - are enjoyed. This spirit will be tempered, almost suffocated, in the stifling summer heat, but for now that music continues and the people smile and enjoy.

Surfing curves

Most people don't know this about me, but I am a prolific writer. I never said that any of it was any good, and in fact most of it is a complete waste of space, but it is what I do to try and marry the ideas in my head together. So here is one that usually would be part of the 90% that never sees the glare of a public forum.

It seems to me like nothing in Chile is straight.

It occurred to me today as I crossed one of the main motorways that cuts through Santiago. It consists of three lanes of traffic in either direction, split by the metro track which runs immediately between the two. The metro tracks are not dead straight as I expect from train tracks, but curve gently first in one direction and then the other. Being familiar with rush hour mayhem I know that this minute curvature facilitates the humiliating experience of falling on a complete stranger penned in either directly in front of you, or directly behind you, as the train hurtles from one station to the next. Metro surfing as it were. Alameda, the main thoroughfare of the city is similarly discordant to the straight lines of convention, with several gentle curves adding interest to the already mystifying lane system that barely functions most days.

Metaphorically speaking, this gentle curve and lack of true directness extends into Chilean culture. When asked direct questions, Chileans will almost never answer in the negative. Saying no is impolite. Rather, you will find yourself believing that yes you are meeting for dinner tomorrow night when in fact they have no intention. It is not a true wish to mislead, these are not corners in the train tracks, rather a wish to not disappoint and to let you down gently. Something will come up, usually family related, and the plan will fall through. Just a gentle curve in the tracks. For a laid back kiwi, this is not too much of a difficulty, and I adjusted fairly easily to these "flexible" plans. But I have witnessed many an upset foreigner, more accustomed to direct plans than surfing the chilean curves, fall on the person in front of them as the train sailed around a gentle bend. It is all part of the process of learning to surf not only the metro, but also the customs of this fascinating country.