Adrift in the Sea of Contradictions

Getting settled in a new home always brings a little bit of friction between one's customs and those of the new place. I love Puerto Natales and Chile in general, but certain things seem slightly strange to me. Almost contradictory, at least from my point of view and my cultural background.

Economic, social, cultural, and behavioral contradictions appear to abound in the small amount of Chilean culture I have experienced so far. They even work their way into construction projects (I magine the conversation among the guys building my bathroom went something like this...we put the light on without painting the ceiling...hmm...well, let's not take the light off and instead just paint around it so there is a circle of ot painted plywood...perfecto!) and the ways that teachers and students interact. 

I find that here in Natales the contradictions run a little deeper, probably because of the transient style of tourism that the town usually attracts and how small of a town it is. Part of the town is very clean, very moodern, and has a ton of coffee shops, outfitters, and restaurants. Once you walk past our house, the town begins to dissolve into fewer paved streets, fewer stores, and much more raw Chilean-isms. Time is flexible, hours at school are too...as are many things about how one interacts with others and how one is expected to behave. And then suddenly a rigid social rule rears its head, and the hapless Gringa has no idea she is in the wrong until she asks. 

Like my clothes. My host mom had said that I should bring my clothes downstairs when I needed to wash them. They were put out on the line, and they hung there for days. I figured that I just didn't know how laundry is supposed to work here and left them out there. They got soaked about five times in wind and rain. Still I waited. I noticed that Nelson (one of the men who lives here) had picked up his clothes, pressed and folded, from the kitchen. Maybe someone will get them and press them for me?

Two days later, my clothes had disappeared from the line but were nowhere to be found. Great, I thought.Someone decided to steal my only work pants. I asked my host mom about it, and her response was along the lines of, "Well, you have to get them of course. And iron. We don't have the time to do it." And then back to chopping carrots in silence.

It is fine that I have to do my own laundry (in fact I really prefer it) but a heads up would have been nice. And the fact that Nelson doesn't do his threw me off completely, since it didn't register that they do his for him because he is a man. As I am a woman, I am expected to already know how to do laundry perfectly and to expect that I will have to do it all without being told. How could a woman have been raised without that expectation?

People expect that everyone has the same background they do here, and they judge those who come from other backgrounds as ill-educated or slow or rude sometimes. Obviously I am not trying to be in any way (in fact I feel like I am doing everything in my power not to step on anyone's toes and to observe and adjust my behavior immediately) but some unspoken rules are impossible for me to know. And there are a ton of them. 

For example, I don't know the rules of the school. I also don't know the bell schedule. No one has told me either of these critical pieces of information, and the administrators and other teachers look at me like I am stupid when I ask them. Solution? Made my own rules. Probably there is some overlap, but still. When I asked for a written copy of the rules of the school, the administrator interrupted my halting Spanish and said, "The students know them, the students know them." And then back to her computer in silence. 

Bell schedule will just take another week to learn, and I am fixing it by setting an alarm on my ipod to ring when classes need to change (sonce the bells are manually controlled and not very reliable anyway). How could I have been raised without knowing all the school rules and schedule by heart?

My students also seem to think I must just be slow. They don't seem to understand that we are in English class and that we need to complete the activities in English, so they just complete the activities in Spanish and ask each other why I am so dumb that I don't speak Spanish. How could anyone have been raised without speaking Spanish? 

It is really hard to feel like an outsider who no one wants to help or educate about customs. Honestly though, this is probably nothing compared to how hard it is for people who try to move to the US from abroad. I feel as though we volunteers are paying for the massive karma debt that my own culture has put out into the world by experiencing it the other way around. 

And maybe all the things that seem to be contradictions are simply juxtapositions that I am not used to. Maybe my definition of contradiction needs to evolve. And maybe i'm over-reacting because this is actual culture shock instead of the "I'm at home!" feeling Italy immediately gave me. 

Funnily, the judgments people make about Gringos are starting to rub off on me. In Natales it is always possible to escape to a Gringo reality for a moment in one of the many coffee shops, but yesterday when I went to El Living (which was amazing, by the way! Real, actual coffee? I haven't had you for a month!) I was slightly annoyed by a group of Gringos who walked in and made a ton of noise and were talking loudly about how great of surfers they were. I was sitting here thinking, "Stupid Gringos..." 

So I am guilty of it, too.

I am certain it is a combination of these and other, hidden factors. And I am still certain that I am meant to be here. Just going to take an adjustment. Or five.

An Attempt at Describing the Undescribable

Torres del Paine was a life-changer. A game-changer. A soul-changer. The pictures by no means do it any justice because the feeling of the place was the most important. i want to try to capture it in verse, since nothing else seems sufficient. 

Awakened by rain and wind 
Lashing my window
Drawing stripes on the roof
Patagonia draws first blood

I am not afraid of wind nor rain
My boots are sturdy 
My body, too
Gore-tex is my best friend
And long underwear? 
The greatest invention known to humankind
Bring it, Patagonia

A natural cathedral 
Gouged by melting glaciers 
Ringed by twisted ancient trees
An aboreadom temple to perservence
And toughness
Even lichins display their ripe colors
Competing for dominance over the arching rainbow
Dancing in the clouds

A pilgrimage on bumpy roads
The nausea barely staved off 
By crunchy donuts and nescafe
Each new microclimate
Microcosm
Brings a new variety of cold
Or wind
Or sun
Or rain
We change our clothes 
We change our faces

The light begins to crystallize
In rainbows
Dancing in clouds around sharp points
Blue granite and blue ice
Sharper than immense knives

11:30 AM, 19 March 2011: I pass as Chilena for the first time.
A woolen cap pulled over my obviously not Chilean hair
The massif is hidden
Microcosms pass
Plains
Forest
Desert
A gray lake filled from Glacier Gray
The sediment of ten thousand years of grating on the mountain 
Drifts 
Reflecting the nublado sky

Our time is not here
Nor is our space
The mountains live in another
Geological and cosmic time are massive
Drawfing us puny
Brief 
Humans
Humans are 50,000 years old
Maybe more

These mountains deal in eons, not in days

Winds race down the cliffs and glaciers 
To try to knock us off our feet
Carrying spray 
Green and heavy with it's ancient load
Into our eyes
Constant, instant change
The sun might flash 
A momentary glare
The clouds might move
And obscure or reveal

Nothing is forever in Patagonia. 

A lunch
Seems strange
I could live on the view
For at least a day
And never move from a single spot 
Letting Torres del Paine change around me
Our puny stomachs filled, the pilgrimage continues. 

Shangri-la 
Not even hidden
Appears in the mist
Beckoning
To an impossible climb
Thousands of feet in the making
We could never make it
The wind would peel us off the face
And smash us against the jagged rocks

First one out
Last one back 
Not enough time to spend here in the park
Visto? Visto?
No
I have seen nearly nothing
Of the magic of this place
And still rainbows follow us everywhere
Wide and wild
Life-changing

Windburned, hungry
Vacillating between too cold and too hot
We pass through more microcosms
And leave the landscape massif
To drift through plains and horses and forests
To a wild sunset over the blue/white mountains
As if heaven were only an arm's length away

But in my soul I feel the stillness of Paine
And to it I will always flee
A secret well of joy
And peace
And comfort in the unearthly beauty 
Of that Tierra

What A Difference 24 Hours Makes

Phew!

Thanks for reading the Rant of Ages yesterday. It was a mess and it was hard, but the situation is very complex and the reasons for why everyone acts the way they do are multiple.

At home with my hosts I discovered that the previous volunteers at the school were not very good at teaching and that the town didn't necessarily connect with them, either. My hostmom said that Puerto Natales attracts volunteers who just want to trek in Torres del Paine, and that occasionally they would not talk at all to the family and just treated it as a boarding house (which, well...it is. But not for us hijas).

Given the crazy amount of change living in another country forces upon people and the (sometimes maddening, let's be honest) idiosyncracies of Chilean life, the volunteers probably have their own side of the story. Maybe they feel like they had no support and that none of the things the MINEDUC said were executed, or they couldn't adapt to this life. Maybe they were scared.

I was certainly scared and angry and frustrated and saddened yesterday by everything that went on. I definitely could have thrown up my hands and said, "Right, that's it. I can't do this." But the frustration served as a catalyst to push me to better things.

I bought paper and markers and spent about six hours in the last 24 making signs and decorations for the classroom. There's a world map that I brought from home, with countries in which English is spoken in lists next to it. There is a list of rules for the English Classroom. There is a collage of things that people often use English for. More will come until the whole things is decorated.

I was prepared today. Since Favian was sick yesterday afternoon (yes, he really was sick and I feel badly for quesitoning it...although perception of sickness is relative) I prepared a lesson for the class today just in case he was still ill. He came into the classroom 10 minutes before class began with the second group of 8th graders, and his face lit up at the sight of all the preparation. His whole demeanor changed. He realized I mean business :)

From then on things clicked and we actually connected as a team. We started planning and he filled me in about many of the different things about the school, and he served as translator (thank all that is good) for a meeting. He said he will bring me a book called, "How to Survive the Chilean Jungle" to help with slang and cultural misunderstandings.

Lesson learned. Motivation breeds luck and communication. Turning a bad situation on its head and letting it serve as a light under your butt is way more effective than the alternative, and makes people want to work with you. Oh yeah, and the kids are still adorable.

Excited, exhausted, and happy.

Tia Coleen and Total Utter Chaos

Upon walking into the Escuela Juan de Ladrilleros here in Puerto Natales, I was greeted with warmth and stares and cries of, "Hello teacher!" from the kids. The female director (? Not sure exactly what her role is really) of the school took me to literally every classroom in the hour that followed to introduce me to all of the kids in the school. It's not a gigantic school because there are only about two hundred students, but during passing period it feels like there are many thousands of them all running around and yelling in burgundy polo shirts and gray tights.

Things stood out; a mass amount of trophies crowd every available shelf in the lounges and teachers' room. Some classrooms are beautifully decorated and offer the students a lot, but the decoration and effort of the part of the teachers wanes in a decrescendo that leaves the oldest ones with nothing on the walls and almost no discipline. The teachers sit in the teachers lounge and gossip openly about students with the door open. The sunlight in the morning is gorgeous. The windows of the English classroom are broken. Every room has a projector, but no way to connect a computer.

After the tour, we sat down to try to decide where I would teach and when, and with which grade levels. According to the Ministry of Education (MINEDUC) I am supposed to teach only 5th through 8th grade, but there aren't enough classes to complete my needed hours. 25 hours of class time is more than most of the salaried teachers work at the school, and to add another 10 of planning and extra-curriculars is very difficult. 

So I'm teaching basically ALL levels, Kindergarten to 8th grade. Where each class goes changes every day and every 45 to 90 minutes, seemingly at random. Class starts at 8AM and ends around 1:30-2:15 PM. An argument broke out over where I should teach, and when, and with whom, and why English is important. In rapid Chileno Spanish (which is nearly incomprehensible, even though understanding is usually what I excel at), the teachers and assistant director decided my fate almost without consulting me. 

I need to buy some pencils to schedule with here, since everything constantly changes.

The orientation last week told all of us volunteers that there would be an orientation in our regions and in our schools, and that the remaining questions we had could be answered once we got here and met all together with the regional director. We would observe classes but not teach until the following week, once we had time to plan with our head teachers and to learn the rules of our schools. And they would give us materials for classes, the books, and other things we might need. We would plan what to teach with our head teachers for at least four hours a week. We could even choose between two models of teaching: independent and flexible. 

HAH! More like the fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants-with-no-support model. The switch that had been at Barely Controlled Chaos ever since I arrived in Chile instantly flipped to Absolute Chaos yesterday when I was expected to teach (off the cuff) classroom instructions to one of the fifth grade classes. 

Complete And Utter Chaos would come today when my head teacher decided not to come back from his lunch break and the director asked me to substitute with no preparation or lesson plan or materials. I don't even have the English curriculum books for the different levels. Nevermind the fact that the MINEDUC specifically told us that we were not to substitute or be in charge of a whole class alone. For three HOURS. I tried for an hour and managed to get the students to make nametags, to have them show me where the USA and Chile are, and to thoroughly confuse them because we could not communicate.

The other teachers I work with make me angry at adults. They gossip, they shirk their duties, they read out scores of students and poke fun at those who aren't doing as well...worst of all they blame everything on the children. The head English teacher esentially said to me by way of introduction, "We teachers always do the lessons so that they are easiest for us, so we don't really care if the students understand." 

Excuse me? We are not on the same page...not even in the same book. The defeatist attitude that permeates the school might come from dissatisfaction with the work, from a lack of materials and resources, from a misunderstanding of what education is and why it is imperative that all children have access to it. It is a public school in a developing country, after all. But they also have this attitude that I should just magically know all the rules of the school, speak impeccable Chileno, and be aware of all Chilean cultural norms. Telepathically. By osmosis. Somehow.

But the children. The children! They make all the Utter Chaos, all the hostility, all the terror at teaching sans plan worth it. They are adorable, every last one. They call me Tia Coleen (Aunty Coleen) and they all ask questions and want to show off that they understand. They kiss me on the cheek one by one after class and say, "bye bye!!" They give me gifts of candy and cookies and wave at me in the halls. Not one of them is a problem or a bad student by their own fault. Their teachers are failing them, and I know we can do better. 

Especially after today, I've decided not to do anything the way the other teachers do. If I overstep boundaries, I will plead Gringa (Stupid Foreign Girl). I don't really care if the other teachers or the administrators are unsupportive or don't like me or lack the resources to do anything more than they are. Paper is cheap. Markers, too. I will make collages and rules and colorful things, and I will not give in to the defeatism. I will not gossip about my students. I will speak English to them and the exposure will be enough. 

I will be the best English Teacher I can be. 

Edit: I've alao aged five years in two days. I look like a teacher now.