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Picture Guy
This guy followed us around and took tons of pictures. Our second day in Santiago (and first full one) we woke up at times varying from 5 AM to 7:45 AM. After breakfast Lena, a peace core volunteer, met with us to take us to the school we were to visit. Lena described the school as one of the best in Santiago so far as resources and cleanliness and such. Here having a lot of resources means having a computer lab with 20 or 30 computers for hundreds of kids. The computers can't even be used all the time because there are random blackouts. Nonetheless this school holds some of the city's finest bright young minds. Lena told us of one student who she said she hoped would be able to travel to the united states for the summer soon.
Despite the apparent lack of resources and facilities, the students were wonderful. We sat in on a class discussing the dangers of HIV/AIDS which here is spelled VIH/SIDA. The entire class appeared to be student run, and the kids running it were engaging and seemed to really care about what they were teaching. The class itself was respectful, engaged and welcoming to the presenters as well as to our own
presence among them.
After the class we went outside and brought out a frisbee and started to toss it around. A large circle formed with three or four of us and about 15 of the dominican students tossing the single frisbee. I wish we had them for our frisbee team. They picked up throwing and catching in about 5 minutes. Chris was beckoned up to the top of the orange concrete bleachers where he was encouraged to dance, wiggling his butt to the rhythm of their chanting and a beat pumped out of tiny speakers somewhere. Soon Devin joined him and the entire party moved under a thatched pavilion in the school yard. The noise beneath the pavilion reached deafening levels as one after another the visitors (that's us) were beckoned enthusiastically into the center to dance wildly to the beat of two boys drumming on checkerboards. The bottle caps used for checkers were long forgotten. Nobody escaped the dance circle, not even the chaperones, who got dragged in just like the rest of us. They even dragged in the computer tech teacher, and she responded enthusiastically, jumping into the center and dancing as willingly as anyone else if
not more so. The relationship between the teachers and the students reminds me heavily of the relationship we at Compass share with our teachers. There was no reprimanding that I saw, and the teachers addressed the students as friends, and vice versa. The teachers seemed to be really proud of their students, and the students grateful for the opportunity they had been given in attending that school. This is something I often forget in my own life and must remind myself of.
On our way out I was walking next to a little girl of perhaps 6 or 7 years. She said, "Hola" so I asked her what her name was (I sadly forget it now). I told her my name after which she fired off a sentence in rapid-fire spanish. Flustered, I was wondering what to do, when I realized I had heard the word "paiz" which means "country" in her sentence. Taking a gamble I explained that I was from a ways north of New York City, a landmark that people are most likely to know down there, and exchanged a couple more sentences with her before we reached the end of the block and parted ways.
Arrival
Chris plays for a dominican family while we wait to find our bags (which end up still being in Miami) The whole exchange left me with a smile and a feeling of great joy as my world had expanded again. It was the same feeling I got from touching hands with the little boys sitting on the wall surrounding their packed baseball field when we had first entered the school.
There is much less of a sense of boundaries here, and I don't mean that as a bad thing (although sometimes I'm sure it can be). One boy seemed particularly interested in us at the school, so he followed us around and took picture after picture of us everywhere we went. He also had a teacher take a picture of our group with him, planting himself directly in the center of the picture between Rachel and Miah.
On a similar note, we had been warned that men and boys would cat-call and hiss, which is there version of wolf-whistling, and that it could be incessant and annoying. Well we have certainly encountered lots of that. What they didn't tell us is that it's not only guys who do this. Chris, Devin and I get hissed at too, which surprised me, because the idea I'd gotten was that the
The Presenters
Three of the kids who presented to their peers on HIV/AIDS incessant barrage of unwanted male attention meant women tended to raise shields and just try to ignore it. As it turns out, while this does happen, women are often just as forcibly flirtatious as the men. While in the supermarket a girl even came up behind me and ran her hand through my hair. I assumed it was Devin messing with me until she blew me a kiss. Confused, I went back down the unmoving escalator that served as stairs.
For dinner we ate at the hotel. I had some delicious stewed chicken with mangu (mashed plantains, and I may have misspelled it) and a plate of fresh cold vegetables.
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