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Published: April 26th 2006
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The autumn is about to arrive in Valparaíso, even though it doesn’t seem to mean such a great change in the lives of the people of Valparaíso. Some of the people that are contracted might have a week or two of winter holidays to look forward to in July, but the majority keep on working or whatever it is that they are doing as usual. In the organisation where I’m working we are about to start with a new concept. It’s very exiting and very new, but so far it’s just an idea and we have still to find out how we’ll go on the implementation stage. The concept is called planning ahead. It was at this weeks staff meeting that the co-ordinator presented the revolutionary idea of making a plan of the activities of the coming month in advance instead of as usual doing it the very same day. The rest of the team mumbled suspiciously but agreed on giving it a try, so next week the very first planning meeting of the organisation will be held.
I was just getting quite comfortable with the day to day planning. One great thing about it is that there’s never any
need to go around worrying about things since you don’t really know what will happen. Since you never really know for example how many of the youths that will show up for an activity is almost unnecessary to plan ahead since it’s very likely that you’ll have to change your planning. This does however at the same time make achieving the objectives of the project quite a challenge, which might be a reason for the sudden change of strategy.
Connecting with “the kids” has been a lot easier than I first thought. I have two principal explanations to this. The first is the colour of my hair and the second my knowledge (even though it’s limited) in capoeira. At the moment I have three different groups of youths that I have started giving classes in capoeira. I have also managed to involve a few other people from my capoeira group as volunteers, so hopefully the work will continue even after I have left.
Before I started working in the field I thought that being blond and blue-eyed would cause me quite a lot of problems, but it has actually turned out to be a strength, using it the
right way. It does for example always create a natural way to start a discussion. After a while of shyness the curiosity always takes over and somebody decides to find out more about who the strange blond foreigner is. In difference to many other countries that I have visited, where you clearly can see the question marks appear in the faces of the people upon telling them the name of my home country (often followed by “Oh Sweden, you’re the ones with the chocolate and the watches, right?), the Chileans know perfectly well where Sweden is. And I guess with 45 000 Chileans currently living in Sweden (whose population in total is about 8,5 millions) the two countries have a come to have a special connection. Almost everyone has a relative or knows someone that’s currently living in Sweden. And the most famous Swede here is of course originally a Chilean - DJ Mendez, which most people seem to think are some kind of Michel Jackson in Sweden. They get very surprised when I comment that I unfortunately don’t know a single song by DJ Mendez, and that I in the past months have heard his name being mentioned more
times than ever before.
Anyhow, many thanks for the contributions and intents to help me solve some of the few mysteries out of which I must say that Johan N won the first price. I will try to figure out a good reward (some of you might remember the well-stored camel cheese from Mongolia that Erik scored in another competition when I was in eastern Asia). If you didn’t read his entry go to comments in the entry “the city that’s upside down”. However I’m pretty sure that I’ll be leaving Valparaíso on the18th of May for a month (or two) of samba, carpiriñas and capoeira in Brazil, with quite a few mysteries remaining to be solved.
One of them, that I can’t resist telling you about, is the one with the bus inspectors. The micros (buses) trafficking Valparaíso and its surroundings are all private, which in practise mean that it’ll take you at least twice as long to reach your destination as in car, since they keep on stopping and waiting until they have enough passengers to make it worth the trip. The microdrivers, that are exclusively men, have due to the tough climate and the competition
developed quite a tough attitude making them known as “the micromafia”. They are however still under some sort of control (remember that Chile in comparison to for example Centralamerica is an organised country) which means that they for example should be running with a certain frequency. To control this various bus inspectors are positioned along the roadside with a pen and very secret note book where they each and every day take very important notes of everything that has to do with the buses, like for example arrival times, passengers etc. The friendly ones also function as living time tables (since printed ones do not exist) and most of them actually seem to be quite happy to show off ,when given the opportunity, with their amazing knowledge in the area of the micros of Valparaíso. It’s at least a very good way of keeping hundreds of people with jobs.
To be honest leaving this town and this country will most likely leave me with more things to miss than the mysteries and funny details. The friendly Chilean is for sure not a myth. In addition to the hospitality and social nature people are just so helpful that they make
me feel ashamed. Even the thieves are nice. Someone stole my wallet a while ago on the bus I think. However a few days later it appeared, without the cash but with all other documents, in a church. The people in the church told me that they quite often found wallets there, and had a theory that the reason for this was they were considered honest people that would help out with handing over the wallets with the documents to their owners again.
More than the people I will for sure miss the nature. There are not so many places in the world where you easily can take off and climb a mountain (or “hill” that they are called here) on 5000 meters (or more if you can handle it) on the weekends. For all climbing fans out there I have made a special gallery with climbing photos (that has recently been updated with more photos) which you can find at http://www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/johannalo/Gallery/
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nella
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kram
vilka underbara bilder. jag forstar om du har det helt underbart. ah johanna, jag ar sa glad att vi ses snart. massa karlek/nella