Today is Day 13 in Chile, South America. It´s February 26, 2010, and it is five hours ahead from Pacific Standard Time in California.
As one can easily see, it has been over a year since I have posted to this blog. In the intervening months I have tried other methods of getting myself to write, including creating a web site on Google. I´ve also been working on a web magazine that I´ve dubbed South59Review, using a web page design program, but it´s kinda slow going since it´s not Microsoft-based and therefore uses different conventions. It´s a really decent program, from the UK and cost much less, but it´s taking me a while to learn how to use it efficiently. I will keep plugging away at it, and upload the site to a web hosting service when I´m ready.
The reality is that the form in which I write is of little consequence. My critical struggle and challenge is for me to write.
Being on another continent has been great in this regard. It pushes and inspires me to reflect upon and write down my experiences over the past two weeks. Many of my thoughts are about the privileges that my life is based on as a citizen of the United States. While to date I´ve considered my existence somewhat modest in the context of the U.S.–living in a 900-square-foot home in a working class neighborhood in Richmond, California–the level of comfort I take for granted compels me to think about how my condition and its consumption of resources is based on the collective infliction of hardships upon many other human beings all around the globe.
I say this not in a spirit of self-aggrandizement, but as an effort to describe reality.
Even within the U.S. context I realize that I live a life that has a lot of privileges and luxury. I can drive where I want and not have to rely on public transportation. I can buy any kind of food I want, eat at any number of restaurants serving any conceivable type of cuisine. In the form of my pension I receive a stable form of income. While I don´t have the capital to own a vacation home, or drive a Prius or Lexus or Audi or Mercedes (let alone a Maserati or Porsche) , or travel abroad whenever and wherever I want to, or buy the kinds of gifts for my loved ones that I´d like to, or buy season tickets to the Warriors or Giants or 49ers, I figure that I´m still squarely in a privileged class.
So this is what I notice and think about during my stay here in Chile. It´s in the background of my mind as Alison and I visit her Chilean friends and family members, as I struggle to understand the conversations in Spanish and try to communicate so clumsily and ineptly with the beautiful people here. If only I can hold on to this feeling of life here through the lens of another people when I get back home. My life in California is so U.S.-centric, and as such, my humanity feels a bit mummified, wrapped in layers of cloth encrusted with fossilized layers of individualism, isolation, consumerism, fear, and paranoia. What I´ve learned from my Chilean friends is how being warm with each other is expected and natural, just part of being a human being. It´s an important lesson to remember.
Tomorrow is our host Myrtha´s 80th birthday party. This is the reason why we are here. Myrtha is Alison´s Chilean mother, the matriarch of the family she stayed with during her senior year in high school. Myrtha had 6 children over a period of 7 years–four daughters and two sons. One daughter was murdered by the Chilean secret police during the Pinochet years. The youngest, a son, died three years ago from a at the age of fall while climbing in the Chilean Andes. The other four are all in their late 40s or early 50s, have families of their own and are doing well.
These are the folks Alison and I have been spending most of our time with. It´s difficult to express how special for me to have these experiences. I hope to figure out a way to stay connected with these people. This experience also compels me to learn how to speak, read, and write Spanish. So I´ll need to do this. And learn how to speak Japanese. The world is vast, yet touchable. And I want to be able to touch it.
Notes of the Day 
Leave a comment