I have had an extremely long week that has actually gone by extremely fast!
But warning: In this post I will be writing about a lot of things I learned on a fieldtrip to Villa Grimaldi (Pinochet's main torture center during his regime) which may be just as hard to read as they are to write about. I am going to write about it at the very end for those who prefer not to know about some of the awful things that Pinochet did to the prisoners.
Now that you've been warned, I can tell you about the happy parts of my week! After much long-waited anticipation I finally started my internship with English Opens Doors! I am working at a school called Liceo Víctor Jara (named after a folk musician who was killed during Pinochet's military government -- all of the kids uniforms have little guitars on them!), in the comuna of La Pintana, one of the poorest areas of Santiago. Luckily, there is a bus that goes straight all the way to La Pintana t
hat leaves about a block away from my house, so it's pretty easy to get there! Especially because the bus drops me off about a block away from the school. However, it does take me about an hour and a half in the morning traffic, especially because there is a lot of road construction going on over there right now. Even after the first day, and the fact that I have to start leaving the house at about 6:30 in the morning to get there by 8am, I know that working in that school is going to be an incredible experience.
I will be working there every Wednesday from 8am until 3:15 when the kids get out (for the whole school day) for the rest of the semester. I work with 7th and 8th graders (ages 12-15), with a really nice teacher named Aracelly. When I arrived on my first day, I introduced myself and the students all stood up at their chairs and greeted me by yelling, "Good morning, Miss!" The teacher had a class of 7th graders that were learning about means of transportation. In that class, I helped with pronounciat
ion of the words and walked around the room to help them with class work. The kids in this class were very sweet, and they seemed to be excited about me being there to help them.
After that class, Aracelly and I had a period off, in which we got to know eachother a little bit, and she taught me how to use the SmartBoard (a very high-tech screen that is connected to a computer that is controlled by touch. It also has special electronic pens so the kids and teachers can write on it. It's so cool!) I also helped her grade a family-tree project that the kids had done the week before, by checking for spelling errors and making sure they had actually done the work (some of the trees were blank).
8th graders came in next, in a block period for 2 hours (separated by a break for recess). This group was a little bit harder to handle. I had to confiscate cell phones and music players, and it was pretty much impossible to keep them quiet. It was chaotic! They were learning about how to talk about their favorite musicians, so they made lists of all their favorite musical groups (which I had to help a lot with pronounciation and spelling of a lot of American groups), and then they classified them into English and Spanish singers. Their big project will be to make a magazine with information about
their favorite singer (in English of course).
The next group after our lunch break was also 8th graders, doing the same project about their favorite singers. Since it was the end of the day, it was even harder to keep the class under control. Aracelly continuously yelled at them, had to repeat her instructions, and I had to separate kids to keep them from bothering eachother, and I even had to stay with them alone while Aracelly went to talk to another teacher. It was so hard to keep an eye on everyone during that time, but luckily they were all supposed to be doing individual work, so I just had to walk around and check their sentences and spelling, and stuff like that.
At the end of the day, Aracelly had 3 girls from the first class walk me to the bus stop and make sure I got on the bus, to make sure I got on safe. And when I finally got home at 6pm I was so exhausted that I completely passed out and slept for about 2 hours! Over all my first day went really well, and I am really looking forward to continue working with the kids. Unfortunately, I'm a little scared to bring my camera to the school, so it will be a little while before I can put some pictures up of my classroom (I think I may invest in a disposable camera in a couple of weeks).
(Now I'm going to skip over my fieldtrip on Friday and tell you about my trip to Isla Negra). [Picture: Me, Jessie, and Marie right after we got off the bus in Isla Negra.] On Saturday (April 18th), I woke up early to make it to the bus terminal by 10am to meet up with one of my classmates, Jessie, from my Pablo Neruda class to visit Isla Negra, where Neruda had his favorite house. My class is taking a school-sponsored field trip to see the house next weekend, but since both Jessie and I will be traveling, we decided to go together on our own to see the house. Jessie is from Chicago and is studying here through the Syracuse University. I met up with her and two of her friends (Robin and Marie) from her program (one of which is also in the Neruda class), and the four of us bought round trip bus tickets for our day trip.
We arrived to Isla Negra at around 12:30 and headed straight to good ol' Pablo's house which was actually really close to where the bus had dropped us off. In my opinion, this house was way cooler than his house in Valparaíso, and I could definitely see why it was his favorite. Unfortunately, it wasn't allowed to take pictures inside his house, so you'll have to deal with the pictures I took on the outside. Pablo Neruda loved the ocean, and each room in his house was designed like it was in a ship: rounded celings, small doors, and lots of ship and ocean memorabilia! A lot of his collections are found in this house too: the collection of figureheads (the statues of women placed at the front of ships), his collections of bottles, bugs, pipes, masks, shells, ships in bottles... He had so many! This house was so beautiful, it was made out of stone, and had huge windows in almost every room that looked out onto the ocean. Neruda loved Isla Negra so much he is even buried right outside his house with his third wife, Matilde.
We ate lunch in the museum's café, where we all enjoyed some kind of seafood (shrimp for an appetizer, and I had salmon with rice) and then we walked down to the beach: Neruda's back yard. The weather was sunny, but still breezy, and over all we had a lovely day. Although we only spent our time around Neruda's house and didn't see much more of Isla Negra, we had a really nice time away from the busy city life of Santiago.
Next Wednesday, I am finally going to Buenos Aires to visit the family! It's my cousin Daniela's 20th birthday, and I'm going over for 5 days to visit and celebrate with them. It should be a very fun trip!
Here's some pictures I took at Isla Negra:
Ok, here comes the hard part: my visit to Villa Grimaldi. For those that would rather not know about the ugly history of Chile's military regime, now would be the time to stop reading. On Friday (April 17th), I had signed up for our mandatory fieldtrip to Villa Grimaldi, Pinochet's main torture and detainment camp during the years 1974-78, and to the Central Cemetary where over 5 million chileans are buried.
First, I thought I'd give some background history of Chile's Military Government (known in Spanish as "el golpe militar" or just "el golpe"). From 1970 to 1973, Salvador Allende was the president of a Socialist government in Chile, in which a significant land reform had given over half of Chile's land to the workers. But on September 11th, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet (with US support) attacked La Moneda (Santiago's White House) and took over the government by force. On that day, Allende was found having committed suicide. Pinochet remained in power unil voters put an end to his regime in 1990. Throughout his 17 years in power, thousands of people went "missing" and thousands more were tortured for information about opponents to the regime. What was interesting about Pinochet's military government, was that it was different from many other Latinamerican military governments at the time because most of the tortured survived. As I will explain more later, our guide, Don Pedro, explained that after being tortured, prisoners were released back into society almost like "zombies" which was an intense fear factor to those who opposed Pinochet's government.
The day started at 9:30am at our Campus Oriente, where the EAP office was and where our ILP classes were held. We met with Don Pedro Alejandro Matta, one of the survivors of Villa Grimaldi at age 22, who was later exiled to the United States for the remainder of Pinochet's regime. Villa Grimaldi was only one of hundreds of detention centers that were built throughout Chile, and has been turned into a National Park because after the first few years of Pinochet's regime, the military destroyed all of the buildings in effort to destroy all evidence that the detention center had even exsisted. In the classroom, Don Pedro had a scaled model of Villa Grimaldi, which was helpful to look at before we went to the actual one, becasue he was able to give us a basis for the day and we were able to get an idea of what it looked like when it was used as a torture center. All that remains today are small, tiled, mosaic plaques that mark the placement of buildings. He explained the use of each building, and the types of torture that were executed there (which were all pretty greusome). The worst types of torture that I found were the types in which members of the military would make the prisoners watch and/or listen to their family members of loved ones being tortured (for example, husbands would be forced to watch their wives be raped). See the photo album for more information, as I tried to explain and translate each picture.
After about a 2 hour lecture, my group (about 15 people) took a bus to the actual site of Villa Grimaldi for a tour. We walked around to all of the main places that Don Pedro had explained in his lecture and we were given more information about life in the camp. He even shared some tearful and personal stories. We learned that most prisoners that went through Villa Grimaldi, who were all kept blind-folded through out their stay, stayed between 10 and 15 days before being released back into society. When released, most were so badly injured, like Don Pedro, that it was an extremely long and painful recovery period. Don Pedro told us that when he was released, he could barely walk. He was not able to bend his knees for months after his release becasue of the way he was tortured. He also told us that becasue he was so preocupied about his legs, it wasn't until he could walk normally that he noticed that his shoulder was also badly injured due to the way he had been tied up for the duration of his stay at the Villa (with his hands behind his back).
What made me sick was the fact that a lot of the prisoners weren't even guilty of anything. They were just taken away from their daily lives and tortured for information about friends and family members that were suspected to be contrary to the new government. The tower that you can see in the album (on the model scale) was re-constructed and we had the oppertunity to go inside to see some extremely tiny cells that had doors that slid upwards, barely big enough to crawl into. Prisoners rarely survived being in the tower, as they were brought up there between torture sessions. If you come to Chile, I highly recommend going to Villa Grimaldi, but I would also suggest having a guide to take you around.
After the tour, we all piled onto the bus again to make our way over to El Cementerio Central (the central cemetary) where over 5 million chileans are buried, (just about as many as are living!) with more being buried every day (in fact, there was a funeral going on when we arrived). It was very impressive, and enormous! It seemed as if you could walk on forever. The most interesting thing I found about the cemetary in general, is that it matches Chile in general, in terms of its classism. Chilean society is extremely classist, and by walking through the cemetary, this became very notable. At the very front of the cemetary, near the entrance, the tombs were impressive. Huge houses, almost, held entire families, clearly of the highest class, and there were roads and paths that lead to even more areas of other huge tombs. Among the high-class tombs was the tomb of Salvador Allende's family (which was pretty ironic, if you ask me, since he was extremely socialist, and probably would have hated to be affiliated with members of the upper class). It was enormous (please see the album). As of today, only Salvador and one of his daughters are buried there, but there is space for the rest of his family for when that time comes.
As we walked futher, we came accross the upper-middle class tombs, which were not as big as the ones of the highest class, but still very impressive constructions. We continued walking, and came across the lower-middle class tombs, which resembled apartments (just like what living upper class chileans reside in). And as we walked a little further, we got to the lower class part of the cemetary. It was such an abrubt change that it surprised me! This area was definitely the most popular, as I could see graves going on for what seemed like miles! These were the most colorful ones, that were covered in flowers and messages from family members, and most were covered by some kind of cloth roof. I saw some family members visiting and watering the plants around their loved-one's graves.
At the very end of the Cemetary, Don Pedro took us to see the graves of a lot of the people that died under Pinochet's regime. A lot of the graves were marked S.N., or "sin nombre" (no name) for those that were not able to be identified. Also, behind those was a long wall full of graves for those people that died within the first few years of the military government. One of the more interesting ones that was there was the grave of Víctor Jara, the folk singer that my English Opens Doors school is named after. He became famous for singing a lot of polical songs, which is why he was targeted by the military. Víctor Jara was captured and brought tothe National Stadium, which is now called "el Estadio Víctor Jara", where he was tortured and killed. While he was tortured, the miltants broke his hands, and then threw a guitar at him and, mockingly, asked him to sing for them. He was killed shortly after that.
Lastly, we saw a huge plaque that had a lot of names of the pepole that disappeared during the military regime. Don Pedro made some closing statements and then bid us good-bye, and we took the bus back to the center of Santiago. Over all, I loved the fieldtrip. I learned so much and I am really happy that it is mandatory. Pinochet's military regime was so important in Chile's history, that it's hard to live here day to day and not hear something about it. It's interesting that in some history musems here, the years 1973 to 1990 are completely left out because no one knows how the military should be portrayed. It was an extremely meaningful and tearful day, and I am very pleased with the experience.
If you were brave enough to read this section of my blog, I really hope you learned something valuable, and I hope it wasn't too intense to read. You can now look forward to reading about my trip to Buenos Aires next!
Hasta luego!
Amara
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