And that's definitely a good thing, because it rains a lot here in the autumn. Yesterday, after the trip to El Espolón and my uncomfortable bus ride back from the boat launch, I was walking back to the pensión and saw this:
This is the first rainbow I've seen in a very long time! I think it's providential. It's a sign! Nature is saying to me, "Kate, I am showering Futaleufú with my watery benevolence, creating vast puddles on every street corner so as to test your ingenuity when you wish to walk anywhere without getting ankle-deep in muddy water, sending forth gusts of wind that oh-so-melodiously shake the windows of the house and cause the petals to capriciously leap off those lovely orange flowers out front, lowering the figurative thermostat and thus allowing the snow on those majestic peaks to creep ever-closer to the softly smoking town below... These things I do for you. For more than forty days and forty nights, this deluge of generosity, this flood of well-wishing, I will send to you. Here is a symbol of this promise. We call it Rainbow."
Now, I know that a rainbow is supposed to signal the end of rain, but I saw this yesterday and it rained all day today. Besides, everything's all turned around in the southern hemisphere: why not symbolism? A rainbow is arco iris in Spanish, which I like because it carries with it a literary connotation, a shadow of Greek mythology, a shade of something more than just a bow that is formed by light refracting through raindrops.
Actually, I think the rain does some very interesting things to the landscape, and is soothing (again, the drip-drips on the tin roof), so I don't mind it. The surroundings become beautifully dramatic -- I imagine that if Emily Brontë were Chilean, she would have written about the Heights of Futaleufú during autumn. It's suitably gloomy and sweeping and emotive.
Here are those crawly clouds, as well as another arco iris that I saw this morning:
And finally.... the House!
This is Hospedaje Adolfo, or Eva's pensión, or a menagerie of educators. The upper-left window is mine, which means I have a Room with a View:
Unfortunately, I think I also have Bedbugs.
I was supposed to go out to more rural schools today, El Lonconao and El Límite, but classes there were cancelled for the third week in a row, due to "meetings." Next week is semana santa, so there's no school that Friday, either. I have yet to meet my students at El Lonconao.
These meetings are indicative of a big problem here in Chile: bureaucracy. There's a special order for every kind of day-to-day interaction -- when I buy supplies for my classes, even if I'm just buying a single piece of cardboard and the only person in the store, the assistant has to write up a ticket for the price, which I then carry over to the shop owner, who takes my money and gives me a receipt, and I carry that receipt back to the assistant, who hands me my cardboard. And this is in Futa. It was worse in Santiago.
When it comes to the meetings in the schools, I'm under the impression that they want to do all they can to improve the education of the children in the area (good), but that they spend so long talking about it and suspend so many classes that they don't accomplish much, or erode that which they have accomplished (bad). People care, and there are individuals that are efficient and hard-working (like Eva), but there is also just such a huge emphasis on following procedures and exhausting every possibility and politely inquiring after everybody's third cousin's wife's black-sheep-of-a-brother that any efficient action by those individuals is stymied. But again, I emphasize, they care.
Class was über-fun on Thursday in El Espolón. We are working on the body, and they learned the Hokey-Pokey. All of the cabros there are extremely sweet and earnest and love to participate. There's this little boy named Cristián (about 8, I think), who gets excited during songs, games, quiet time for drawing, really all the time, and he lets loose this bubbly, high-pitched laughter, which makes me laugh, which makes the other students laugh... Part of the charm of those kids is the way that they all get along and help each other, despite coming from different parts and being of all different ages. The school there is only one room, for students up through 8th grade, after which they go to high school in Futa or a larger city where they have family. The children come from remote areas like the ones in my earlier post, the ones with the smoke signals, and live at the school during the week. They go home over the weekend. Anyway, Cristián is buddies with the older students, and they all have running jokes and these great relationships and he and Macarena, a sweet, quiet little girl, don't stick out at all even though they are the youngest. I can't do it justice -- it must be observed!
