Wow! This week went by really fast!

The teachers in Chile are on strike, so there wasn't any class in the school for the last week.  However, the rural schools are still in session, partly because the information is not spread widely enough and there's no one to organize the strike for them, and partly because it's so hard for the students to get to the school that it would be almost cruel to send them away for an undetermined period of time, and then have to call them back, suddenly.  

So, I went to El Espolón again, despite the strike -- and the cold!  I wore long underwear, sweats, jeans over the sweats, and six shirts/sweaters/vest.  And still those tendrils of cool air, those insidious fingers of winter, found their way past the barriers and reached deep into my bones.  But I survived.

And I took pictures.  Here are the children, playing with marbles:

The girls!  Trinidad, Macarena, Karina, and Jesica.

So incredibly sweet!  Roxana, Amadeo, Macarena, Cristián, Karina, Trinidad, and Jesica.

Copying new vocabulary for some activities!

Two of the boys!  Amadeo catches on really quickly, and is an amazing artist.  Cristián is just about the most adorable kid I've ever worked with.

Vilma, the Inspectora of the school.  She's slightly crazy.  I think they go so long without visitors that she gets really excited when meeting someone new.  Vilma has a habit of talking really fast and even on the intakes of breath.  "MellamoVilmaybienvenidosalaescuela."  Her husband, Lorenzo, is the teacher.  They've been working at El Espolón for over 20 years, living there during the week and going home on the weekends.  

Vilma was wearing a red string around her right wrist, and silver and copper rings on her right thumb.  She explained that the adornments were to help her thumb, because she couldn't bend it for a day.  I thought that was interesting.

It probably snowed today in Espolón.  Here are some pictures of the boat launch with the portentous clouds.  Amongst all the neblina and the white clouds hanging overhead were these neon-blue intruders.  They may look like the shadows of the mountains but it's really just heavy clouds, waiting to drop their snow on the lake and its people.

More!

The Catholic chapel, where they have mass.  Sometimes.  

This is 100% of my students from El Lonconao.  It's a rural school with one classroom, a horse in the schoolyard, a chalkboard (wow!), and a really wacky teacher.  I go once a week, for an hour-and-a-half on Friday mornings, and these two little goats, Francisco and Bernardo, are going to be the best in their class when it comes to English, with all the personalized attention they're getting!

The Monkey-Puzzle Tree!

(Thanks, Boulderites!)  This is the national tree of Chile, according to Kelton and Wiki.  Según Eva, it has a long and slender fruit that is used in some delicious treats.  There are several of them in Futaleufú, but they are hard to keep around because they dry out and die.  Here's one of the trees in the plaza:

Ouch!

Fotos of Futa in the Fall

I've seen stranded cats and jumping dogs, all over town.

I've seen the leaves change, from green to brown.

Monkey puzzle trees, house-fires,

Chubby chickens and flat tires,

Bloody sidewalks and bottles of beer,

Even the first snowfall of the year.

Yet I haven't uploaded a single view

Of how the town's changed, for all of you.

So here are some photos, only a few,

Of fall and the winter in Futaleufú!

These trees are called álamos; there is a street in Santiago named the Alameda because of the trees that line it.  I'm not sure about our own Alamo -- according to the ever-dependable Wiki, the Mexican Army named it, so it's possible that it refers to the same trees...

The line of red trees occurs in the fall and lasts through the spring.  They are called lenga, and the ones that stay green are called coigüe.  The lenga don't lose their leaves -- they just change color, due in part to the high altitude, as well as the cold, of course.  The coigüe are victims of the logging industry down south here, though I shouldn't criticize too much because it's what keeps us warm.  I found that these color changes were the most impressively pretty part of the autumn here, especially on sunny blue days and with snow.

I've been taken to task for not writing often enough on this blog, soooooo....

.... my new goal is to write something every other day, be it ever-so-boring or ever-so-short!

I'll start with the people I live with.  That could provide enough fodder for the entire year, but I'll keep it short and neat! ;)

Yohanna:  the art teacher at the school.  Yohanna is the typical artist, with a female mullet, a need for solitude, and a feeling of superiority over the other, unenlightened teachers.  She's extremely generous and has a lively sense of humor.  For example, we were talking about the H1N1 flu and about mutations of viruses and mutations of cells like in cancer and other mutations at the microbiological level, and she pipes in with, "Yes, like Michael Jackson."  Yohanna speaks intermediate English, and likes to practice with me, which inevitably leads to a lot of misunderstandings and inside jokes.  "I like pie.  That's my truth."  She is one of nine children, grew up on the outskirts of the city of Concepción, and believes that the eggs here in the South are far inferior to those that they had at home.  Yohanna has a collection of strange art films, performance art or dance theater or something like that, which she likes to share with me.  I don't have the heart to tell her that I would rather watch Shrek for the 82nd time. 

onces again, and little kiddies

I heard another version of the onces story, where it's the miners' submissive wives that create the code so that their husbands don't know that they are drinking.

They like me, they really like me!  Last Friday I had class with 4th grade for the first time (schedule changes, never ends), and when I walked into the classroom I got a standing ovation, complete with shrieking that only 8- and 9-year-old girls can achieve.  It was deafening, and definitely hard-warming. :)  And again, a week ago I had class on a Saturday because we get next Friday off and they had to make up for it.  I was walking around the school after my last class and saw the preschool class lined up after their computation lesson.  The girl I mentioned before, Alondra, spots me and yells, "Tía!" and runs over to give me a hug.  Immediately, the others turn around to see what she's doing, and soon I'm being hugged by so many children that they cut off my air, knock me over, and I end up at the bottom of a wriggling pile of miniature people.  I had a headache for hours afterwards, but it was possibly the sweetest thing and the only thing that made up for having to work on a Saturday.

P.S. the littler kids, until about 6th grade, refer to their teachers as tía or tío (aunt or uncle).  After that, they are Profe, or in English class, Teacher, or Miss.

Something I learned today

They eat a LOT of bread in Chile.  Apparently, this country has the 2nd highest consumption of bread in the world, at least according to my housemates.  Breakfast consists of bread and cheese and jam, lunch is the big meal with soup or meat and potatoes (and bread), and then there's teatime, which once again consists of bread and cheese and jam.  Today I asked Juan Pablo (music teacher, housemate) why their teatime/supper is called onces.  According to him, there were a lot of miners working in Chile, and when they would go to supper they would often drink, sometimes quite a bit.  The bosses didn't like this, for various reasons, and so the miners began to keep it secret, saying they were going to take onces because A-G-U-A-R-D-I-E-N-T-E, or liquor, has eleven letters in it.  It was a code to keep their drinking activities under wraps, and the Chileans still call their evening meal onces as a result, despite the strongest drink available being coffee.