Loretta uses her thumb to wipe the smear of chocolate off Cristobal’s cheek.  There are only a few minutes left of recreo, and as soon as she has finished he races off to rejoin the game of throw-the-tennis-ball-as-far-as-you-can-and-then-everyone-run-after-it. 

“His mother told me to look after him,” she says, shaking her head as if she has spent decades keeping little faces clean.  Loretta is in third grade and just barely taller than my hip.

“Is Cristobal your brother?”  I ask.

She shakes her head again, sending the blue baubles attached to her hair ties wobbling.  “He’s just my friend.”

The bell rings, signaling the end of recreo.  Some of the students are lining up, but the boys chasing the tennis ball run past Loretta and me in a flurry of dust, still intent on their game.  When the ball comes back our way again Loretta catches it, gives her classmates a look of exasperation, and then marches off towards the classroom with her pigtails bobbing behind her.  The group of boys, sweat on their foreheads and dust on their navy uniformed sweaters, make their way over to the line outside the classroom door.  Cristobal, at least, has clean cheeks.

The music starts up as the file into the classroom, first the line of girls and then the boys.  The celebration of the 18^th of September continues for the entire month, long past the actual day of independence, and the school is preparing for the celebratory dance showcase that is happening on Saturday, when every class will perform a traditional Chilean dance as well as a piece from another country, and their parents and tios and abuelitos will come to watch them and eat empanadas. 

The music is especially loud here in 3A, close to the center courtyard where the stage is being built and the dances practiced.  The PE teacher is using a microphone to call instructions to the dancing students, and he is either holding it too close to his face or playing the volume too loudly, because his words are distorted as they bounce into the classroom.

I’m positive that we’ll never get anything done, but I close the door and Miss Cecilia writes the date on the board, and even though it sounds like there is a football match or a trivia night going on outside the students get out their books and stretch their hands up to answer questions.  Juan Pablo, sitting in the back against the window, looks out longingly towards the music.  We can’t really see the dancers from the classroom—just the occasionally teasing flick of a white handkerchief—but he leans out the open window anyway.  Surprisingly, he is one of the few students who can’t seem to ignore the music—Javiera, sitting next to him, is dying to tell me that camels have big flat feet and store water in their humps (we’re reading a book called Wonderful Wild Animals—can you guess what it’s about?)

The teachers cannot wait for Saturday, because after Saturday the dance practices will stop and they won’t have to yell over traditional music from any country.  The students are excited for Saturday because they have been practicing for weeks and they will finally get to wear their costumes, the long skirts and wide-brimmed hats.  I’m looking forward to Saturday because everyone tells me it is the best event of the school year. 

The classroom is decorated with red, white, and blue streamers, and a large Chilean flag hangs on the back wall, the bottom edge draping over the row of backpacks on hooks.  Loretta is the first to finish the exercise, copying sentences down from the board and correctly using “there are” versus “there is.”  Somehow, even with the sound of the music and the PE teacher calling out names and steps, almost everyone behaves, so at the end of class we give out stickers. 

All in all, not a bad way to spend an hour.

The Dunes of Ritoque

I spent last weekend in Ritoque, a beach about two and a half hours from Santiago and a few kilometers outside the nearby town of Quintero.  If you walk from the bus terminal in town to the hostel on the beach, you’ll see horses crossing the street freely, pausing in their journey from one field to the next to sniff the flowers on the side of the road.

The hostel is perched above the shore, three small buildings climbing up the hill, and as we ducked through the wooden fence that separates the dirt road from the beach my bare toes drank in the warmth of the sand.  The hostel dogs, Rainbow and Paltita, followed us, and before we had made it to the water’s edge a third dog had joined—a flea-bitten, short-legged mutt we named Groupie for the way he panted after the others.

The seven of us—four people and three dogs—followed the gentle curve of the coast, keeping far enough away from the water to avoid the frigid sting of the waves but close enough to hear the crunch of shells under our feet.  We walked for a while before we saw the path Angie had described, cutting through the small sand dunes that bordered the beach. 

It grew quiet as we walked past the first row of dunes, the ocean silenced by sand.  On this side of the world, where the sun didn’t have to compete with the wind, it was hotter, burning a little between my toes.  The sand at the water’s edge had been interrupted only by seashells, but here the ground was covered by squat dark green plants.  A set of railroad tracks, looking almost too old to be useable, ran alongside the dunes, its two dark metal rails reaching out towards the horizon.  We walked along the tracks, stepping from one wooden tie to the next, and the unnatural size of each step reminded me for a moment of Pennsylvania, where we used to do the same—shortening our steps from tie to tie, stretching our legs further to bridge the gap when a board was missing.

We turned left again at the next path, leaving the railroad tracks and cutting deeper into the dunes.  The dogs were still with us, scampering around the low-lying bushes and returning to the path every few minutes to check up on our ankles.  As we walked, the plants grew scarce and the path dissolved into dunes much bigger than the first ones we had passed through, steep hills of sand rolling up into the sky.

We climbed up towards that sky, blue and cloudless, running when the sand was too hot for our feet to stand.  At the top the wind was strong again, kicking sand up against out legs, but we let it beat at us while we stood and watched the world.  Behind us, the dunes seemed to stretch on endlessly.  The Pacific opened in the other direction, and from where we stood the waves that crashed on the shoreline and the bobbing shapes of the surfers waiting to catch them seemed tiny, nothing but specks of color bordering the endless blue.  Standing there at the top, my skin growing red from the joint assault of the wind and the sun, it seemed like there was nothing else: only wind and sun, dunes and ocean.  The sand rolling out from one horizon while the waves spilled out from the other. 

Paltita raced down the dune, a cloud of shining black fur and sand, and then collapsed on the side of the next hill, panting happily.  They were flying kites down on the beach, a few shaped like birds or airplanes but most of them the red white and blue of the Chilean flag, the strings that anchored them to the world almost invisible.  I sat down, burying my legs in the warm sand, and Paltita raced back up the side of the dune and then flung her exhausted body down next to me.  We watched the kites on the beach below us, Chilean stars tugging towards the sky.

View of the beach from out balcony in the hostel.

Spring is here, and it sounds like the Cueca!

This coming Monday is the 18^th of September, Chile’s Independence Day, and the country has been preparing since long before we ripped August from the calendar.  There are Chilean flags hanging on every building and being sold on every corner, and the windows of bakeries are plastered with hand-made signs reminding you to order you empanadas in advance.  In collegio, the students have been practicing the cueca, Chile’s national dance, during the periods normally reserved for both PE and music.

Today, my collegio hosted a Cueca competition that was attended by all the collegios in the EduCA network (there are currently eleven such collegios in Santiago).  Although the competition started early in the morning and lasted the entire day, classes continued as normal for the students who weren’t actively dancing.  As normal as you can get, at least, where there is Cueca music pulsing across the yard and pouring into the classrooms, so overwhelming that I found myself trying to explain grammar in tempo.  In sixth grade, Gonzalo slid the wide glass window back open no matter how many times I closed it, flooding the classroom with music while he leaned out to look at the dancers twirling their handkerchiefs under the wide white tent, spinning around and around each other but never quite making contact.

I can’t blame them for ignoring their workbooks, not when there was so much color outside.  Spring has come with September, with warm winds and a stronger sun, and I was almost hot when I stood on the edges of the tent during my break and watched the dancers.  The most fascinating part is the clothing; boys wear cowboy hats, flannel ponchos, and boots with gleaming, sharp-looking spurs while the girls wear bright-colored country dresses that are tied tightly at the waist by a white apron and then open out like bells into wide skirts.  No one dances without a white handkerchief. 

The older dancers I saw in the afternoon were beautiful, their steps precise, but my favorite to watch were the young dancers who had finished in the morning and spent the afternoon playing in their bright clothing, the boys kicking up dust with their jingling spurs and the girls running after them with their full skirts bouncing, their carefully twisted hair coming undone.  “Tia!” one of the boys yelled as he nearly ran into me, handing me a small branch of tiny white flowers, the kind that are blooming in the trees near the kindergarten classroom.  The flowers were slightly crushed, and a little dirty, and before I could thank him he had run off.  The bell rang, signaling the start of the next class, just as a new set of dancers took the floor and the music surged forward again.  I turned and went to class, where I knew the windows would be wide open.

                                         The giant Chilean flag outside La Moneda

I Like

Yesterday, in Primero Basico (first grade), we practiced I like and I don’t like. 

“What do you like?” I ask the class, and both hands and students leap into the air.

“Tomatoes! Tomatoes!” Juan Pablo yells as he jumps out of his seat.  “I tomatoes!” he is bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet now, ignoring my attempt at a stern look and gripping the edge of his desk so he can jump higher.

“Javiera?” I ask, turning to the tiny girl whose right hand is straining towards the ceiling. 

“I,” she says the first word exploding out of her mouth.  Then she pauses, thinking.  I squat down next to her desk so that I can hear her better.

“I like,” she says, pushing the k sound out of her mouth with effort.

I nod.

“I like cheese!” she says finally, and although her tongue trips a little on the harsh s at the end of cheese she is smiling.

“Good job!” I say, standing back up to address the dozen tiny hands still waving in the air.  I ask and they answer for the next few minutes, until Juan Pablo has settled back into his seat and we have discovered that nearly everybody likes ice cream.  Miss Yvonne, the head English teacher, is taping flashcards to the whiteboard when I hear Javiera.

“Miss!” she is calling, waving her arm in the air.  “Miss!”

“Yes?” I ask, sitting down on my heels so that the rest of the students can see over me.

“What does, ¨ she says, and then stops, her forehead furrowing with concentration.  ¨What do you like?” she asks.

I think.

I like when my train leaves the Vicente Valdés metro station, barreling up from underground and out into the morning.  It’s early, and only the edges of the sun spill over the mountains, spreading a soft light across the city.  I like the fresh smell of outside, a smell of cold and wide open space that pours through the open windows and flushes out the thick scent of the tunnels.  I like the sound of the train, the hum it makes as it slides along the tracks in a path that mirrors the curve of the mountains.  Most of all I like the mountains that stand steadily in the east, their white peaks pushing up into the sky. 

Sometimes, the clouds are so low and thick that its hard to tell where cloud ends and mountain begins, what is snow and what is condensation.  I like it more when the sky is clear and the sunrise colors the peaks pink, a shade of soft rose that fades slowly into tangerine.  By the time I get off at my stop, Las Mercedes, and come out from the station, the sun has pulled itself out into the sky and the mountain tops are white again. 

I turn to look at the board, but there are no flashcards depicting mountains or trains or the smell of a tunnel.  Yet I can’t complain, because there are plenty of options—ice cream, cheese, tomatoes, bread, and ham. 

“Miss?” Javiera asks again.

“I like cheese too,” I say, and it’s true.

View of Santiago from Cerro Santa Lucia, a hill in the center of the city.

I also like: fresh fruits and veggies from La Vega!

Sunrise from Line 4 (the photo doesn't do it justice)