In the groove...

This week I heard Dan tell a coworker during his daily skype meeting that there was no big news and that we're on cruise control now. That said, I give you permission to stop reading now unless your a grandparent! :-)

It's true. No big news. We are starting to feel the wind down and we're just cruising through our daily routines. So some quick updates.

Dan is spending a lot of time on skype with India these days. As part of Dan's new parent company's plan to expand, the developers team went from three to eleven in a little over a month. So his solitary days of working on code are now interspersed with lots of phone calls from across the world - folks getting up to speed on that same code. Dan continues to run with the Viña Runners. Tomorrow he's signed up for a 10K! We're all impressed. He also has requested Spanish at dinners after spending his work day in English, which we're all okay about - although we slip back and forth really.

Theo continues to love soccer and marbles at school. He's usually willing to take about a 2 mile run along the ocean with me while Grace is her Tae Kwan Do class after school on Wednesdays. Very cool. He recently brought home his "dream room" made from a shoe box and plastilina (play do/clay-like substance). It was super cool and looked a bit like a room from Club Penguin. My favorite was the hanging chandelier. Yesterday, we had Theo's friend Vincente and his family over for pizza and wine. Fabiola is a social worker and Marcelo is a music professor and Diego is a cutie pie 2 year-old brother. We had such a good time - with lots of silliness and soccer balls moving in this little space!

Gracie now can loosely fit into my shoes! Yikes. She was asked by her school to participate in the national exams that determine how the nation's schools are performing. Regardless of my feelings about standardized tests, I thought it was telling of how far she's come in her language acquisition that her school wanted her to be part of its aggregate scores (as it would have been very easy to have asked her to sit this one out). Anyways, she left school early on exam days and we had a nice gal's lunch and later Gracie joined me for my mosaic class one day. She is working on a beautiful box that we'll post when she's finished. Several folks have commented on how confident she is speaking with adults in Spanish these days. Its great to see her confidence and her mood so high these days.

I had a very interesting week. I ran off to Santiago for a day to attend a training on Open Space facilitation. Open Space had its world-wide conference in Chile later in the week, so I got a little exposure to this unique model. I think its similar to what is termed an "un-conference" in which session topics and discussions are determined and realized by conference attendees themselves. Highlight..I got to rap in Spanish!

I also finished another 7 week session of English classes with a great group of folks. They are a little flakey about always showing up, but they are very motivated and just very nice folks. I also continue with my organizational analysis work for a volunteer-run youth development organization here in Valparaíso. I am having fun doing interviews and attending/helping out with events, but somewhat dreading writing my report in Spanish! I also finished another mosaic project...shhhh, this one may show up under the Christmas tree (I'm pretty sure I can't leave it in Chile as it would look great in our living room).

I also had my neighbors, Señora Sonia and Señora Rosa over for tea and zucchini bread. They started sending cuttings of plants for my nascent garden, then food or drink or other little gifts. They are very sweet and always wonderful for a chat on our way up or down the stairs.

Finally, Dan, the kids and I ran out of town last Saturday for a day trip to a National Park Reserve (El Lago de Los Peñuelas) about 30 minutes outside Valparaíso. Nothing spectacular but we saw a rogue llama running around and had a nice time having a picnic, reading Harry Potter, and throwing the frisbee.

That's all for our updates for now. Thanks for catching up on news and our best to all of you.
Laura

Carnaval Valparaíso style

Carnaval or what is known also as Mil Tambores (a thousand drums) took place last week in Valparaíso. This event was born in 1999 as an expression of protest for the lack of public spaces for artistic, cultural expression. Each spring tens of thousands of folks participate in a weekend long gathering of musical and political expression.

It definitely reminded us of our May Day celebration in Minneapolis. This year's event was dedicated to Violeta Parra, a folk hero and pioneer of the Nueva Canción in Chile. You'll perhaps know her most well-known song, "Gracías a la Vida". Its one of the most covered Latin American songs ever. Our kids have learned several other of her songs in music class at school.

Here's some photos of the culminating event - the parade. We had a lot of fun attending with our friends the Dicus Breen family. A carefree celebration filled with creative costumes, dancing, lack of costumes, all to the backdrop of thousands of drummers. It was awesome.

Happy Anniversary!

Happy Anniversary....to our blog. Yep, October 7th, 2010 I wrote about the perfect fall day in Minneapolis and about how special our community is back home. Can you believe that we still hadn't decided on a country at the time (2 months pre-departure! Yikes.)? Anticipation was building but so was the awareness of what we would be giving up for a year.















So, what better way to mark this anniversary than spending time with some of our great friends from home and from Chile!

Last Thursday our dear friends, Jenny Breen, Jon Dicus and their girls Solana and Franny pulled into town for the long Columbus Day weekend. They are neighbors, fellow frisbee players, we've worked together in the community, and our kids have been close since Gracie and Solana started sharing babysitters at 6 months of age.


















They just moved to Mendoza, Argentina in July to start their one year sabbatical, similar to us (Check out their awesome blogs Cooking Up the Good Life and Argentina Adventure.

Just a year ago, all eight of us would gather over dinner or tea and dream about whether we could pull it off - one year in Latin America with the kids. Jon and Jenny, like us, had dreams of their girls not just learning Spanish, but living it. We all wanted to be immersed in another culture and find our way to be part of that community. And here we all are.

It was so great to check in with these guys: to compare notes, to laugh about the funny situations we find ourselves in and to empathize about the challenges. Long into the night, as we adults were reluctantly saying goodnight, we could still hear Solana and Grace chatting about everything as well.

We basically talked all weekend - thrown in was lots of cooking and good eating (Jenny is a chef; check out her new cookbook!) and some wandering around our favorite haunts in Valparaiso (the beach, the funiculars, our favorite ice cream shop, bungee jumping on a trampoline, etc...).

We had a great typical Latin American dinner, hosted by our dear friends Cecilia and David, in which you gather around 6pm, but then there's lots of talking, drinking wine, and eventually cooking and eating maybe around 11pm, until finally its time to go because its almost 1am and the kids are all falling asleep! We caught some live music and attended the Mil Tambores parade (more on that next).

When we went to Cecilia and David's, we suggested to our four kids that they play in Spanish that night, so as to include the Chilean kids. Theo responded, "Yeah, yeah Mom. No problem". Nothing like looking back to realize how far we've all come.

-Laura

p.s. Thanks to all of you who have been reading the blog this last year. Some quick blog stats:
- page views total: 27,554
- post with all time most page views: Theo's "Ayúdame" Halloween candy advice-seeking post last October with 181 views.
-Four out of five of top page view posts were written by Grace or Theo...hmmm...I can take a hint.
-Number #1 referring site: Facebook, hands down.
- Audience sources: 10 countries, #1 US, mystery audiences: Russia (45 hits) and Germany (41)??? (who are you?)

p.s. It was a good day today - according to Theo.

Probably, I overreact and this is all normal in the course of kids' lives. I think our elementary school at home does such a good job at creating a positive community for all the kids - that we get spoiled and forget how common acting mean to other kids or bullying can be.

Anyways, I asked Theo about his day and he shrugged shoulders and said, "Estuvo bien. Normal." Yeah for good and normal days.
-Laura

Stranger in a Strange Land

Yesterday Theo had an awful day at school. Some of the kids in his class were excluding him and being mean to him. It breaks my heart. We're hoping today is a better day. It does seem that there's mostly "good days" and then a bad day will happen. Its hard to know how much Dan and I should intercede and how much to try to give Theo the tools to deal with mean or exclusive behavior - which unfortunately he will encounter in different forms all his life.

I think part of why this happens in Theo's class has to do with elementary school boy culture, which left unchecked isn't characterized by being nice and inclusive. I do think the teaching staff are proactive about counteracting it, but I don't think the other parents are involved around these topics. I think part of it also has to do with the fact that there are so few students in Theo's class - 11 in all and only one girl, which means there aren't a variety of friends' groups. Instead, there's one group and those who are left out- which changes from day to day. I think also that we opted for a school that hasn't had much exposure to foreign students. In terms of immersion this has been great, in terms of embracing and empathizing with kids that are different, from a different country, that speak a different language there has been a lack of knowledge, experience, and sometimes empathy in particular among Theo's classmates.

I think that until you have lived abroad, away from family and friends, its hard to understand what that experience could mean. Our friend Jenny, who along with her family have recently embarked on their own year abroad in neighboring Mendoza (and who will be visiting this weekend!!!!) recently wrote on her blog about gaining a new empathy for folks that have been removed from their communities. She writes,

"I am developing great empathy for all of the ‘outsiders’ in our own world. The parents whose kids enter our school without understanding how to navigate the system. That is, be both the formal school system, and the more elusive informal system of friends, play dates, book clubs, weekend get-togethers and carpools. The transplants who move from other parts of the world and try to settle in to the rhythms of a foreign place with all of it’s idiosyncrasies-the weather, the nightlife, the bus schedule and housing, and the language-what an incredible barrier that can be!".

I think that all these factors can be true in any country. Certainly, all these factors happen in the US too. But I also think that a country that has lived under a violent dictatorship that ended only 20 years ago, still has healing to do. I am doing a series of interviews for a nonprofit project I am working on here, and I was talking with a school leader this week about the community she grew up in. She still lives in that community, but talks of pre-dictatorship and post-dictatorship in very different terms. She explained that when she was a child, all the children played out in the street, safe with many neighbors watching over them. During the dictatorship Chileans headed inside, there was a state of emergency at night, it wasn't safe to be out, neighbors became informants regarding other neighbors sometimes as the only way to save themselves. People, sometimes children, were disappeared by anonymous groups working for the military. My interviewee explained that Chileans learned to fear and distrust their neighbors and today children still often arrive home and stay inside. Perhaps as a result, Chile can be an insular society at times. As one of the Chilean disabled adults at the recent training workshop I attended stated, "Chile is an exclusive society" - exclusive in terms of low tolerance for outsiders or those who are different. Whether that generalization is true or not, we're thankful that at least as a family we have made many good friends here, but it is true that many of them are Chileans that have in fact lived abroad previously.

I hope that one of the many life lessons of this year for our kids will be around empathy for those who are different and the importance of inclusivity. I know that has often led me to work or volunteer with recent immigrants in the US. I know when people here invite us to dinner or let us know about an event happening or simply ask us about how we are doing, it means everything to us. Here's hoping for more "good days".

-Laura

Participatory Facilitation Chilean style & Don Francisco!

For those of you who have worked with me either at Joyce Preschool or Lyndale Neighborhood Assocation, you will remember well the ubiquitous purple sticky wall! The purple sticky cloth is a tool used by TOP (Technology of Participation) and ICA (Institute of Cultural Affairs) along with a whole bevy of other wonderful facilitative tools and methods that foster maximum group participation and general gleaning of group wisdom.

I love these methods, so I was thrilled to be connected to the Chilean ICA team of facilitators. This week, I ran off to Santiago for a couple days to mostly observe a training workshop I'm very familiar with, but in Spanish! Very cool. In addition, the Chilean ICA team has focused their efforts on working with adults with disabilities. A group that is very marginalized, particularly professionally, in Chile. It was a very powerful experience.

I wasn't able to observe the entire workshop, as responsibilities back in Valparaiso called, but I'm hoping I'll be able to help out with another workshop before the year is out.
-Laura

p.s. On a side note, my gracious hostess in Santiago - Ana Mari Urrutia, also took me for a tour of La Sociedad Pro-Ayuda al Niño Lisiado or now known as the Teletón. It is a multi-million dollar organization which has clinics all over the country which treats handicapped children. She had been director for many years and her father was the original founder. Anyways, it was a great tour and we were there for the day of the Teletón kick-off, their big fundraising event. Why I am telling you all this? Because for all of you that have seen Sábado Gigante, which has been on Latin American television for the last 50 years, will be interested to know that the organizer and face of the Teletón is none other than Don Francisco, or Mario Kruetzberger, a Chilean, who I had the pleasure meeting this week! To give some context for those of you unfamiliar with Don Francisco, it was kind of like meeting the Latino Bob Barker.

See Gracie's new post from today, but dated Sept 25th!