Week of Violence

This past week I had a lot of new experiences with witnessing different types of violence. On Tuesday, there was a protest happening across the street from my apartment. The Communist party was protesting about what is going on in Aysen. Aysen is a town in Southern Chile, and is essentially the gateway into Patagonia. Patagonia brings in a TON of money for the country due to tourism, so the whole area focuses purely on tourism. The protesting is about the lack of resources in that area for the people who live there (there are no schools that are close, no hospitals, etc.). The community feels like they are doing a lot for the country, but they feel that the country is doing nothing for them. Anyways, the protest had a lot of people gathering around, and there were a bunch of police everywhere making sure nothing got out of hand. Well, things got out of hand, and the protest turned into a mini-riot. The police brought in a big tank that sprayed water at the crowd.

That was so crazy to see! The police also had tear gas. I had the pleasure of smelling tear gas for the first time – man does it sting! The crowd had some tricks up their sleeves as well. A lot of people had gas masks or scarves to cover their faces; they came prepared for the gas. Some people had molotov cocktails (glass bottle with white cloth coming out of it – a homemade bomb). I’ve only seen those on TV, so that was pretty surreal to see them in person. I have no idea what set the whole thing off, but the whole situation was super entertaining to watch.

Later in the week a fight broke out right in front of my apartment. I have never seen a fight in action, but I did get to see the aftermath of this fight. The fight was happening between these two random guys and with one of the shops we live above. We came into the fight, when one of the random guys was yelling at a few of the guys who work in the shop (there were about four guys from the shop and they were holding a billy club, a metal hook, a big beer bottle, and a long metal stick). The guy ended up walking away, but then his friend came over, took his shirt off and showed all the guys from the store his bloody hand. He was bleeding pretty badly from the back of his head, so obviously one of the guys from the shop hit him pretty hard. They were all shouting in Spanish, when all of a sudden the first guy came back and threw a huge rock at the shop’s window. They ran away and the shop guys stood guard in front of the store for a while. We have no idea what the fight was about, but we don’t think they tried stealing something because normally if you steal something, you don’t go back to the shop, especially if you have been caught in the act. Someone could have gotten offended over something or this group of people could have had some sort of history we don’t know about. Yet again, we got front row seats to something entertaining.

At the hogar that I work at, the way the girls are taught not to hit is that if a girl hits you, you are allowed to hit her back. The philosophy behind this is that the hit back is suppose to show the girl that hitting hurts others, so she shouldn’t hit in the first place. Also that if you hit the world, the world is always going to hit you back harder. Isabelle and I do not agree with this method of teaching, but it’s not really our place to step in and tell the Tias that that method does not work. However, this Friday, one of the older girls (who is 16 years old) was repeatedly hitting the youngest girl (who is 2 years old). The 16 year old was really hitting the young girl; it would have hurt me if she hit me as hard as she was hitting the girl. Isabelle tried intervening with the hitting, telling the girl that she can’t hit that hard or use that type of violence on a baby, but then another 16 year old chimed in telling us that that is what the Tias tell them to do. Since there is nothing we can really do while at work, I reported this incident to VE. The issue (along with many other things) was brought up at a meeting the following week to the professionals (social workers, psychologists, ect.). I was very pleased to hear that all the professionals were appalled by this behavior. Hopefully that means things will start to change.

On some happier notes…

This week at work we started implementing a good behavior chart. Each time a girl does something very helpful or very nice we give her a sticker. However, if the girl asks for a sticker after doing something nice, she does not get one. Each Friday, we will be giving the girls a piece of candy for however many stickers she has by her name. For the most part, each girl has around 2 stickers. Over all, the girls were pretty well behaved last week, so the chart seems to be working. Isabelle did a great job making it:

One of the girls had just gotten a curly iron, and she had been curly people’s hair all week. She asked me if she could curl my hair and I said yes. When she was done with me, I looked like Shirley Temple ha. As the day went on the curls fell out a little, and it ended up looking not too bad. This is what my hair looked like after work:

Spanish class has been going pretty well so far. We only have a few more classes left with this professor before she leaves for Bolivia. She has been trying to make sure she can get all the different tenses of the subjunctive crammed in before she leaves, so she has been moving a little quickly. Class has been super overwhelming for me because the pace is way too fast for me, and this past Thursday I was super stressed out. Lately work has been keeping me really busy and I haven’t really had any time to do anything else but stuff for work…so no extra studying of Spanish for me. I haven’t really had time to study the subjunctive on my own and everything is starting to jumble together in my head, confusing me even more. Free time is really precious to me down here, and I haven’t had too much of it lately, and have been unable to do the million things I want to do each day. Every now and then I get super stressed out about everything that is going on in my life. The stress just lasts for a night, and then the next day I am better. I know that I don’t need to be stressing out about everything that I stress out about, but every now and then I get a little overwhelmed. I need to remind myself to step back, take a deep breath, just relax and calm down about everything.

Friday night one of my friends had people over for Once, and she had prepared everything for us to have S’mores. That was sooo great! Plus it was a great taste of home. Everyone brought other small dishes, and my roommate, Ben, had prepared a little fruit dish with melted chocolate for dipping. It was delicious!

It was so great to spend some time with the other volunteers here. I really like everyone in my class, so it’s great to see them whenever we all get together. This past Friday was also my grandma’s 90th birthday, so I skyped with her and the rest of my family for a little bit that night. I was a little sad that I missed the party, but it was so great to see and talk to everyone.

Until Next Time,
Liz