Student strike

A brief update to my last entry on teaching. Classes on Friday were cancelled due to a student strike over a proposed change to the law concerning how scholarships are awarded. Currently, only students in state schools are eligible for state grants. The proposed change would allow students at private universities to be eligible as well. The result would be that students at public schools will receive less money.

I lack sufficient information to form an opinion as to the merits of the change. It is interesting to try to imagine what it would take to get students to strike at Rhodes, though. In the six years I have taught there, there have been three events that captured Rhodes students' passions. One was a series of vandalisms directed against students of color. Another was a proposed change to move fraternity and sorority recruitment to the second semester. A distant third was the set of curriculum changes that is now in the process of being implemented. None of these led to a strike.

On the whole, I feel Rhodes students are pretty effective at making their opinions known when it comes to things that matter to them. Perhaps they have concluded that striking is not necessary. It may also be true that they are reluctant to lose the class time or grade points that could be the result of a strike.

Rebecca has taken up knitting and recently made me a beautiful deep red scarf with an unusual pattern. Soon I will add a photo of my scarf and the ones she made for the boys.

May 23, 2005 | Permalink

Friends and family

I have been asked by a reader to say a few words about how we are doing here. This fits nicely with the visits we have enjoyed from friends and family, so these will be the topics of this entry. Of necessity, the descriptions of the visits are selective rather than comprehensive.

The boys are doing very well. They are delighted that school is over and summer break is here, though they did enjoy Colegio Baltazar. Their Spanish is improving dramatically. This coincided with the start of Spanish lessons, which are given by a very nice woman named Elisa once per week in our home, and with a request we made of the boys' teacher Marcela to speak to them in Spanish as much as possible. Or, it could simply be time doing its job. In any case, Sam is yakking up a storm in Spanish, and Gus, though he doesn't speak much, seems to be understanding a great deal. Sam is becoming an expert at mancala, an ancient African game and also enjoys chess.

Gus is absorbed in a series of books called The Animorphs, which is about a group of kids who can change into animals. Gus is also developing a keen appreciation for mathematics. I recently asked him to guess how many subsets a set of size n has. After some thought and assisted data generation, his answer was, "you add it to itself to get the next one". This translates as "double the number of subsets of an n-set to get the number of subsets of an (n+1)-set". He was able to understand a proof involving a 2-1 correspondence between the collections of subsets. When he understood it, he said "Cool!". Mathematical readers will know what I mean when I say that he completed the base step himself.

Rebecca went to Santiago a couple of days ago to see a dance performance -- in a former life she ran an organization that supported dance companies in Florida -- and to pick up her sisters Angela and Martha, Martha's husband Jim, and their adult children Tracy and Jay. Rebecca was highly entertained by the juxtaposition of Christmas displays and bikinis on sale. I also found the summertime holiday season to be counterintuitive.

I am over the bout of homesickness I described earlier and am very much enjoying being here. The trip I recently took to New Zealand and our visitors helped in this regard. I am finally getting to the point where I can understand what Chileans are saying, though not perfectly. I have been getting research done, which always puts me in a good state of mind.

We had a delightful visit with my father and his wife Betty. They planned and implemented a Hannukah celebration, which the boys enjoyed. We also visited the banks of the Rio Claro, which flows near Talca. There are restaurants on both sides -- our favorite is called Las Viejas Cochinas, or Dirty Old Women. It looks as if it were slapped together by a couple of buddies over a weekend twenty years ago and hasn't been touched since, like something you might find in the Florida Keys. You can catch a boat for a brief tour of the Rio Claro and a trip to the other, more developed side, which is planted in places with beautiful flowers. Weeks later, Rebecca, the boys and I saw an experimental theater piece on this side that was better attended than any comparable gathering I have seen in the US. In fact, it was so packed we had to climb a nearby hill to see what was going on. Generally, interest in culture seems to be higher here. Virtually everyone plays an instrument, and there seems to be a good deal of apprecation for poetry, theater, painting, and sculpture. Another favorite restaraurant of ours is Los Ganaderos, or The Cattlemen. Good meat, but don't ask what part of the cow it comes from. Chileans can be quite resourceful in this regard!

Before my mother came, she said the only thing she wanted to do was to do whatever we would normally do here. Her goal, she said, was to create a mental image of our lives here. She flew down with us when we first arrived and saw how the house looked before we moved in but never saw it furnished and lived in. She integrated into our routine right away and never left it. I keep expecting to find her talking with Rebecca in the kitchen, feeding our bunnies in our back yard, or reading a book on our futon.

My mother left on the same day that our friends Kathy, Kelly, and Adele Fish arrived. We had pisco sours at the Torremayor, our pied-a-terre in the Providencia neighborhood of Santiago. The boys and Adele played as if we had never left Memphis. Like my mother, the Fishes demonstrated an appreciation for the benefits of good food, wine, pisco sours, and naps. Kathy is pictured with Lucy, the woman who helps us around the house, behind a table of Lucy's delicious food. I have a lot to say about Lucy, but it will have to wait for a future entry.

One of the most memorable of our adventures with the Fishes was a New Year's party at the home of our friends Constanza and Manuel. Chileans welcome the new year by eating a dozen grapes (good luck for each of the coming months) and running around the house with a suitcase (to ensure travel in the coming year). Good food, music, and dance are also essential. Chileans, including the children, love a good party, and the parties always start and finish late. Manuel told me that he was up until 6 AM! We left around 1 AM.

To celebrate their tenth anniversary, we took the Fishes to the restaurant at the Miguel Torres vineyard near Curico, where they serve sophisticated food in an elegant setting. We also went there with my mother. There is a lovely sunken courtyard outside surrounded by a fountain which flows moatlike around its circumference. I don't think it was intended as a playspace for children, but ours like most are known to improvise. We visited Rio Claro and Las Viejas Cochinas with them. The kids (large and small) enjoyed riding around on the three wheel recliner bikes and on the horses. We attended a party at the property of our warm and generous friends Aturo and Fernanda at Lago Colbun.

During a later visit, Arturo told me an absorbing story about a nighttime UFO sighting 16 years ago, complete with a visit the following morning from a "scrub team" of men in full-body white suits who used heavy equipment to collect and haul off the dirt from the landing site. If it had come from anyone but Arturo, I would have been skeptical. Sam and Gus were able to understand Arturo's Spanish language recounting.

Casa Donoso is a small and beautiful family-operated vineyard that produces delicious wines. Note the cactus growing through the roof. We learned about the production of wines and got to sample some in the process. Huilquilemu is a former estancia, or country estate, a few minutes from our home. Kathy made friends with a couple of guides, one of whom left her group to be with ours because she found Kathy to be so entertaining. We attended a cultural festival there weeks ago, where we first sampled chirimoya ponche.

In addition to visiting us, Kelly came to Talca to establish an exchange program between the business programs at his school, Arkansas State University, and at the University of Talca. There are strong similarities between the goals and demographics of the two institutions and their business departments. Maria Fernanda (in the sleeveless blouse) was his contact person; the chair of the business department is seated next to Kelly. It was very interesting for me to be a fly on the wall of the meetings they arranged. Kelly is looking even sharper than usual in the beautiful library at the University of Talca.

Rebecca's sisters Martha and Angie, Martha's husband Jim, and their adult children Tracy and Jay arrived yesterday. Tracy lived with us for a few months after the boys were born to help us with them. We are still grateful! More updates soon.

January 11, 2005 | Permalink

War, voting, sex, and gender

Because it has been so long since my last post, I have a lot to say. Initially I was going to try to pack it all into a single post, but it rapidly grew too long. I hope my readers will find several shorter posts to be more readable than a single long one.

This entry will focus on my recent reading habits and related thoughts, the topic I found easiest to write about. While there will be little relating directly to Chile, I hope my readers will find something of interest. Future posts will deal with my end-of-semester thoughts comparing the teaching environments at Rhodes and the University of Talca, the research I have done in Chile and my experiences presenting it in New Zealand, and events surrounding the visits of friends and family.

I recently finished reading a fine book called They Marched into Sunlight, by David Maraniss, which is about two nearly simultaneous events that took place in October of 1967. The first is a battle in Vietnam in which American forces were ambushed and sustained heavy casualties. The second is a protest at the University of Wisconsin at Madison against the right of Dow Chemical, manufacturer of napalm, to recruit on campus. The protest turned ugly when the university’s administration, which was relatively sympathetic to the protests, summoned the Madison police, who then used batons and tear gas to break it up. These stories are told with an emphasis on the people who lived the encounters.

Additional context is provided by summaries of the American political scene at the time, with descriptions of Kissinger, Johnson, and, interestingly to me, John Shelby Spong and his role in protesting the draft. Spong recently spoke at Rhodes College, where I teach. Dick and Lynn Cheney are also mentioned as students at UW at the time of the protests.

I came away from this book with an overwhelming sense of sadness and sympathy for the people who were there, particularly those who got swept up into the war almost by accident. The political machines on both sides of the war had entrenched positions, did not trust each other, and were unwilling to meet halfway. It reminds me a great deal of the political situation in the United States today, with one notable difference being that today's protest movement is less visible. As one who has only the remotest and most isolated recollections of the Vietnam conflict, They Marched into Sunlight provided both a needed history lesson and a reminder of the great value of dialogue and compromise.

Related to those crucial virtues, I am now reading books and articles about the mathematical aspects of voting. These include Chaotic Elections and Decisions and Elections, both by Donald Saari, Approval Voting, by Steven Brams, and several related articles. The basic question is, how should a collection of voters choose between a number of candidates?

In the United States, the plurality method is used by each state to decide who wins that state's electoral votes (though a couple of states distribute their electoral votes to the candidates differently from the rest). This means that each voter can cast a vote for one person, and the person who gets the most votes wins.

For a number of years I have been concerned that the plurality method, along with the two party system, encourages voters to split into two camps which may not accurately reflect the complicated political makeup of our electorate. The two sides then wage a vicious battle to see which can eke out a slim victory over the other. The victors spend the next four years advancing their agenda, usually with as little compromise as they can get away with. The ultimate result is further polarization. In other words, the plurality method causes us to shun consensus candidates who might have a chance at crafting unity in favor of those that further our divided condition.

There are other problems with the plurality method. Specifically, many people feel that they cannot vote for their true top choice because they fear that this candidate has no chance of winning. The plurality method causes some voters to lie! Perhaps the most well-known example took place in 2000, when many Nader voters cast their ballots for Gore, their second choice. Another problem is that a person that is considered unqualified by nearly 2/3 of the voters can be elected to office. A recent example is the election of Jesse Ventura as governor of Minnesota.

These instances suggest that there are fundamental structural problems with the way we vote that extend beyond the more superficial issues of close elections, election fraud, denial of voting rights, hanging chads, and malfunctioning voting machines. The superficial issues have received a great deal of attention, while the fundamental issue has received almost none.

So what should we do about these problems with the plurality system? My opinion, which is shared by many experts on voting, is that we need to find a different method to elect our representatives. How can we choose the best alternative system of voting among literally infinitely many possibilities?

In an election, each voter has a preferred ranking for the candidates. The goal is to use these rankings to decide on a collective or societal ranking in a fair way. Some commonly discussed alternative voting systems include:

• approval voting, in which each voter votes once for each candidate she considers to be acceptable. The candidate with the most votes wins.
• the Borda count, in which each voter's top candidate gets n points, the next gets n - 1, etc., the bottom candidate gets 1 point. The candidate with the most points wins.
• Condorcet methods, which say that if a majority of voters prefer A to B, then the outcome should rank A above B. A problem with these methods are that it sometimes leads to situations where A is prefered to B is prefered to C is prefered to A. Various methods are used to resolve such conflicts.
• antiplurality voting, in which each voter votes for everyone but her least favored choice. The candidate with the most votes wins.
• instant runoff voting, in which a candidate with a majority of first place rankings wins. If no such candidate exists, then the candidate that is ranked first by the fewest number of voters is eliminated and the process continues.

One of the goals of voting theory is to discover which of these and other voting systems are well behaved. For example, if everyone agrees that candidate A is better than candidate B, then the collective ranking should put A above B. Also, if society collectively prefers A to B when C is in the race, then society should also prefer A to B if C should drop out. Unfortunately, Arrow’s theorem says that when there are more than two candidates, the only voting system which satisfies the two properties above (assuming some technical but highly reasonable requirements) is a dictatorship! That is, the societal ranking must be equal to that of some voter.

Saari claims to have found a new way to look at Arrow’s theorem to make it seem not so terrible. He favors the Borda count. Steven Brams favors approval voting. Brams recently spoke at Rhodes at the invitation of the math department. He has tried to persuade governments at various levels to abandon the plurality method.

I hope to design and teach a nonmajors course on this subject after I return to Rhodes. I think it may have interdisciplinary appeal, particularly if I can find something positive to say. That is, I feel the course ought to be about more than all of the things that can go wrong with the various voting systems, which is the focus of most of the reading I have done so far.

When I was in Auckland, I happened across a highly accessible book entitled Mathematics and Sex. Its goal is not to teach mathematics but to teach about the many ways mathematics can be applied to the unlikely subject of heterosexual sex. The author, Clio Cresswell, discusses topics including:

• the use of systems of differential equations to model the attraction between a man and a woman when, for instance, the man becomes more interested in the woman when she shows more interest in him and when she becomes less interested in him the more interest he shows in her.
• the optimal number of partners a person should try before finally settling down in order to find the “best” mate possible.
• the “bonk rate”, as she calls it, how it varies over time for a given couple, and how best to model it.
• how the large number of questions asked by dating services leads to what she calls “the curse of dimensionality”.
• how a collection of men and women should pair up according to their lists of preferences so that the resulting pairing is stable, i.e., so that there are no two people of opposite gender that would prefer each other to their current partners.

My biggest complaint is that the mathematics is not adequately developed. For example, equations often appear in which the variables are not defined. This happens frequently enough that it is clear that Cresswell has made a conscious choice to sacrifice mathematical clarity for broad accessibility. Though I found her choice distracting at first -- it makes the equations seem to be plunked down out of nowhere -- I later came to agree with it, since her goal seems to be to bring the appreciation of mathematics to the widest possible audience. Furthermore, she provides references for the material she presents, making it possible for the interested reader to obtain all the detail she desires.

Cresswell writes simply and with humor, making the book entertaining, and speaks frankly and directly, even including some personal revelation. I was impressed by her courage as I tried to imagine offering a course at Rhodes based on her book. I realized I would find it extremely uncomfortable to lecture on some of the subjects she covers. Repeated discussions and cautions of what is and is not acceptable conversational material between student and professor has made me view any mention of sex in class as a third rail.

As a consequence of my fears, I found myself reluctant to give a potentially valuable topic further consideration. It was at this point that I realized that I was engaging in self-censorship that had crossed the line between treating my students with respect and protecting them from any content that might be offensive or uncomfortable, even if it is intellectually worthwhile. This is truly a modern academic hazard.

A tangential consequence of my recent reading has been some reflection on how best to genderize generic personal (possessive) pronouns. For example, when referring to a voter, is it better to say “his preferences”, “her preferences”, or “his or her preferences”? Some social critics have complained that the default use of “he” and “his” does not reflect the reality that women are also participants in society and may lead to under representation of women in some important roles. They have called for a more equitable convention . Unfortunately, the most commonly used "his/her" solution is horribly clumsy and I find myself engaging in literary contortions trying to avoid it.

My solution is for male writers to use female pronouns and female writers to use male pronouns. This convention has the advantages of being linguistically elegant, courteous, and self-balancing. If, for instance, females are over represented in a discipline and if the use of male pronouns encourages males to enter that profession (an assumption that needs empirical support), then the tendency over time with this approach will be towards equal representation of the genders. If certain simplifying assumptions are allowed, this statement can be proved using systems of differential equations! Now you know why I have been using feminine personal pronouns in this blog entry.

More soon. Thanks to those of you who have written to me with comments on previous entries. Your comments are always appreciated! Also, I made a short entry prior to this one that I never sent an email alert about. I had intended to add to it but never did, and upon re-reading it, it seems that at this point it is best to leave it as is. So, if you haven't seen it, give it a look.

January 09, 2005 | Permalink

Fallen bridges and fresh lettuce

My father and his wife Betty have been visiting us for the past week or so, and we've been having a lovely time. This past weekend we returned with them to Chovellen, the place on the shore where we rented a house a month or so ago. The place was mostly as we described it before, so instead of trying to describe the place in new words, I will instead focus on our trip there.

Friday morning as I was on my way to Curico to teach, I overheard one of my vanmates talking about the miracle of a bridge that had fallen with no one injured. He didn't say where this bridge was located (or if he did, I couldn't understand) but he did say that another bridge had fallen in '95 in the middle of the night after some heavy rains. Some 20 cars speeding along the main north/south highway had plunged into the ravine it formerly spanned before it got light enough for someone to detect its absence from a sufficient distance to stop in time.

As it happens, the particular bridge that collapsed this time was on our route to Chovellen. It was new and apparently suffered from poor construction as there were no rains upon which to blame its demise. We were advised that we had to detour to the south through Parral. This was fine with us as it wasn't much longer and was just as lovely.

We stopped for dinner at a seaside restaurant at around 5:30 or 6. This is a couple of hours earlier than Chileans normally eat, so we had the restaurant all to ourselves. After the waiter took our orders, we watched him walk across the street to a lot there. We couldn't tell what he was doing, but we ultimately learned that he was picking fresh lettuce with which to garnish our plates. Alice Waters lives and breathes in Chile!

On our trip home we decided to take a more northerly route hoping that this would allow us to simultaneously avoid the downed bridge and see some new sights. We got our second wish, but not our first. The northern route, almost all the way to Constitucion along the shore, took us through dense pine forests. At one point as we were driving, I saw a tarantula cross the road in front of us. They are numerous throughout the countryside in Chile (though we hadn't seen any before, and they are not common in Talca). The boys are very excited to have their very own pet tarantula.

As we approached San Javier, which is about 15 minutes from Talca, we discovered that we would not be able to avoid the downed bridge. We were detoured across some dirt roads to a ferry crossing. It looked like there were a lot of cars ahead of us -- indeed, there were 50 or so, so I decided to try to estimate our waiting time. I walked to the front of the line, where I learned that the ferry takes three cars at a time, and that a round trip ride on the ferry takes about 10 minutes. While we felt that the boys would have enjoyed the ride, we would have needed to wait for about 2.5 hours and it was already late. So, we headed south to Chillan over many, many more dirt roads as a really spectacular sunset was underway, replete with golds and purples. The roads took us through areas we had never seen before, with many small vineyards, small houses, small towns, and small farms.

The trip home was in many ways typical of the Chile we have known. Breathtakingly beautiful, frustratingly inefficient, and to borrow my favorite line from Lewis' Babbitt, more romantic than scarlet pagodas on a silver sea.

November 23, 2004 | Permalink

Breaking and entering under a cloud

Breaking and entering under a cloud

We have had a bit of a rough spell here over the last month or so. Nothing went seriously wrong, just a number of small things. There were some good things too.

About a month ago, we went to a town called Chillan and to Termas de Chillan, the hot springs in the mountains about 45 minutes east of Chillan. Termas is a ski resort, but we arrived too late in the season to ski, even though it snowed while we were there. Though it was an interesting experience to swim in mineral rich water heated by the earth (it was piped into the hotel’s pool) while cloaked in fog and steam, the hotel room was ridiculously overpriced and the room absurdly small. It was furnished with two bunk beds, and there wasn’t room for much more.

Worst of all, Rebecca got really sick with some kind of stomach bug. She was up all night climbing up and down the bunk bed (no ladder) and in bed all the next day. She felt so bad that she later told me that, in the middle of her long night of malaise, she was contemplating whether I should remarry and, if so, how long I should wait after her illness took her life. Her answers were "yes" and "two years."

Fortunately it didn’t come to that, but once we got back to Talca, she remained bedridden for four days or so. At least the kids had a good time at the Termas – they got to play all the video games they wanted in the arcade down the hall while Rebecca rested.

After Rebecca recovered somewhat, I was hit with a spell of homesickness that lasted several days. I felt a strong desire to be in more familiar surroundings with people I know well. I hadn’t felt this way during the first three months. I suspect it is a predictable part of living in a new country for an extended period. Anyhow, it has passed, though I still get occasional pangs of longing.

Towards the end of my homesickness, our friends Arturo and Fernanda invited us to Lago Colbun, where they own a house and some land. The lake was created years ago by damming the Maule river. Despite the fact that the water is currently a couple of dozen meters lower than normal, the place is really beautiful. It’s close to the mountains, which are easily visible, and the land is covered with grasses and wildflowers. The boys discovered rocks that float! Pumice is a most counterintuitive substance.

The weather was cool enough to make us forget to put sunscreen on our very fair skinned children, but sunny enough to punish them for our oversight. Both got bad sunburns on their necks. Sam’s was bad enough that a blister about the size of a quarter arose there the following day. They were most uncomfortable for the next few days. We have since been advised that the ozone layer here is quite thin and that, as a consequence, the sun is strong and sunscreen is mandatory.

This past weekend we went to Rocas de Santo Domingo, a seaside town to the west of Santiago. We stayed at a house with a lovely view of the ocean owned by the family of the directora of the institute where I work. Most of the houses there are seaside getaways. Very few people actually live there, and most of the houses were empty as far as we could tell. I dropped Rebecca and the kids off on Thursday and headed to Santiago for a Fulbright breakfast meeting on Friday. I returned Friday afternoon.

Saturday morning at about 5:00, Rebecca woke me up frantically, saying “there was a man in our room!” I jumped up, looked for some kind of weapon, and finding nothing, went down the stairs anyhow. The kids were fine, the sliding door and the refrigerator were standing open, and the man had apparently left, taking Rebecca’s purse. After looking around to determine what else might be gone and finding nothing save a couple of cartons of juice from our refrigerator, I called the carabineros who assured me that they would send someone around.

At this point I thought perhaps I should check to see if our car had also been burglarized. I stepped outside, where it was still dark, and as I entered the street where the car was parked, I saw a man standing about 150 feet down the road. I stepped behind some bushes to wait and watch where I wouldn’t be seen. Shortly, a second man emerged from the yard of the house in front of which the first man was waiting. The two of them stepped behind a jeep parked there, and then suddenly began to walk away. I realized that a car was approaching from the opposite direction, and they had been spooked by its headlights. Sure enough, it was the carabineros. When they arrived, I pointed out the men to them, and they sped away and stopped them.

They frisked the men and found nothing of significance. The men claimed innocence, stating that they were on their way to work. It started to look like the carabineros would have to let them go. I started to look around on the road to see if they had dropped anything. Sure enough, I found a wad of cash that Rebecca later identified as hers. At this point, the carabineros locked the men in the back of their wagon. After further searching, I found Rebecca’s wallet and some papers from her purse hidden in the bushes, and the carabineros found that a stereo system had been taken from another house. As time passed, we discovered more items in the bushes. We also learned that they had broken into a car, that both house and car keys were missing from another house, and that a number of items had been loaded into the jeep, including a bottle of liquor and a couple of car stereos. Rebecca’s purse was also there, and inside were a number of CD cases, including one of ours that I had overlooked in my earlier search.

I filled out a number of forms for the carabineros and they took a bunch of pictures of the crime scenes and recovered items. I got conflicting reports about the amount of time the burglars could be expected to serve if convicted, ranging from one month to five years. Apparently crimes against extranjeros carry more punishment.

Rebecca was grateful to them for not harming us or the kids and felt bad that they would be locked up at all. She said that when she realized that the guy poking around in our luggage wasn’t me and sat bolt upright in the bed, the guy assumed a nonthreatening manner and left immediately. She said he was so silent that it was as if he floated ghostlike down the stairs.

After we recovered from our adventure, we drove to San Antonio, about 15 minutes away. They have a pier by the harbor there, where they sell seafood and arts and crafts. There are also a number of performance artists dressed to impress (yes, those are chains on his wrists and wings on his back) and make practiced and stylized movements. Sam’s preschool expression “arts and crabs” describes the scene pretty well.

The place is frequented by pelicans and enormous sea lions with brutish, bear- like, dignified faces with airtight nostrils and big, yellow-brown teeth. They climb on the rocks and some are close enough to touch (though we didn't). The boys had a great time throwing fish heads to them, which come in buckets of 3-5 for 100 pesos, or about 16 cents. They also enjoyed riding horses at an equestrian club in Rocas de Santo Domingo.

We returned to Talca on Sunday, which was election day for Chile. Here, if you are registered to vote, then you are required by law to vote. If you don’t, then you must pay a fine of about $50. The lines are long at all of the polling places, and in many localities, traffic is badly snarled. The elections were only for municipalities, and in Talca, the socialist candidate, a basketball coach at the University of Talca, beat the conservative candidate. In Santiago, it appeared that the leftist candidate had won, but then they found a batch of ballots that shifted the victory to the rightist. In another town, I forget the name, the socialist candidate won by twenty votes, then lost by twenty four to the UDI (extreme right) candidate after a recount, then won again after another recount.

On Tuesday, we hosted a party to watch the US election results come in. It is now two hours later than Eastern Standard Time here, so we didn’t learn much before we fell asleep around midnight. We had been monitoring the nail-biter of an election via CNN and the internet and voted absentee. Chileans are divided about Chilean politics, but every person I have met dislikes our current administration and can’t understand why so many Americans support it. They especially oppose the war.

I was planning to avoid revealing my own political preferences here (my readers who know me well will be forgiven their skepticism) primarily because some of my students may read this, but also because I am supported by the US Department of State during my time here and it strikes me as bad form to bite the hand that feeds me. However, my priority in maintaining this blog is to relate faithfully my experiences, and doing so requires some self revelation. Plus, I just can't contain myself any longer. Anyhow, I don’t think it will come as a shock to anyone that a college professor might vote for a Democratic candidate.

I voted for Kerry, and I was shocked – heartbroken, really – that so many of my fellow US citizens supported Bush. I spent Wednesday walking around in a daze. I had a lump in my throat all day long and felt as if I had been kicked in the gut. The weather, which was foggy in the morning, overcast in the afternoon, and drizzly and cold all day, matched my mood. Both Rebecca and I felt an almost urgent need to be near each other and the boys and took comfort from each other’s company in the same way that someone who is hospitalized is cheered by a visit from loved ones.

I mourn for the divided state of our nation. I think everyone would agree that the current president cannot heal that divide. I was hoping against hope that we would elect a real leader, one who understands the meaning of building consensus. Instead, we chose one whose claims to be a uniter are belied consistently by his “with us or against us” rhetoric and might-makes-right approach in matters both foreign and domestic. He and his allies reject dialogue and compromise and prefer to steamroller their agenda over the objections of the 49% who don't support them. I suppose I will spend the next four years contemplating the state of powerlessness and looking for whatever advantages it may carry. My feelings of impotence are only amplified by being out of country. I still can’t bring myself to read the news.

One of our Chilean friends, observing our morose state, said, “Don’t feel too bad. You have four more years of Bush, but we had seventeen years of Pinochet, and you can still sleep safely in your home.” It’s hard to argue with that.

The bright spot of the election for us was the 72%-28% margin of victory enjoyed by our dear friend, neighbor, and doctor in his race for Memphis school board. It's comforting to be in accord with the broader will at least once in a while.

Today the boys went to a birthday party of one of their classmates. Immediately after Rebecca dropped them off, Gus took off his shoes so he could go on the moonbounce and stepped on a wasp, which of course promptly stung his foot. Rebecca reports that he was very brave.

To top it all off, my bedtime reading these days is Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis. Since Lewis’ main point seems to be to skewer the Babbitts of our world, it is unlikely to be a cheery read even on the best of days, but it’s even worse when I glimpse my own image reflected in the words and find myself on the receiving end of Lewis' barbed typewriter. Fortunately his writing is lovely and, at times, humorous. Last night I was laughing myself silly in bed over Babbitt’s “doodads and flipflops” and his pride in his son’s affinity for correspondence courses. After I read Rebecca the parts I thought were funny, she looked at me like I was losing my mind. Then I came across this passage, which describes Babbitt's nighttime reading habits.

When his story was interesting, he read the best, that is the funniest, paragraphs to his wife...

I hope my readers will forgive me my political rant and complaints. Despite having weathered some challenging moments recently, there are some hopeful signs for the near future, and we continue to view our time here as a wonderful experience. In a week and a half, we will welcome my father and his wife for a visit. School is out in late November, and I will travel to a conference in New Zealand in early December to present some results I obtained in my time here. I land at the Santiago airport a few hours after my mother, who returns for a second visit in mid-December. Towards the end of December, some Memphis friends are coming so that the husband of the couple, a professor at Arkansas State University, can explore establishing a faculty/student exchange program with the University of Talca. Rebecca’s brothers and sisters and some of their families will join us in January, when we may visit Chiloe, an island in the south of Chile near Puerto Montt. I understand the lakes region, which is just a little further south, is really spectacular. We hope to travel with them to Bariloche in Argentina, where Rebecca’s sister’s husband Jim spent some time as a child. We will visit Buenos Aires with my sister Karla, her husband Josh, and their sweet boy Xavier. The winner of the school board election and his family plan to visit in March, with their son, who we refer to as Gus and Sam's other brother, in tow.

The prospect of being surrounded by those we love is a great joy to us.

November 06, 2004 | Permalink

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Photos

I have been meaning for months now to post some photos. Click on them to enlarge. It takes a really long time to load them as our internet connection is rather slow.

Here are a few in no particular order; more may follow later. The first two were taken at the Curico campus of the Universidad de Talca where I teach, about 40 minutes north of Talca by the highway.

In this one, the Andes are visible in the background.

All buildings are identified by their color by Curico faculty, staff, and administrators. I teach on the second floor of the orange building.

The next photos are of the Talca campus of the Universidad de Talca where my office is. The campus is filled with statues; I have featured a few here.

Here is my office with the coastal range visible out of my window.

On a clear day, you can see the Andes if you step out on the very small balcony shared by the offices on my side of the building.

Here are three photos of the boys' school, Colegio Baltazar. The second one is of the outside of their classroom.

Next come some photos of the vacation house and grounds where we stayed in Chovellen.

The first two are of the humble but comfortable and well equipped house that we stayed in.

This is the first view we saw of the grounds, minus a family eating under the wisteria-covered arbor below.

Here are two views of the rocky outcrops that punctuate the shoreline.

Sam and Gus, adventurers at play.

Here are some of the flowers, wild and otherwise, that grow around the area.

Next come some photos of the horse farm.

In this one, you can see for yourself that Chilean horses really can run sideways.

Note the kinetic relationship between horse and rider.

Some of the proportional differences between Chilean horses and those in the US are visible in this photo.

The boys got a chance to try their hands as huasos.

Here are some shots of Veramonte, the vineyard we visited. Their Primus is truly a treat.

Here is Santiago at its best and worst (in the polluted sense). There are also many areas of Santiago that are not as well to do as shown here.

Here are some shots of the rodeo.

OK, that's it for now. I'll post more photos in the not too distant future, including some of our home.

October 02, 2004 | Permalink