School has started/Villa Grimaldi

Hola hola!

I realized I hadn't written since I got back from Patagonia so here I am.  There has been so much going on and so much change and transition it is crazy.  School has started and I really love my classes, its just a huge transition because I don't know anyone in my classes and I don't really understand how the system works yet so quite frankly its just a little petrifying.  I have a quiz tomorrow, but have no idea what its going to be like! Once I get started though I should be completely fine.  I am taking three classes: Social Work and Human Rights, which walks through the history of human rights and the progression of how they have come about (legally).  Then I am also taking a Social Work class about the human rights of children and the stages of development that they go through which as you know is right up my alley!  My last class is spanish semantics, which is a linguistics class, and should be very interesting even though I'm not quite as passionate about that one ha.  In both of my social work classes there is a large group of chileans that all take all their classes together because here your major is planned out for you before you enroll so you all end up taking the same track/classes.  That being said it is a little intimidating to be the only foreigner when they are all such good friends but I have started getting to know some of them and also have made friends with the kids who are from other majors since they don't know them either.  Overall, school is going well and should be great, I'm just still in the transition period!

This past weekend I went up into the Andes with Kathleen and Kelsey (my two friends from CAL who I met here) and also with Martin, Gonzalo and Fran (Gonzalo's girlfriend).  Martin is the grandson of Grandma Bertie's 6th grade student when she was in Chile and it is so amazing to me that the one family that she put me in contact with produced my closest Chilean friends.  Gonzalo is Martin's best friend since high school and we all went up to Gonzalo's family's house in the Andes in a little ski town (kind of like mammoth or tahoe but tiny).  We spent the whole weekend just talking and sitting on the balcony and cooking and playing games and it was exactly what I needed.  I feel so close to them and they are such incredible people! They are both 24 and I really think I just get along with guys that are a little older than me (it happened in Mexico too) because of Zach.  We just instantly establish that kind of relationship and vioala! Good friends.

Lastly, yesterday I had the incredible experience of taking a field trip with my UCEAP (abroad) program to the Villa Grimaldi, one of the torture facilities during the Pinochet Dictatorship.  We were guided through the facility by a chilean who had himself been detained during the dictatorship and had actually had to stay at this facility, among others.  It was so moving and such an incredible gift to hear the explanation of it all and try to grasp the awful horror that occurred there from someone who had actually lived it.  He had scares and broken fingers and yet here he was, talking very openly and vividly to us about it so that he could pass on the memory.  He was exiled to the US in '76 after 13 months of being detained and tortured and when he finally returned to Chile in the '90s he devoted his life to researching what had happened and continuing the memory of it all.  It was so moving and I was absolutely horrified that no one in the US knows about any of this, simply because the US doesn't want us to know because it was our fault.  We are taught about the Holocaust because the US was the "saviors" but we aren't taught about the atrocities that occurred during this time in all of Latin America because we are ultimately the ones to blame.  We then visited the general cemetery in Santiago where we paid tribute to many of the detained, disappeared and politically assassinated people.  The cemetery has over 5 million people buried there and its HUGE! It was really gorgeous though and I am very glad we went.

Overall it was a super heavy day but a very very important one in my opinion! I have to do a lot of reading today but I'm thinking of you all and hope all is well!


Besos y abrazos,

Becca