The Three Sisters

Once in a while a book gets written that reflects so accurately things we have done, places we have visited, and people we have known, that , rather than read it, we experience it. One for the Road, by David Mather, is for me just such a book. My Peace Corps experience was in the same country, Chile, at the same time, and with some of the same people featured in the story, including Mather’s (and my) friend “Oso”, who to this day continues to be a very good friend; and he is still an “Oso”, a bear of a man. Reading this book, a novel actually, I relived many of my visits to Valdivia, the carousing with Chilean friends, the headaches and hangovers, the long meals with “Oso”. Mather’s story isn’t exactly the same as mine. He would go into town and head for the Bomba Bar downtown,
while when I visited Valdivia with my forestry colleagues we would stop first at the “Guata Amarilla”, a rustic grill alongside the river on the outskirts of town, before heading to the Hotel Schuster to have one of the best pisco sours in Chile. Some differences, but the Valdivia Mather describes as his, is also mine.

One For The Road brought back deeply hidden memories of nasty Chilean free ranging campo dogs, SAG’s visionary reforestation program, the rich smell of a cook stove stoked with firewood from the native forest, empanadas fresh from the horno de barro, and waiting…waiting…waiting for someone to show up.

Mather’s main character in his story, Tomás, lived with a family in the small rural settlement named La Colonia de Cufeo, when he arrived in Chile for his two-year assignment with the Peace Corps. If you have ever spent much time in a place where you do not speak the local language, or at least not very well, you know that you are pretty much left out of most conversations, sometimes even totally ignored, but for the saving grace of lovely, open minded, inquisitive children.

During the first year I lived in Santiago, speaking Spanish like a 3-year old, my most frequent and informative conversations were with 4-year old José Luís and his two slightly older sisters. These kids, neighbors of mine, thought my Peace Corps colleague and roommate Tom and I were great entertainment. They would come to our street-side window, which we opened to let the sunlight into our cave-like apartment, climb up on the sill, and “talk” to us. We gave them comics from the newspapers, and candy. They asked us simple questions like “How many cars do you have?” “Do you know superman?” “What’s that stuff you are putting in your pipe that smells so sweet?” “Why are there so many empty bottles on your table?” Very good questions. Great fun. I have often wondered what ever happened to José Luís and his sisters. They are now about 50 years old or so, probably have families. It would be nice to know.

Mather’s fictional Peace Corps Volunteer, Tomás, lived with three young sisters in Cufeo, and his story is similar. These young girls were at first the only people who would talk to him. The older folks took a lot longer to relax and warm up enough to try a comment or two. But he learned about small things like when to pick the wild fruit called chupón, and big things like the prevalence of sexual abuse in rural Chile, from his “little sisters”. And in spite of the friendship that developed, when he went home to the US after his service had ended, he probably lost track of these wonderful welcoming Chilean kids who taught him so much, especially the value of caring.

Just before taking off on one of my recent trips to southern Chile, I asked Mather if there were, by chance, any of his “fictional characters” in One For The Road who might exist in real life whom I could visit. He had said in the preface to his book that while some of the characters in his novel were based on real people, they all had been given fictional names except for “Oso”. He told us that if we followed his instructions, we might be able to find the three sisters PC Volunteer Tomás lived with in Cufeo. So we went looking for the three sisters, Rosa, Ana and little Lilia in the book; Sonia,Irene, and Mila in real life.

We drove out of Valdivia, onto Teja Island, past the campus of the Austral University and the large tourist trap that is the Kunstman Brewery, arriving eventually in Niebla, a small town at the mouth of the Calle Calle River across from the Spanish fort at Corral. All summer in Niebla there is a very funky Chilean tourist type thing called the “Encuentro Costumbrista Playa Grande, Niebla, Valdivia” where they have set up a large stage and surrounded it with tiny little restaurants and vendors selling anything from Kuntsman beer to apple cider they call chicha dulce everything you need to make a Chilean Cowboy (huaso) outfit. The little restaurants serve seafood empanadas, beef shish-ka-bobs, and asado al palo (lamb on a spit). We timed our arrival to lunchtime just for that reason.

When we arrived, they were playing recorded traditional music, but shortly after we arrived a series of live folk groups began to play all types of popular music, including the National dance, the cueca. Our objective was to find at least one of the three sisters, and finding them was becoming urgent because we were hungry and Mather had told me the sisters have two food stands here at the “Encuentro”. We started asking for the Montoya sisters (their maiden name when Tomás lived with them in Cufeo in One for the Road). We lucked out immediately. We found Irene(Ana) with her husband, her son Boris and Mila’s(Lilia) daughter Yohana serving roast lamb in a stand right across from the stage. Irene was ecstatic to meet someone who had been in the Peace Corps and she took us right away to meet Sonia (Rosa) who along with her husband Hernán runs another stand that also serves roast lamb. We had a great time with these little sisters from Cufeo.






More than 45 years have passed since a Peace Corps Volunteer lived in their home, and life in the rural south of Chile is not easy for men or women. But, while older and stouter, these sisters have not lost a bit of their bubbly, open, sincere nature. Irene and Sonia argued over who would feed us their roast lamb. We told Sonia and Hernán we would be back later to test theirs, and went to Irene’s place to have lunch. After all, we found her first. Flick and I sat down pretty sure the roast lamb plate Irene had offered us would be just too large for us to finish, so we thought we would be clever and ordered a cazuela.



That’s a beef stew-type dish we often order and knew we could at least finish that. The generosity of the Montoya sisters is something to behold, and we should have suspected what would happen, that “Gringo clever” fades when faced with Chilean hospitality. So, sure enough, as we finished our cazuela, Boris and Yohana plunked down two plates full of roast lamb, beef and boiled potatoes.
We learned long ago that Chileans can be terribly offended if you do not eat the food they prepare for you, so we finished every last bit, took some pictures, listened to some music, resisted getting up on the stage to dance the Cueca, and said long goodbyes to the Montoya family.

The next day as we drove out of Valdivia, heading south towards Osorno and eventually Chiloé Island, Flick and I talked a lot about the people we knew when we lived as twenty-some year old Peace Corps Volunteers, like Tomás. The Montoya sisters with their food stands in Niebla encouraged me to think that maybe José Luís, my little neighbor on Calle Luís Beltrán in 1967, might at this moment own a neighborhood restaurant in the Nuñoa section of Santiago. Who knows? Maybe he is a professional soccer player, or a high school teacher. I wonder if he would remember me. I must try to find him.

Along rural roads throughout Chile, especially in the south, there are shelters for passengers waiting for buses to come by to take them to town. We were not far out of Valdivia the day after we had seen the Montoya sisters, when we noticed one of these shelters had CUFEO written on it. We realized that up in those hills, above the shelter, is the stage where the Montoya sisters gave Peace Corps Volunteer Tomás, of One for the Road, the soundest education he probably would ever get.

As we drove by the shelter, I looked back through my rear view mirror, at the roof of the shelter, and the trees surrounding it, to see if there was, by any chance, a condor perched there looking over us. I was a bit disappointed, for sure enough, there was not. I had harbored the thought that since we had found the three sisters, maybe, just maybe, the condor would be there.

Note to reader: The last thought in this story only makes sense if you have read the book, One for The Road, so if you have not, please do so. www.onefortheroad-mather.com)

Posted in Santiago, Chile On March 25, 2012

Trovolhue High and Dry

There are many small towns sprinkled throughout the Araucanía region of Chile west of Temuco and along the meandering Río Imperial. One of these towns is Trovolhue, which, on a sunny, warm day in the last week of the 2012 Chilean summer vacation period, was our destination as Flick and I cruised along the busy road south of Concepción.
We were enjoying the miles and miles of forested hills and valleys covering this part of the Bío Bío region, south of the Río Bío Bío between the Pacific Ocean and the Pan American Highway, and north of the Rio Toltén, a vast area relatively unknown to most Chileans and unvisited by tourists.

In spite of the isolation of this area of Chile where the southern Bío Bío region melds with the northern half of the Araucanía Region, from 1962 to 1998 dozens of Peace Corps Volunteers were assigned here to work in reforestation, rural health, and community development programs. Flick and I were Volunteers from 1967 to 1970; he was assigned to a reforestation program in Curicó and Talca, more to the north, and I to Chile's forestry research center, the Instituto Forestal, located in Santiago but operating field projects that took me for long periods of time to parts of the Chilean south. As we drove south from Concepción, we saw signs for many of the places familiar to us as sites where our fellow Volunteers spent the better part of two years: Arauco, Cañete, Curanilahue, Contulmo, and Purén. These towns are all just west of another set of towns further from the coast, where other Volunteers were assigned to coax small landowners to plant trees on very poor land for erosion control and to produce fence posts, construction lumber and firewood: Laja, Nacimiento, Angól, Traiguén, Collipulli and Galvarino.

Our plan this day was to reach our destination, Trovolhue, by early afternoon but we were running quite late. Our departure from El Faro, near Loanco where Flick and I had left Ximena and her mother to spend a quiet week with Ximena’s sister Verónica and her husband Joaco, had been early enough. A Maule breakfast of a big cup of steaming Nescafé con leche, a couple of pieces of hallulla toast smothered with unfiltered, thick, wildflower honey and blackberry jam, a couple of boiled eggs, a piece of Chanco cheese and a slice of salame, and we were off on our week-long adventure. However, our decision to get to our destination that day by going from Chanco to Cauquenes, and then to Concepción along an inland road instead of the coastal road, was a mistake, and an omen of what the rest of the day would hold. Construction on the Chanco to Cauquenes road delayed us for more than an hour, so by the time we finally passed Concepción it was already well after noon.


The last three Chilean Presidents (Lagos, Bachelet, and now Piñera) have all committed impressive amounts of resources to building and rebuilding the infrastructure that Chileans need to move themselves and their products from one end of this long country to the other, to the ports and the urban centers. A key element of this multi-year initiative is the opening up of the many isolated expanses of the Chilean coast where pristine beaches, exciting rocky shores and coastal hillsides have gone unsettled and hardly visited until now. We were traveling, this sunny day in late February, along one of those roads where massive bridges, overpasses, and hard surfaced highways are being built.
When it is all done, it is hard to tell what will happen to this relatively untouched area of the country in terms of development, and destruction, but on this day the main issue for us was that it was taking us a lot longer to get to Trovolhue than we had planned.

We finally reached the small town of Tirúa, about 50 kilometers north of Trovolhue, late in the afternoon. From Tirúa we had two options, a paved road that would take us southeast to Nueva Imperial, from which we could take the main road west to the turnoff and then about 10 kilometers north again to Trovolhue, or a more direct gravel road used mostly by logging trucks, ox carts, an occasional horseman, and dogs who flashed out of the roadside wild blackberry thickets in a futile attempt to run us off the road. We chose the road less traveled, of course, and after about an hour or so of cruising slowly through absolutely beautiful coastal hillsides of forest and farmland, we descended into the town of Trovolhue.

In 1960, Chile experienced an earthquake stronger and more destructive than the 8.8 quake that hit central Chile two years ago. The quake in 1960, centered in the southern city of Valdivia, registered in at 9.5 and killed ten times as many people (more than 5,000). One consequence of this was that the small river that flowed through the town of Trovolhue, situated about 160 kilometers to the north of Valdivia, every year would rise above its banks and flood the town. Flick and I were visiting Trovolhue because one of the prominent stories of the Peace Corps in Chile is that of a small group of volunteers who assisted the townspeople of Trovolhue disassemble their oft-flooded town and move it to higher ground, lock, stock and barrel.

The story goes like this: In 1965, Peace Corps Volunteers helped design a plan to move the town to safer ground. The Volunteers helped obtain the required official approvals and heavy earthmoving equipment and financing to build a new access bridge. They surveyed and laid out the town streets, home sites, and essential services. Public agencies and private organizations all contributed to move 100 families, who dismantled the existing homes and buildings and rebuilt them on the new site. Volunteers worked with townswomen to improve nutrition and health, and to increase income through home-based food preservation and clothes making. After the Peace Corps Volunteers left in 1968, townspeople and the Chilean government continued to improve streets, built a new school and police station, and many more families moved to the new town site.

Like most folklore, which Peace Corps legends often become, there is always the chance that there may be some distance between what actually happened, and the story as it is told decades later.

The story of Trovolhue was featured, along with other notable Peace Corps Chile accomplishments, in a picture poster at the 2011 reunion in Washington, DC, for Peace Corps Volunteers who had served in Chile from 1961 – 1998. To tell the story of how Volunteers Brian, his wife Sharon, and Phil helped move Trovolhue to higher ground, Kay, another Volunteer who had served in the region at the same time, provided pictures she had taken of the actual operation to transfer the town. Brian filled in the details of their service as Peace Corps Volunteers in Trovolhue. The poster reflected the kind of story that adds meaningful depth to the adventure that is the Peace Corps. Hence, our interest in taking a first-hand look at the place where this all happened almost a half century ago.

I have never met Brian,Sharon, or Phil, but I have communicated with Brian several times. He is now professor emeritus in the California University where he has written more than thirty books about Chilean political science and history. He was awarded in 2010 the highest award the Chilean government gives to non-Chileans, the “Condecoración de la Orden al Mérito de Chile”, and has been back to Chile often and to Trovolhue at least once since his Peace Corps service.

Before departing this year on our yearly visit to Chile, I told Brian I was going to try to visit Trovolhue to see for myself the town we had featured on the poster at our reunion. He gave me the names of two men who were involved in the re-siting of the town, who might still be around after all these years, and I promised to see if I could find them.

Fortunately for us, the sun sets late in February in Trovolhue, close to 10 PM . As we entered the town from above on the dusty gravel road, we emerged into a very neat, well-kept village, and immediately parked next to what we figured was the main plaza. Activities in town were beginning to slow down as the shadows from the sycamore trees lining the plaza lengthened.
Or more likely the pace in Trovolhue is slowed down, as we found it, most of the time. Flick and I decided we had to move fast if we were to find anyone who might know about the Trovolhue project in the early 1960s. So, we found the oldest looking person we could, a leathered woman dozing in the late afternoon sun in an old chair in the doorway of her wood clad single story home, and asked her if she knew a Sr. Ernesto Paredes, one of the two names Brian had given me to pursue. Ernesto was part of the town’s construction committee in charge of the 1960s project to move Trovolhue up the hill. She did not know much about Sr. Paredes, but after a fashion let on that the house he owned awhile back was just down the hill a block from the plaza.


Finding people you do not know in Chilean towns is not especially difficult, if you know how to listen, respond, listen again, wait a bit for another piece of information, and then connect the dots. Chileans are nowhere as mobile as folks in the US are, so they can usually be found, if you have time, patience, don’t come across as a detective or a tax collector, and of course as long as they are still alive. Flick and I seemed to have very good luck with this type of search on this trip, especially this day in Trovolhue.

After a bit of idle banter, the lady who runs a small market in the storefront of the Paredes home did seem to remember the Peace Corps Volunteers who helped Paredes move Trovolhue up the hill in 1962. “Could we meet with Paredes?” Well, no. Though Paredes is actually still alive, she let on that he is somewhat infirm and lives in an apartment in the city of Temuco, 80 kilometers away, coming to Trovolhue only seldom. However, whom we really needed to talk with about this whole thing, she informed us, was El Chino. El Chino supposedly lived two blocks up the hill, on the other side of the plaza, so Flick and I set off to find El Chino, expecting him to be a decrepit ancient who after all these years had taken on some Asian features. We found the house, with the help of a couple of giggling 15 year old girls, and went to the door, not knowing what to expect. To our surprise, it turned out that El Chino is actually Oscar, a young man in his 30s, a native of Trovolhue who is so enamored by his town that he has begun a life-long project to document and make public the history and happenings of Trovolhue.
He was so excited when he heard we were once Peace Corps Volunteers also, like Brian, Sharon, and Phil, whom he seemed almost personally familiar with. He explained his whole Trovolhue history and promotion project to us. He showed us pictures he is collecting in his files, including several of Kay’s photographs of the Volunteers at work in 1965 that he had picked up from somewhere via the internet. He is working with another historian, Dino, who also lives in Trovolhue and together with Oscar is documenting the history of Trovolhue.

Oscar remarked that another resident of Trovolhue, Donaldo Obreque Rivas, would be excited to hear about Brian and to know that we had visited Trovolhue to talk about the 1962 project to move the town up the hill. Obreque was one of the members of the Pro-Construction Committee that Brian worked closely with, but unfortunately he was not in Trovolhue the day we visited.
Oscar then took us on a tour of the town, starting at the lowest part, the main street shown in the old photographs Kay had taken in 1965. This was the location of the part of town that flooded every year after the earthquake. We walked up the hill, as he pointed out where the first homes were built on the new higher site. He pointed out with pride the new homes, modern public buildings, and extensive paved streets.

We finally came back, full circle, ending up at the beautiful plaza where my car was parked. It was now getting late, so we bid farewell to El Chino, who gifted us with a promotional DVD about the beauty and attractions of Trovolhue and a promise to meet with Dino the historian, Donaldo Obreque Rivas, and if possible Ernesto Peredes to gather more information from them regarding the project to move the town of Trovolhue to higher ground and the young Peace Corps Volunteers who helped them do it.

Before we drove off, we stopped to thank the lady who got us headed in the right direction earlier that afternoon. By now she had covered her shoulders with an old woolen shall. She looked up from her position in the now shaded doorway, and muttered “Vuelvan pronto”, “Come back soon”. We assured her we would do just that, and headed off down the hill towards Puerto Saavedra and the Hostería Boca Budi, where we enjoyed a fresh fish dinner as we listened to the Pacific surf crashing on the rocky coast below and, with lots of cold Chilean sauvignon blanc, toasted the accomplishments of Peace Corps Volunteers like Brian, Sharon and Phil, and the fond memories and good will they have left throughout the world, especially in places like Trovolhue.

Posted on March 22, 2012, in Santiago, Chile