Emilio and the "Pulga"

Everyone has a friend who seems to remember everything; mine is Jesse.  He remembers names, histories, quirks and faults of people he knew for only two years, fifty years ago, but hasn't seen since.  When Jesse tells a story, it is with such detail that you are either bored to death or totally captivated by what he is saying; the latter was the case when Jesse reached back about forty years into his memory to tell me about Pulga and the Banda de Collico.

It seems that when Jesse was a Peace Corps Volunteer assigned to rainy, cool, Valdivia, where mold grows nine months out of the year on your shoes and leather coats if you don't leave a light bulb on all the time in your closet, there was another Volunteer in the same area who wasn't totally satisfied with the assignment he was given in one of the outlying poor suburbs of the city, and went looking for additional activities to entertain himself, as Volunteers of that era would often do.  Being a large, strong, young man full of energy and a friendly drive to be with people, Emilio, Emilio being the name his Chilean friends gave him since apparently they did not much like his real name Emery, set up a weightlifting and exercise group with young Chileans, and because he also was a good mechanic, this other Volunteer would offer his services to anyone who needed to repair pumps, motors, and other machinery.  He was handy, energetic, and driven by a desire to be useful. 

But his Peace Corps assignment plus the weightlifting classes and even his additional handyman jobs were apparently not enough to keep Emilio busy, so one day, as Jesse tells it, Emilio wandered into the small, clapboard frame house on a side street in one of Valdivia's muddy outer neighborhoods along the Calle Calle River, attracted by the noisy practicing of a pick-up group of would-be musicians.  You see, Emilio was a kind of Renaissance man, who besides body building and mechanics, also knew a lot about music, so his apparently serendipitous appearance at the modest headquarters of the Banda de Collico was in reality the logical start of a long and enduring relationship.

Jesse told me this story at my home in Virginia, in the United States, when we were gathering information for an exhibit about the Peace Corps in Chile we were preparing for the 50th Anniversary celebration of the Peace Corps, and like with so many (but not all) of his stories, he made Emilio's story so interesting that, when I found myself driving into Valdivia this past year on one of my annual exploratory journeys into the far reaches of Chile with my friend and erstwhile travelling partner Flick, I headed straight to the Collico neighborhood, determined to find someone who might still remember Emilio and the Banda de Collico.  I must admit I had a second agenda, though, which was to confirm some of the details of Jesse's story, because Jesse, like I, will often remember things in ways that ensure that our lives, as we remember them, turn out more interesting than they possibly really are. 

Jesse had provided me with a picture of the old wooden house in Collico where the Banda used to practice.  I thought it might actually no longer exist, but if it did, I was pretty sure we could find it  just by going up one street and down another until we covered the dozen or so blocks that make up the Collico neighborhood of Valdivia for things don't really change all that fast in Chile, certainly not outside of the Capital, Santiago.  And sure enough, we found the house because it had not changed at all since the pictures I had seen and it still had the sign on the front with the full name of the band: Grupo Musical Eleuterio Ramirez.  (Eleuterio Ramirez was a Chilean naval hero in the war of the Pacific, but I have no idea why the musical group is named after him.  So not having a good reason to feature Eleuterio in this discussion, I will continue referring to the group as the Banda).

Elated that we had found the place, we knocked on the front door, hoping that someone would be there who could talk to us about the Banda, and who might remember Emilio.  But nobody answered.  It was getting late in the day, so after waiting a few minutes with no response and deciding finally that this was not going to work out, we began to drive off.  As we did, a man from a neighboring house, surely having watched us from behind a curtain the entire time we were trying to arouse someone, walked over to our car and asked what we wanted.  We told him about our interest in the Banda, to which he replied with polite sarcasm, "Why don't you just knock on the door of that house on the other side...the President of the Grupo Musical lives there." 

Astonished but excited that we may actually be about to find someone connected to the Banda, we followed his advice and banged on the door of the neighboring house until from around the side of the house a large, middle aged woman appeared, exhibiting some reticence, obviously taken aback by the sight of Flick and me, for we actually look a bit like Anglo versions of Don Quijote and Sancho Panza, if you use your imagination a bit.

As we began to tell her our story a big smile appeared on Malva's ruddy face and she said "Emilio?  You know Emilio?  Wait a minute.  I will go in and wake up Jose, the President of the Banda.  He works nights as a security guard downtown, so he is sleeping, but he will want to meet you and talk to you about Emilio."

So for the next half hour or so, Malva and Jose gave us a tour of the headquarters of the Banda and explained some of the history of the Banda.  Both Malva and Jose were small when Emilio lived in Valdivia and was involved with the Banda de Collico, but they remembered him fondly.  They showed us pictures of the early years of the Banda that they have in a scrapbook and adorning the walls of the Banda's headquarters, and explained how the Banda during the 1980s, 90s and into the 2000s went dormant because so many members came of age and went into the military services, including their leader, Pulga.  Jesse had mentioned this guy named Pulga, piquing my interest to know more about someone named "Flea" and I became more expectant now that we were finally hearing about him. 

 Jose explained that Pulga was back, living in Valdivia, and he had resuscitated the Banda de Collico. (One of the first things Malva had done when she met us, unbeknownst to us, was to call Pulga to tell him he had to come to Collico to meet some friends of Emilio.) As Jose was explaining how this guy Pulga was getting the group going again, a big silver Mercedes Benz drove up the dirt street and stopped right in front of the Banda de Collico headquarters, out jumped a diminutive, tightly wound package of energy, and we pretty much knew we were about to meet the revered leader they call Pulga, for the nickname fits the man...as long as you limit the similarity to the positive attributes of a flea:  tough, small, persistent, hard not to notice. 

 After several Chilean macho back slapping hugs a greeting like this requires, we settled into the practice area of the Banda headquarters and listened to Pulga recount but in more depth the story Jesse had previewed for me.  Jesse had based a lot of the story he passed to me on a communication he had received in late 2011 from one of the surviving Banda members, Jose Miguel.  What follows here is some of what Jose Miguel remembers, enriched and possibly embellished by Pulga's testimony, as told to me in Collico that day in February 2012.

In the early 1960s, a group of very young men would get together every day to practice what little music they knew, on whatever instruments they could find, mostly abandoned  or donated, "...after all, it was the only entertainment we had those days, no television of course; and one day, in 1963 or 1964, all of a sudden a tremendous "Gringo" appeared in the door of the Banda's house, a "Gringo" who did not speak Spanish but was in spite of this able to communicate the ideas that amounted to: I band...I musician...I tuba...I peace missionary.  No one knew him, for apparently he lived in a different neighborhood of Valdivia."

As Chileans are known for doing, they invited the Gringo in. "He asked us many questions and said many things, none of which we understood, but he picked up a tuba and began to play it to everyone's great pleasure, including the Gringo's because we were all attentively listening to him play."

As was mentioned earlier, when he learned more about the Banda Collico, Emilio stayed in the neighborhood to live; "...even though we were all of very humble means, children of obreros, modest workers, many of whom did not know how to read or write, less read music, Emilio developed a deep interest in us, especially our music, and he began to teach us musical notes on some of the few decrepit instruments we had.  His personality made him an extremely friendly person, an attractive combination of jovial but demanding."

Emilio became especially close to the smallest of the musicians, a boy in his early teens, Fernando, who spoke deeply vernacular Chilean Spanish including a good collection of the ugliest and most descriptive garabatos, swear words, many of which have now become commonplace in public discourse in Chile but back then were frowned upon.  It was Emilio who baptized Fernando with the name Pulga because he was a huge pain, disorderly, and, well...flea-like..but they cultivated a grand friendship up to the time for Emilio to return to the United States.

"Emilio picked up his street Spanish from Pulga, and everyone in the neighborhood began to know El Gringo and wanted to learn music from him. His way of speaking made him extremely popular and a favorite of the children and adults alike, men and women, but more than anything, he was loved for his dedication to teaching music and his willingness to live in a humble way, like everyone else at that time in Collico."

"Emilio knew cold and hunger with us, the poverty we were living.  We had some very bad times, when we, and he, had very little to eat, but he never stopped teaching and demanding that we learn, and his friendship with Fernando never waned."

After Emilio left, Fernando joined the Carabineros de Chile, where he remained for more than 30 years and rose to become the Director of the Carabinero National Band, the Orfeon, an impossible feat were it not for the music skills he learned from Emilio.  Other members of the group, Humberto "el pavo", Victor, and Dagoberto joined the Chilean army, Carlos "el chivo", Luis, and Belarmino remained in civilian life, and even though the Banda did not prosper for several years while they were all doing other things, "..they are all very appreciative to this day of the training Emilio gave them that made it possible for them to escape poverty because of their music."

One of the stories the old musicians of the Banda Collico like to remember is when Emilio, seeing that the Banda had too few instruments to play, sent a message to his parents in the US asking them to send instruments and uniforms for the Banda, only to be disappointed as they waited several months without news of the shipment.  "One day El Gringo disappeared for several weeks, reappearing with boxes and boxes of instruments, uniforms, and best of all, sheet music including the favorites of Herb Alpert and John Philip Sousa!"  As it turns out, the instruments had been sent from the US to Chile, but due to an ambiguous importation law the instruments could not enter Chile without previously paying a very elevated tax, a protective tariff habit Chile had during those years before the freer trade movement caught on.  Anyway, confronted with this tax impossible to pay, the story goes that Emilio made some arrangement to obviate the Chilean official customs process and relying on an "unofficial" process the boxes arrived to Valdivia in a fishing boat that entered town via the Calle Calle river.  They all swear that Pulga, future Carabinero officer, had nothing to do with the clandestine importation of musical instruments, but this part of the story is still quite cloudy and for my part shall best remain so.

I'll keep sitting patiently through Jesse's stories from now on, in part because he is a friend and I have learned to be polite to friends and listen to what they have to say or they won't listen to me, but also because through this story about Emilio, Pulga and the Banda de Collico I found a treasure trove of interesting stories, memories, and personal histories by merely taking the time to stop by the headquarters (such as it is) of the Grupo Musical Eleuterio Ramirez, aka Banda de Collico (such as it is), site of another memorable Peace Corps experience in Chile.  The genuine expressions of friendship and human understanding these stories tell are absolutely heartwarming, the stuff we all search for in life but only sometimes find.

What leaves an even more indelible mark on me when I connect with these moving relationships between regular Americans and regular Chileans is how durable they are, relations that began decades ago like this one in the poor neighborhood of Collico in southern Chile, relations that are alive and full of hope, as they were in the most vibrant moments when they were being formed, one day at a time. 

Pulga brought this home to me as we were saying our goodbyes;  he shouted to us as we drove down the road: "Tell Emilio we are still waiting for that second shipment of instruments he promised us!"

Posted in Leesburg, Virginia, on November 15, 2012.

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

CHILE 2012

Dear friends and loyal followers,
It took me quite awhile to recover from the Peace Corps reunion in Washington on September 24, the subject of my last posting on this blog. But we are about to head south to Santiago again, on January 12, for a nice long stay of three months. I have gone back through all my prior postings, and find that I have promised to follow up on several interesting themes, but have yet to do so; like oysters, mussels, earthquake recovery, some special wines we have heard about and want to try, and of course the continual search for old friends, colleagues, and haunts from when I was with the Peace Corps in Chile.

In the runup to the reunion on September 24, I received many interesting letters from others who spent time in Chile, with stories that deserve some research to determine at least approximate veracity, but also an update on circumstances around the people and places those stories relate. Peace Corps volunteers Larry Rector, Tom Scanlon, and Brian Loveman have written books about Chile over the years since their Peace Corps service, and I would like to visit their sites and see what they are like now, compared to what we hear about them as long as 45 years ago; especially Trovolhue where Brian and his wife helped a town move their village to higher ground to avoid annual flood waters from the river, and the area in the Araucania region of southern Chile where Tom wrote his letters home that served as the basis for his book "Waiting for the Snow".

Also, Jim Dungan, who now lives in the Temuco area on his farm, wrote me a very long description of how he, when he was a Peace Corps Volunteer, was pretty much responsible for introducing Radiata pine to Chile. Since this introduced species has become the basis for a very successful forest industry sector in Chile (and the target of the environmentalists ire for contributing to the "sterilization" of the Chilean countryside), I would like to get Jimmy D. around a bottle of Chilean tinto and delve deeper into the true story of how this tree came to Chile.

And speaking of introduced species in Chile, we have made much of the role the US Peace Corps played in the introduction of salmon, as class of fish that has also, along with Radiata pine, resulted in incredible economic growth of an export product and a whole leading sector of the Chilean economy. But, some of the stories are short on details, so even though I have promoted the positive aspects of what has gone on in Chile with the introduciton of salmon, I would like to spend time visiting with long-time Peace Corps marine biologist counterparts I knew several years ago in Chilean Universities, like Alfredo Cea and Juan Carlos Castilla, if I can find them.

It seems there was one Peace Corps Volunteer in Valdivia who became a member of the community band that played in the town square every weekend. He is remembered not only as a friendly "gringo" who wanted to be part of his town, but also for the instruments he brought from the US and donated to the group. Just before the September reunion, we received a note from one of the band members, remembering fondly the Volunteer who lived up to the best people-to-people dimension of the Peace Corps. I would like to share a pitcher of iced white wine with peaches, clery, with this old Valdiviano and get a bit more flavor of the town band.

The last time I left Chile, I sat next to a New Zealander who has lived in southern Chiloe, near Castro, where he raises oysters, clams and mussels. He invited me to visit him and see how his operation has grown and how he is trying to raise these bivalves in an environmentally sustainable way. This visit is high on my list for this trip to Chile, if for no other reason than that I was so impressed with the New Zealander green lipped mussels when I visited that country for my Godson Joaco's wedding, that I am sure this guy can do wonders with Chile's best mollusks.

So, you have been forewarned....there will be much more coming. But I want to try something new this year. I am acceding to the oft-repeated suggestion that my postings are to long, and have decided to try to post more frequently, but shorter pieces. We shall see how that goes.
Until then, Happy New Year. I hope to see all of you in 2012, but if not, at least an occasional exchange of views and high thoughts.

Un gran abrazo,
Dave

Posted in Panama City, Panama on December 28, 2011

CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF PEACE CORPS

Saturday, September 24, 2011 was a great day for those of us who served in the Peace Corps in Chile. Under a threatening sky, over 220 returned Volunteers from throughout the country gathered at the invitation of the Embassy of Chile, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps and our lasting relationship with the fine people of Chile.

At about 1 PM, in the patio and courtyard of the Museum of American Art in downtown Washington, DC, just a couple of blocks from the White House and behind the majestic building of the Organization of American States, two tents were finally raised in place to shelter our group from forecasted inclement weather that, fortunately, did not materialize.

An impressive display of posters with pictures and stories of Peace Corps Volunteer activities throughout the years welcomed the participants as they streamed in, young and old alike. There were 70 year olds from the first groups to arrive in Chile in 1961, and 30 year olds who served in the last group that left Chile in 1998. Each Volunteer who attended was given a copy of the freshly edited publication “The Peace Corps in Chile; 1961-1998”, soon to be available online on the National Peace Corps Association website.


True to form, the menu began with classic empanadas washed down with rich Chilean red and chilled white wine and accompanied by recordings of those old Chilean tonadas sung by the Huasos Quincheros. About an hour into the reunion, as more Volunteers showed up and the reencounters after many years of separation began to create a happy din, Peter Walsh, a Volunteer who served in Valdivia in 1964, played the National Anthems of Chile and the United States on his accordion as the groups sang along. The Chileans present were duly impressed that so many gringos actually knew the words to their national song.

It was a wonderful afternoon of meeting and greeting people we knew and worked with many years ago, some of whom we had not seen since leaving Chile. We had great fun sharing memories again with Volunteers from our PC Chile group, including Ron Bodinson, John Hager and Blanca, Carl Gallegos and Brenda, Jerry Dillehay, Ron Billings and Carmen, Lee Baker and Suzie, Millie Wetterberg, Kerry Mills and Pete, and Willie Goldsmith.

It was also a great pleasure to reunite after many years with Volunteers who served, and whom I became close to, when I was on the staff of the Chile Peace Crops program from 1976-79: Connie Mohlis, who helped develop the chinchilla reserve near Salamanca in northern Chile, Sean Keagan who served in a farmers coop in Hijuelas north of Santiago, Raoul Gagne and Paul Randolph who were professional natural resource specialists working to better manage Chile’s water and forest resources, Christine MacNaughton who was one of Augusta Crino's star Volunteers in the rural health program, Gary and Elaine Gepford who contributed modern approaches to physical education training and of course Linda and Floyd Thompson who contributed so much to the design of visitor facilities and environmental education programs in national parks.

A Chilean buffet was set up, featuring ceviche, pastel de choclo, chicken and beef pinchos, and several salads including ensalada Chilena. As the dessert of fruit mousse and fresh fruit was served, the speeches began.

First, Joe Keyerleber greeted the Volunteers on behalf of the first group of Volunteers who went to Chile in 1961. He reminded everyone of what it was like to be the first to join up for something as novel and exciting as the Peace Corps. And, he read a greeting from Father Theodore Hesburgh, who was intimately involved in training and supporting those first Volunteers to go to Chile, and who continues to meet annually with these Volunteers in spite of his advanced age and delicate health. Hesburgh’s greeting ended with a very personal message to the Volunteers:

“Each and every one of you has a personal story to tell about your time in Chile. You helped Chile grow, and at the same time your experience led to your personal growth and that of our nation. Because of you and your service in the Peace Corps, we are a society more aware and sensitive to the broader world around us, and this contributes to world peace. Thank you for your service in the Peace Corps. Don’t ever forget why you went, and always cherish and share what you brought back with you.”

Representing the last group of Volunteers to serve in Chile, Christina Machion Quilaqueo spoke about the many cultural and personal links Volunteers maintain with Chile and Chileans well past the end of their Peace Corps service. She married a Chilean and like so many others, has a child who is bilingual and bicultural, “…where celebrating Dieciocho is just as routine as celebrating the 4th of July; where eating empanadas is a ordinary as having a burger; and where hopping on a few planes to vacation with abuelita and tata is way more fun than going to the Jersey shore.” She ended her greeting citing Ambassador John O’Leary who, in 1998 while talking to the Peace Corps staff in Santiago said:

“The US can be proud of what the Peace Corps has contributed to Chile, but none of it would have been possible if Chileans did not open your arms and your homes to welcome these North American Volunteers. The marvel of the Peace Corps experience worldwide is that Volunteers return to the United States saying they will never be able to repay what they received, and the citizens of countries where Volunteers served say they will never forget what the Volunteers contributed to their country. The Peace Corps has helped broaden the United States’ view of the world, and I trust the Volunteers have given Chile a better understanding of the United States.”

Christina ended by addressing directly the Ambassador of Chile: “On behalf of all the Peace Corps Volunteers that have served in Chile, I would like to express our heartfelt gratitude through you, Mr. Ambassador, to all the Chilean people that we worked, lived, and shared so much with us while we served as Volunteers in your beautiful country, our adopted home.”

Representing the State Department, Jason Vorderstrasse, Chile Desk Officer, read a greeting from the Department, which included another quote from Ambassador O’Leary, who said in 1998 in Santiago: “The best friends that Chile has in the United States are the 2,500 Peace Corps Volunteers who served in Chile, who proudly tell all who will listen, “I worked for the Peace Corps in Chile”.

The Chilean Ambassador, Arturo Fermandois, then congratulated the 220 returned Peace Corps Volunteers who had come to Washington to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Peace Corps. He noted that between 1961 and 1998, over 2,500 Volunteers had served in Chile, an impressive number to be sure, and that for so many to come together for this reunion was a testimony to the commitment Volunteers feel for the Peace Corps and the country in which they served, in this case, Chile.

Fermandois stated that over the past 50 years, since the first Peace Corps Volunteers arrived in Chile, great advances had taken place in the Chilean economy, and he recognized that Volunteers had made significant contributions in many of those sectors where the most development has taken place. He mentioned specifically how PC Volunteers had assisted with the relocation of the entire town of Trovolhue, affected by the earthquake of 1960, and the role the Peace Corps played in the introduction to Chile of salmon, now a leading export product. He thanked the Volunteers and the United States for what the Peace Corps did in Chile.

The Ambassador recognized the intercultural learning and integration that takes place with participants in partnership services like the Peace Corps, and noted humorously that it was clear that Peace Corps Volunteers were “risk takers”, given that so many had married Chileans, according to him a very risky undertaking.

Fermandois explained that the Government of Chile is totally committed to developing more partnerships with US institutions of all types and levels, and he described his recent visit to Harvard University where they discussed educational exchange programs between US and Chilean Universities.

He ended his greeting to the PC Volunteers noting that Chile was deeply committed to more interchange between Chile and the United States, a commitment that underlies Chile’s determination to obtain U.S. Visa Waiver status for Chileans visiting the United States, and he even suggested that a Peace Corps type program that would bring Chileans to the United States might be a viable program to pursue in the future.

Bringing this historic encounter to a close, the 220 Volunteers joined Ambassador Fermandois in a loud “Viva Chile”, after which pictures were taken of the group with the Ambassador Fermandois. The event ended with repeated “Viva Chile” and even a verse or two of “Si Vas Para Chile”.

Later that same night, the ever resilient Chile 27/28 group of Hagers, Bakers, Gallegos, Joslyns, Mills, Bodinson, Dillehay, Wetterberg and Goldsmith dined on steak and crab cakes at the Historic Old Ebbits Grill in downtown Washington DC, and as you all may have already guessed, before heading home we toasted the Peace Corps, Chile, and our friendship repeatedly with way too much award-winning Chilean tinto.

Posted on October 1, 2011, in Leesburg, Virginia

Viva El Instituto Forestal!!

Tomorrow, May 5, 2011, in Santiago, Chile, there will be an event to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the founding of the Instituto Forestal, the Chilean government’s forests, forest products, and forest industries research center. 1961, as it turns out, was truly a year filled with optimism and “Big Ideas”. Visionary Chileans created the Instituto Forestal that year, and an equally progressive US President established the Peace Corps. Both institutions and the many fine people who have worked within these organizations have made transformational changes to our world, providing noteworthy benefits to the fine people of both countries.

During the 1960s, several very fortunate young foresters from the United States were chosen to participate in both enterprises, and were sent to Chile as Peace Corps Volunteers to work along side Chilean professionals at the Instituto Forestal. I was one of those fortunate few, whose lives were changed by that experience. We established intimate friendships that have lasted to this day. We contributed our small part to the growth of Chile’s forestry and wood products sectors, and consequently we share with our Chilean friends and colleagues a sense of deep pride that this sector has now become a mainstay in Chile’s vibrant economy. We have not always kept in contact with the Chileans with whom we lived and worked during those heady years of our youth, but because of our experience at the Instituto Forestal we have rejoiced in Chile’s successes, and suffered along at least in spirit during the difficult years.

For me, the Instituto Forestal occupies a special place because it was while I was working there that I first saw Ximena (now my partner of 41 years), in a photograph shown me by my colleague at the time, Joaquin (now married to Ximena’s sister Veronica). In fact, it was not just that picture, but the undercover work of Ximena’s aunt, Silvia, who worked in the library at the Instituto Forestal, that determined that Ximena’s and my path should converge.

The work I did at the Instituto Forestal as a Peace Corps Volunteer on ways to preserve Chilean wood for use in construction not only led to more and better research at the Instituto itself, but also served as the basic research for my Master of Science Degree at the State University of New York College of Environmental Sciences and Forestry after Ximena and I returned to the US in 1970.

For many Peace Corps Volunteers, our time at the Instituto Forestal, under the memorable guiding hand of Don Manuel Munoz, together with Don Mario Han, Don Moises Yudelevich, and Don Manuel Ortiz, was one of the best times of our lives. For this, and for the many fond memories of time we spent in Chile’s forests, laboratories, training centers and green and white “Instituto” vehicles travelling the spectacularly beautiful roads of Chile, we all join our Chilean colleagues today in celebrating the 50-year Anniversary of the Instituto Forestal.

Viva el bosque Chileno!
Viva el Instituto Forestal!
Viva Chile!

Written on May 4, 2011, in Leesburg, Virginia.

NAYA

Finally, I have met Naya. Attempting to meet Nadeschda Del Rio is really why I ended up tossed out of bed, onto the floor at 3:34 AM in the Hotel Alonzo de Ercilla over a year ago in Concepcion, Chile, during that terrible 8.8 earthquake. (You can read all about it in the first posting on this blog, dated May 2010). On that fateful day, my plan was to drive by car to Arauco, a small town south of Concepcion, to visit the widow of an old friend, Enrique del Rio. I worked with Enrique in the Instituto Forestal in 1967 when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer, but I had not heard from or about Enrique or Naya for 40 years. I had finally contacted the Del Rio home in Arauco that day a year ago, before driving to Concepcion, only to hear from Naya that Enrique had passed away 15 years ago. Disappointed by this news, I still wanted to see her, to talk with her about Enrique and to meet his children.

Having aborted this plan to visit Naya in Arauco last year, and knowing that the coastal area south of Concepcion (including Arauco, Lota, Coronel and several small fishing villages) had been seriously damaged and isolated due to the earthquake and tsunami, I have been concerned for the Del Rio family for the past year. As my latest trip to Chile drew to the end, I finally had a few days left in Chile with no commitments and the urge to get out of Santiago for a few days, so I enlisted my old Peace Corps boss and USAID colleague, Gerry (who lives in Santiago with his Chilean wife Maria Elena), to make a visit with me to Concepcion and Arauco to find Naya.

It is a long day’s drive from Santiago to Concepcion and further on to Arauco, so the only stop we made on the way was in Concepcion at the Alonzo de Ercilla Hotel, where I had been the night of the quake. I wanted to see how well they had recovered, since my memory of the place when I left it early the morning after the earthquake was that it had suffered quite a bit of damage. But a year later, the hotel is all fixed and operating as if nothing had happened, so we decided that we would go to Arauco to see Naya, then return to stay at this hotel that night. Gerry insisted, though, that if we did that, we would request a room on the first floor. I had been on the 4th floor in the earthquake, and the first floor just seemed more advisable. The building next to the hotel, which had collapsed into the street during the quake, killing someone in a car parked in the street at the time, was completely demolished. An empty lot now replaces that old building used during 2009 as presidential campaign headquarters for Eduardo Frei. That is pretty appropriate; an unsuccessful campaign, a lost election, a demolished building….three strikes, you’re out!

As we left Concepcion, we crossed the wide, lazy Bio Bio River, and drove right by the ill-fated apartment building which had split in two and partially collapsed during the earthquake, killing several residents and leading to a huge debate and series of lawsuits precipitated by the obvious fact that errors in construction were to blame for this building’s demise. Two taller buildings stood firm right next door, silent witnesses to the crime. We were in a hurry to get to Arauco, so we did not stop to observe closely this landmark building, but agreed we would do so upon our return through Concepcion.

It was getting late as we arrived in Arauco, and we had to search a bit to find the place where Naya had told me a year ago that she lived and was operating her ceramics factory. I had lost the phone number I had used to contact her the year before, so I was not able to call ahead to see if she was there and alert her to our visit. I was just hoping to find her. As Gerry and I drove in a long driveway, past some simple homes and other buildings, we began to speculate as to whether we would even find anyone, since the place was very quiet and we saw no one. However, as we turned a bend in the driveway, Gerry softly whispered “There she is, that must be her standing there…and she is definitely Russian!” Standing in the doorway of what obviously was her ceramics factory, holding a piece of pottery she was polishing, white-blond hair shining in the sunlight, covered with white clay powder from head to toe, stood Nadeschda Mordwinkin Rudenko, my old friend Enrique’s widow.

She smiled from ear to ear when I introduced myself, and honestly, I almost cried as I thought about my old friend Enrique, how he had been so good to me during my first year in Chile as a young Peace Corps Volunteer, how sorry I was he was not there to greet me, and how pleased I was to see Naya after all I had been through to get back to Arauco. Gerry and I toured her ceramics factory, which she and Enrique built 40 years ago but which she is closing down because, at 78 she is tired of working. Besides, the earthquake destroyed the larger of her two ceramic ovens, and she could not repair it. Naya showed us some remaining examples of the beautiful hand painted bowls, dishes, flower vases, and pitchers she has produced for years but which sadly will no longer be on the market. Naya is moving soon to Concepcion to live with her daughter Natasha, where she will teach painting and ceramics in several institutes and schools.

Naya is of a White Russian family that, after escaping from Russia, then from Serbia (Yugoslavia at the time) where they lived in the Diaspora. They arrived in 1948 by boat at the port city of Valparaiso, Chile, with 800 other Russian war refugee families who ultimately settled throughout Chile. She was only 19 when she and Enrique met while living in Penco, a small town just north of Concepcion, and were married. Their six children (Natasha, Maria Alejandra, Maria Cecilia, Eliza, Enrique, and Carolina Nadeschda) and a dozen grandchildren all live in Chile. Naya and Enrique left Chile in 1973, several years after he and I had worked together at the Instituto Forestal in Santiago. She explained to Gerry and me that they left Chile then because they had no desire to go through the civil and social chaos Chile was consumed by at that time as the leftist government headed towards military intervention amidst talks of civil war. Naya especially wanted to leave, since she had escaped as a young girl from what she remembered as similar conditions in Russia and Yugoslavia. They moved to Costa Rica and the United States where Enrique endlessly searched for the right niche to satisfy his independent and creative urge to build his own company, but ultimately they returned to Chile, to Arauco, where Enrique’s family lived and where they built their ceramics factory.

As we talked with Naya about their lives, much of it difficult, struggling to establish themselves in new places, with new languages and new cultures, I could not help but marvel at Naya’s unabated optimism, how creative she has been and still is. I recall some pretty difficult times I myself faced when I went for the first time as a young man to live and work in Chile, but Naya is the kind of person who, without trying, makes me feel guilty to have ever felt sorry for myself.

When we parted after a lovely time together, I became very emotional, as I was when we greeted earlier that afternoon. And I sensed that this very sensitive but life-hardened woman also felt a twinge of nostalgia for times and people in her past awakened a bit by my visit. As Gerry and I drove out the driveway, he said to me “Dave, that was a very nice and meaningful thing to do”. And I felt the same way. In a very small way, I guess I wanted to do something to acknowledge what a good friend Enrique had been to me over forty years ago. I remember how much Enrique admired the United States. I remember the day Enrique entered my office at the Instituto Forestal, shaking, tears in his eyes, having just heard of the assassination in Los Angeles of Robert Kennedy, and cried out “David, what the hell is wrong with your country?” I had no good answer for Enrique that day, but his honest concern for me and for my country helped me greatly that day face up to a very difficult issue and get through a confusing time.

As Gerry and I left the Del Rio home, I deeply wished I had been able to reunite with Enrique before his untimely death, and thank him for his friendship. My efforts to see Naya in Arauco, though, were paid back many times over by the short time I spent reminiscing with this wonderful woman who, during our visit, quietly insisted that “Life is too easy if you don’t find a few stones in the road”. That’s quite an appropriate take on life for a woman whose name in Russian, Nadeschda , means “Hope”.

Finding “Jauja”

When I was a young man, serving with the Peace Corps in Chile, I discovered “Jauja”! I remember once standing on the rocky shore of Lago Villarrica in southern Chile, looking out over that beautiful emerald lake with the smoking, snowcapped volcano in the background. I admitted to my Chilean counterpart Enrique, that I had never seen scenes like this before, to which he commented “You are in Jauja, Gringito”. I was told this again one cold, rainy evening while sitting around a crackling fireplace in the Protectora de Empleados Particulares just off the central plaza in Valdivia, drinking warm red wine and eating seafood-filled empanadas with my colleagues from the Instituto Forestal. Upon exclaiming my total pleasure of the moment, Humberto, my boss at the Instituto stated, almost accusatorily, “You have really found “Jauja”, haven’t you Gringo”. For the longest time, I must admit, I did not really know what they meant by “Jauja”. At the time, it did not matter much to me to find out, because when it came up, I was usually too happy and enjoying myself too much with my colleagues to care. Later on, however, in a more inquisitive time, I learned that “Jauja”, while the name of the first capital of Peru, in Chile is a metaphor for prosperity and abundance, or more to the point, an ideal place.

In the interceding forty plus years since I first heard of “Jauja”, I have myself occasionally invoked the term “Jauja” to others. I remember well sitting at an old table behind our Shenandoah Valley country home with Francisco, our Chilean nephew, and shared a bottle of 10-year old Concha y Toro Don Melchor, just the two of us, reminiscing about our lives in Chile and how fate brought us together as family. We bonded a bit more that night, uncle and nephew, in the calm mist of the humid evening and under the soothing effects of one of Chile’s best wines. I stated to Francisco, “You know, this is “Jauja!”. I wasn’t exactly talking about the place, although it was pretty perfect that evening, but more about the mood of our relationship. An ideal place.

And again when a bunch of my Peace Corps buddies and our families stood together on the streets of Santa Barbara, California, drinking cold beer, celebrating the floats in “La Fiesta” parade and toasting our friendship, the day before our oldest daughter Andrea was married. That too was “Jauja”. When you lead an exciting life, have many good friends, and a wonderful family, you tend to have lots of “Jauja” moments.

During the second week in January of this year, Ximena and I travelled to Hastings, New Zealand, to attend the wedding of another Chilean nephew, Francisco’s brother Joaquin, our Godson. Joaquin went to New Zealand about three years ago in a “working holiday” program New Zealand has with Chile. After experimenting with several different jobs, mostly temporary worker jobs like picking fruit, cleaning shellfish, milking cows (you see, New Zealand does not have a border with Mexico), Joaquin found a longer-term opportunity in the wood products industry, made possible because Joaquin, like his father, and like I his godfather, has a university degree in forestry. So he stayed on in New Zealand, much like four decades ago when I stayed on in Chile for a third year of Peace Corps service that culminated in my marriage to Ximena.

As one might expect, Joaquin, a young man, good looking, gregarious, and probably somewhat lonely and nostalgic for his homeland and family, soon found the woman he has been searching for over quite a long period of time, and Laiza and he were married in a lovely Orthodox church in a residential neighborhood in Hastings on January 15. Because I am his Godfather, I was asked to make a toast at the wedding reception. But before that, since we arrived in Hastings several days before the wedding, we were invited to several parties, dinners, and gatherings to meet Laiza’s family and friends. To make things more exciting, Laiza is a Kiwi whose parents are Greek. It didn’t take long to see that the entire Greek community in Hastings makes up Joaquin’s newly found New Zealand family. They all call Joaquin "Joe", signaling a high degree of integration in this English-speaking country, familiarity and permanence, I believe. So of course we roasted a lamb on a spit in the backyard under the expert guidance of Laiza’s father.

We learned Greek dancing, including Zorba’s favorite, so we would not embarrass ourselves at the wedding reception when we would have to spin, kick, and circle all together. We drank too much wonderful New Zealand wine and a good bit of Ouzo. And we even broke some plates, that's required in a Greek party, even in New Zealand.


Joaquin’s and Laiza’s wedding ceremony was traditional, beautiful, and moving.

Through all this, I had been having a difficult time constructing in my mind the toast I would give at the reception. I had almost given in to the easy way out of giving a short, to-the-point congratulatory toast. However, when it came time for me to propose my toast at the reception, I was suddenly inspired by the moment and instead told a story, the story of how young foresters find “Jauja”.

I explained how forty or so years ago another young forester travelled far from his upstate New York home to work for a short period of time in a foreign land where he had no friends (other than his Peace Corps colleagues) and no family. I explained how that young forester, after struggling with a difficult foreign language, a curiously intricate culture, and loneliness, was taken in by a group of caring colleagues and a loving and fun-loving family, how he learned a new language and delved head first into the new culture. In essence, I clarified, he found “Jauja” in Chile. And what’s more, he is still married to Ximena and together they have raised a multi-culture family with close ties with families in both Chile and the US.

Now the God-son is repeating the cycle. Joaquin has been completely taken in by this loving and happy Greek-Kiwi family, and he is a valued employee in his work where his relationship with his colleagues so reminds me of what I had at the Instituto Forestal back in the late 1960s in Chile. Joaquin and Laiza will raise a family that is a blend of Chilean, Greek and New Zealand genes and culture, and the Spanish, English, and Greek languages. That is really how “Jauja” is defined. Just like forty years ago when “El Gringito” found “Jauja” in Chile, “Joe” has found “Jauja” in New Zealand.

Felicidades!! Congratulations!! Sinharitiria!!

Written in Leesburg, Virginia on January 31, 2011