I’ve been in Chile for three months, and it’s interesting to look back at some of my fears before I left and consider which ones were accurate and which were not. My worry that I would be bored living in one place for so long was entirely unfounded; this Friday we went out for some after-work drinks and then it was five in the morning and I was sitting on top of an Andean foothill next to a man playing a didgeridoo.
I have also discovered entirely new fears. The award for the person who most terrified me this week goes to Gabriel. On Thursday we decided to take some of the kids to the park to play in the sprinklers and stopped on the way in a nice shady meadow behind a statue of the Virgin Mary. As we walked in Gabriel spotted a sweet-looking cow and toddled off towards it. I was enjoying the scene until I saw that what Gabriel was doing was more like ‘running very fast’ and less like ‘toddling’ and that the ‘sweet-looking cow’ was more like an ‘angry bull with big horns’. And that Fluffy and Billy Elliot at that moment had decided to go and bait the bull into charging. Right towards Gabriel. Fuelled only by blind panic and the large amount of bread I had eaten that day I sprinted after Gabriel and moved him out of the bull’s range. My triumphant ‘I didn’t let a child under our care get killed’ walk back to Grace and Beth was slightly spoiled, however, by the fact that in the excitement of the moment Gabriel had pooed himself.
The rest of the week was better. On Tuesday we went to see the Arctic Monkeys in Santiago. It was brilliant. Having spent a quarter of a year with only two people to speak English with, I probably would have paid just to hear a Sheffield accent but the music was pretty good too. Grace and I lost Beth early on in the enormous crowd of sweaty Chilean rock enthusiasts. We assumed that as this was her first ever concert in a foreign country where she didn’t speak the language and didn’t have any money or a phone, she would be absolutely fine; and proceeded to enjoy ourselves. We found some other English people and formed a mosh pit of four people to the bemusement of our neighbours. I had such a good time, there’s just something about being soaked in the sweat of strangers and being essentially punched to music that makes me very happy. By the end I was a mess; the combination of Alex Turner singing ‘I Wanna Be Yours’ and the discovery of a churros vender (churros are deep fried pastry sticks filled with manjar and rainbows) had made me quite teary with joy.
Friday, however, brought the return of the feelings of confusion and discomfort that I had felt when I realised cow was bull. For some inexplicable reason I was placed in the back of a bus filled almost entirely by adults who had dressed up as ‘scary murder clowns’ to celebrate I’m not sure what. With me were Jorge and Cristobal who were hysterical with fear for the entire hour long procession around Colina. My situation was slightly better than Grace and Beth’s, though. They had been chosen to sit in the back of a truck with the rest of the kids, who all felt a strong desire to leap off the back of the moving vehicle (I, as a child, was also overcome by this desire and succeeded in fulfilling it. I would 100% not recommend the experience). When we weren’t trying to stop the death of the children in our care (almost this week’s theme…) we were reeling with the realisation of just how small Colina actually is. We had been told when we arrived at the Hogar that ‘our friends with the car’ were there. We were confused, because we have no friends. After a while, however, it became unpleasantly clear that ‘our friends with car’ were in fact ‘the procession’s police escort who recognised us from the night club we visited last weekend and who were keen to meet up again, even offering Cecilia extra procession freedoms if she helped engineer it’. Travellers, if you visit South America, beware of the police. They are everywhere. They are in that grimy nightclub watching you white girl dance like there’s no tomorrow. They are at your work a few days later telling your boss all about it. They are still at your work and now they are giving you knowing winks.
You’re Never As Safe As You Think You Are
Isobel In Chile 