10-07-08

Watch Parties
The "Watch Parties" that CNN flashes to during the debates look terribly un-festive. Here in Puerto Natales, we've been having a lot more fun. Even if it's hard to hear our favorite catchphrases such as "you betcha," "maverick," "wall street versus main street," and most recently "that one," the debates have been a welcome reason for a weeknight get-together, exoitc foods such as burritos, guacamole, and pizza, as well as a drink or two. Oh, and I just heard from the city that my absentee ballot is on its way. Go Obama!

Claudia
Claudia is the inspectora at my school. She is a large and severe-looking woman with a delantal that is often stained and rumpled, thick, tinted lenses that remain dark inside, and a hefty neck dotted with moles. I liked her as soon as I met her, because she is the only person in the school, it seems, to whom the students show unyielding resepct. All Chilean schools have an inspector or inspectora--an official disciplinarian. I merely have to mention the name Tía Claudia and I watch my students perk up and stiffen in their seats. She has rescued me on more than one occasion now when my class is out of order, barging into the room to shout, "Hey, la tiá didn't come from thousands of miles away to put up with this crap!" Outside of class, she's funny and kind, offering me a wad of cold bread pudding on a plate or giving me the lowdown on certain students and Natalinos--"Watch out for the ones with dreadlocks," she warned. "Lice!"

Claudia told me she liked my block-letter printing, and she asked if I could help her with a plaque she was going to leave in her mother's niche--the little box shrine visible in the wall of graves at many Chilean cemetaries. (Photographs are often also left in these displays--the country is much more inclined to show and remember what the deceased looked like in life, which makes the graveyard more personal than a name and a number.) Claudia had chosen a few words of poetry from a library book, beginning "Nunca jamás," never again, and with her guidance I wrote them on a posterboard cutout of a dove another teacher had drawn. Claudia was going to take the dove to the jail, where the inmates run a serigraph workshop for engraving wood.