I am excited about getting started on our environmental engineering project, because I think that it is going to be very interesting. The criteria for our project was that we have to work with a Chilean business to help them find a solution to one of their environmental problems. My group ended up choosing to work with a campamento. A campamento is a community of poor people that live in very small homes that are called mediaguas (a house that usually consists of no more that 4 walls and a roof.) To my understanding the government gives them the building materials, the land, electricity, and water for a very reduced price and volunteers often help construct the house. Not all mediaguas have electricity and water and most campamentos have public bathrooms that everyone shares. I hope that through this project I will get to understand (a little bit) the life of the poor in Chile. However with how the project started off already, I am not quite sure how much I am going to be exposed to. I am not sure why, but we could not go directly to the campamento itself. So we had to go through a business that gives classes to people in campamentos for free in order to teach them skills either to get a job or to take care of themselves, their familes, or their homes. For our first visit to Campamento Poema 20 (Poema 20 is a very famous peom by Paublo Neruda the noble prize winning Chilean poet) I thought that we were going to meet with some families and interview them about what environmental problems were plagueing the comunity, but I suppose if my Spanish was better I wouldnīt have misinturpeted what we were going to do. What we actually ended up doing was help people in the comunity register for a class, and then if there was time after they registered for the course we could ask them a few questions. Well as you can imagine I just sat back and observed and listened, because the whole helping people fill out applications was a bit over my head. In the end our group really only got to talk to two people briefly and basically what we gathered was this: that this particular campamento was 30 years old and so had already solved the two most common and important problems that plague campamentos in general (water supply and trash removal.) However, the problem that they still havenīt found a solution to is that in the winter their homes are plaqued by a large population of rats. So from my understanding (which doesnīt say much) my group is planning on trying to find a way to rid this campamento of rats (sounds pretty ambitious to me, this should be interesting.) Although I didnīt get to see much of the campamento itself during my visit, these are my observations that I feel are interesting: The mediaguas were very small and close together (usually with roofs in poor repair) with very narrow dirt roads winding between the rows of houses. There was a major city road just outside the entrance and middle class houses just steps away from the campamento. The people themselves were very clean and wearing good clothes. The dirt roads were full of people not really playing but just hanging out. I do not think that they usually see cars go through because many of the groups that we passed gave us a hard time in one way or another. Lastly, seeing some one from the United States in a campamento is probably a pretty rare thing, because I kind of felt like a circus freak or something. People didnīt talk to me they just stared at me and the children sang songs about me that the people in my group assured me it was best that I didnīt understand. I do not think that I will be going to this campamento alone, but I am glad that I am getting this unique experience. Iris (my Chilean) mother works for the city helping disabled people, some of which live in a campamento. When I told her that I was surprised by the cleanliness of the campamento and the people she said that it was probably because of its age, because in general this is not true in many campamentos..
On a different subject, I think that I made another Chilean friend which is always exciting. His name is Sebastian and he has my same Physics class but with a different profesor. I met him in the engineering computer lab, he just came up to me asked me a few questions about the process I went through to study abroad and then said that he is always in the Engineering courtyard playing ping pong ball and fooz (sp??) ball if I ever need anything. So of course the first thing that I asked for was help studying for my Physics quiz. He lived up to his word and invited me to study with him and his friend. I spent half of Saturday studying with them. It was a fun time. His friend was a very good teacher and we took breaks to talk and play darts, so I got to practice my Spanish a lot that day. He studied in the United States during high school for a year as a foreign exchange student through rotary club, therefore, he speaks very good English although he hardly ever speaks English to me. So two Chilean friends and counting...
Lastly, Sunday my Chilean familyīs first foreign exchange student came to visit. We had a very nice lunch with a large group of people, in which, my Chilean father intorduced me as their foreign exchange student that doesnīt understand any Spanish! I have to remeber to ask him to not do that again, because I just totally lost my confidence to start a conversation with anyone and of course nobody talked to me because they thought I wouldnīt understand. I am still struggling with improving my Spanish, but I can handle one on one conversations if the person has a little patience and is willing to re-word things when I donīt understand. Anyway, the guest of honor was Jenny who is from England and was back to visit the Chilean guy she fell in love with here. I guess they are planning on getting married, and she is here so that they can decide whether they are going to live in Chile, England, or Spain. I got to talk to her a little bit and she said that during her month here she will try to introduce me to some of her Chilean friends (so weīll see how that goes...)
Love,
Emmie