Carreteando y Estudiando

Just to clear up the title: carrete = fiesta = party; carretear= to party. Oh, chilenismos.

Last Saturday night Diane, Kristin (new Canadian friend, very cool), and I went to Pablo's birthday party. I joked that we were going to do an homage to Pinochet in the middle of it, as Pablo is a young penochetista. He has redeeming qualities, though, and I just tell myself he doesn't know any better.

As for not knowing any better, we found ourselves in an embarrassing situation that night, but we also learned a new chilenismo, or Chilean way of saying something. We had received a flyer via email from Pablo saying giving the direction of the party, Edificio Lemu, Clubhouse. It said that entrance was free after 10 pm, but at the bottom it said that it didn't include cover. We thought that was strange, but that maybe there was a special fee to get into the clubhouse but we may have to still pay a cover for a band or something. Anyway, we came prepared to pay a cover. Well, ''cover'' actually means alcohol! The party was in a rented out clubhouse, and everyone brought their own booze. We didn't notice this at first, as we were offered drinks as soon as we arrived. Later, though, we wisened up. We had considered bringing alcohol, but because we decided the party was at a bar since we would have to pay a cover, we didn't bring anything. Pablo just laughed and provided drinks for us for the rest of the night. I never would have thought that that is what cover means here. He's having another party to use up the leftover food from the first party, so we are going to bring enough ''cover'' to cover what we didn't bring before!

Other than carreteando, which I really haven't been doing that much of, I have been recovering from a sinus infection, teaching, and eeking out final papers. I am proud of myself for not having waited until the night before the papers are due to start working on them. I figured I couldn't punch out two 15-page papers in Spanish overnight. I shouldn't be doing that with papers in English, either....

I didn't teach at the high school this week because there was a teacher's strike. There were strikes and protests all over Chile because of a new education bill being proposed in the Congress that would further privatize education. That's crap. The free, public school education here is severely underfunded, and the gap between private and public education is only maintaining the economic gap within the country. I don't think they have reached an agreement about the bill yet.

I did teach the little kids this week. My heart is both warmed and broken every time I go to the school. The children are so loving, but it pains me so much to know that some of them live in children's homes because their parents abandoned them, and all of them live in poverty. I found out this week that another child, Jessica, lives in a children's home because her parents were/are drug addicts. She is six years old, the same as my niece Madelyn. She is really sweet, and in class Tuesday she hugged me a lot and called me ´´mamá.´´ I so wish I could adopt her! I actually mean that seriously. If I were in a more stable place in my life and had the money to do it, I would probably try to do it. My 15-year-old niece Kayley told me that if I were to adopt all the kids I see and say I want to adopt, I would already have a house full of kids. She's probably right! That's just me, though. I am a mother without a child.