Archive for people

Strap it on

10 March 2008 at 7:05 pm · Filed under my kids, people, school, travel

I have an exercise for you. Take a not-so-small-anymore baby and strap her on the front of you in one of those baby carriers. (I prefer Baby Bjorn myself, since it’s lasted through some beyond-normal use and three kids.) Then strap an almost-three-year-old into an umbrella stroller. (Again, I have to recommend a Chicco Caddy, for the same reasons as above.) Strap on the backpack full of diapers and extra preschooler clothes, wipes, snacks, etc. And strap on a smile. Don’t forget that last piece, because you are going to need it. You are going to pick up a five-year-old from school.

It takes 10 minutes to get out the door of the apartment, down the elevator from the eleventh floor, and out the front gate. If you share the elevator with another resident of the building, you will get your first chance to exercise that smile. “Oh, what a cutie,” they say. That’s good, they are still focused on the baby.

By the time you get down the street to the bus stop, another 10 minutes have passed, and another 20 people walking on the sidewalk. “Que valiente,” they whisper to each other. Now they are talking about you. “How brave she is!”

The bus could take anywhere between two and twenty minutes to arrive. More opportunities to exercise that smile come with the wait. “Can I give her this candy? What’s wrong with her?” Now they are watching the two-year-old. Keep smiling!

You pull the kid and yourself and the stroller up onto the bus. Good news: now they think you have to be crazy, so they give you a seat, even if the place is full. But keep smiling because they are watching you now. If you keep smiling, the bus people will smile back, and you can complete some good-vibe circuit that will insure that you arrive with your smile still in place when the bus reaches your stop in 20 minutes. If you stop smiling, well…don’t stop.

Once you have made it to the door of the bus with your baby strapped on the front, your kid trailing from one arm, and your stroller gripped tightly in the other, push the buzzer and get off. Then assemble the stroller without bending over (remember the baby is still on you) and strap the kid back in place (if she doesn’t kick you in the meantime). You are ready for the next leg of your journey.

Cross the street, avoiding the potholes and the “dog doodles” in the sidewalk, hopefully not against the light, and walk six blocks to the school. You made it! Halfway that is, because you are about to gain another little dynamo and her backpack, and try it all again on the way home.

Roundtrip = 2 hours. Keep smiling!

Comments (3)

Happy Birthday to Rachel

7 November 2007 at 10:05 am · Filed under food, holidays, people

As I have said many times before, my parenting is one the most gringo things about me, and I am okay with that.

Rachel turned five this past week, and it was a busy week of birthday preparations. We had no less than 25 people (friends, their parents, and their brothers and sisters, plus us) at the park for chocolate cake and strawberries. Strawberries for your birthday is one of the benefits of your November birthday being in the spring in Chile. We hung a piñata and the kids all smashed it with a stick, but finally we had to put it down ourselves. All sorts of fun.

Here’s a picture of Rachel blowing out her candles:Rachel birthday candles

On Sunday, Rachel went to the birthday party of another girl who had been at Rachel’s party. She was turning seven.

It was a High School Musical Party. (“That’s SO cool, Mommy.”)

They opened the presents as soon as they arrived. Each child just gave the gift to the birthday girl when they arrived, and she opened them up on the spot. Very Chilean.

They played party games in Spanish even though all the kids were from English speaking families. There’s the culture gap between us and our kids, and they are only five or a little older!

They hung the piñata and just pulled the string so it would shower the kids with candy. No sticks. Also very Chilean.

They ate hot dogs (well, not Rachel, but everyone else). The birthday girl didn’t get a hotdog because they had more guests than they expected. She didn’t seem to mind too much.

They sang Happy Birthday and Felíz Cumpleaños. She blew out her candle (shaped like a 7) and then did the most Chilean thing yet: She begged her parents to let her plant her face in the birthday cake.

They said no. Not very Chilean.

On the way to the car, I said to Rachel, “Did you see that? She wanted to put her face in the cake!”

Rachel said, “Yeah, Mommy. Abby did it at her party.” Like that was the most normal thing in the world.

Comments (1)

Where are you from?

4 October 2007 at 9:04 pm · Filed under people

I was walking from the school to the bus stop with Rachel this afternoon, and a random question popped out of my mouth. “Rachel, where are you from?”
“I don’t know, Mommy.”
“Are you from Chile?”
No answer.
“Are you from America? The United States?”
Still no answer.
“Are you Chilean?”
“Yes.”
“Are you American?”
“No. I don’t know, Mommy. Why do you ask me questions I don’t know the answers to? You don’t like it when I do that to you, Mommy. You really shouldn’t ask me things I don’t know the answers to.”
I apologize. I do hate it when she asks me crazy questions I don’t know the answers to. I am glad she figured that out.
“Mommy? Where am I from?”
I have to think about it for a second.
“Denver. You were born in Denver, Colorado. But now you live in Santiago.”
“Yeah, I knew that.”
I’m not so sure she did.

Comments (1)

One way that you know you are a foreigner and a stranger in a new place is because your name is weird there.

12 August 2007 at 7:54 pm · Filed under language, laws, people

One way that you know you are a foreigner and a stranger in a new place is because your name is weird there.

Okay, so Essenmacher would be difficult for many people in many places. My friend Marion who is from Germany is the only one who thinks our last name isn’t too odd. Essenmacher means food-maker in German, and Marion likes to come over and bake with me, so she thinks it fits us pretty well. And when she prays before the meal, the only word I recognize is “essen.”

But in Chile, my family’s names are weird for another reason: we only have one last name.

Just as we learned in our high school Spanish classes, people in Spanish-speaking countries have two last names, one from their father and one from their mother. For example, my friend Verónica’s full name is Verónica Alejandra Carrera Jara. Verónica and Alejandra are her nombres, her first and middle name as we would describe them in the States. Carrera is her father’s last name, and Jara is her mother’s.

My name is therefore incredibly strange to the poor people who want me to fill out forms that ask for two last names. They deal with it in different ways. The hospital makes the mother’s last name optional, so I can just skip that field when I go online to schedule a doctor’s appointment. The lady who entered my info into the system so I could get a grocery store discount card couldn’t believe it…so she just put her second last name in the place where mine should have gone. Amanda Mead Essenmacher Perez is what my grocery card says!

So you can imagine our shock when we went to get Megan’s Chilean birth certificate and were informed that by law everyone born in Chile must have two last names, and that they must be the last names of the parents of the baby. So poor little Megan was saddled with Megan Hope Essenmacher Essenmacher for the first days of her life. And she will always be legally known as such here in Chile. Thankfully, the American Embassy in Santiago knows how to fix such things when applying for a US passport!

Leave a Comment

Everyone has been asking me to write about having …

13 July 2007 at 1:00 am · Filed under health care, language, people

Everyone has been asking me to write about having a baby in a foreign country. Honestly, I was prepared for something culturally-crazy to happen during the labor and delivery of Megan. I know that I am not so good at surprises, so I tried to psych myself up for something weird to happen. Pretty much it all went according to plan, which almost never happens here!

I credit this all to my doctor. I was referred to this ob/gyn by an Australian friend who has since returned to Australia. The doctor is German, speaks English easily and fluently even with my kids, and has been in Chile for four years. He’s the father of four kids, which I find a big plus in a doctor. He knows what I am experiencing in my daily life because he and his wife are also trying to raise their family in a strange culture.

Anyway, it was Dr. Buhler who put me in touch with my Swiss-German nurse-midwife and my British-trained Chilean pediatrician. They all let me pretty much do things how I wanted, and it all went very smoothly. Whew!

Post-delivery things got a little weird when I had to move on to the care of Chilean-trained nurses and nurse aids who look after new moms. Chilean women usually stay in the hospital for three nights after having a baby, and these nurses were a little hesitant to let me leave before that time was up. During my two days in the hospital, I also had to adjust myself to the Chilean meal schedule: breakfast at 8:30, lunch at 2:00, and dinner at 8:30pm.

Overall, it was a good experience. At my one-week checkup, Dr. Buhler informed me that he was taking all of July off to travel to Europe with his family, so I would have to see him again in August. “I just have to get out of here, you know?” he told me. “Santiago in the winter is pretty unbearable, what with the cold weather and all the smog.” Yes, I know. And it’s good to know that other people know too.

Comments (1)

The first row of seats on each side of the buses i…

5 June 2007 at 6:33 pm · Filed under laws, people, travel

The first row of seats on each side of the buses in Chile is supposed to be “preferencial” for the handicapped, senior citizens, and pregnant women.

Today when I got on the bus, there was an open seat in one of these preferential seats, so being 37 weeks pregnant, I took it. The man next to me looked to be a businessman in his mid-50s. The other preferential seats were taken by middle-aged women.

As the bus filled up, the aisle began to fill with people who couldn’t find empty seats. The “bien educado” (well-educated = polite) thing to do is for younger people to give up their seats for the older and less mobile people. This doesn’t always happen, of course. And some people aren’t happy about it, including the next woman who got on our bus today.

She was about mid-50s, I would guess, and a bit overweight, with a huge purse that was hanging under her arm. She decided to position herself in the aisle right beside me, hanging on to the back of my chair. This left her purse to bang me in the head every time the bus changed lanes.

I first just made a face, but then she just shrugged and it happened again. So I asked her to please lower her purse so it wouldn’t hit me.

Then it happened, and I couldn’t believe it…She told me I should give her the seat! She pointed at the sign on the window indicating that this was a preferential seat we were talking about. Thankfully she didn’t tell me I was “maleducada” (poorly educated = impolite). I was speechless.

The man next to me quickly intervened and informed the woman that I was pregnant (couldn’t she see?), then stood up to give her his chair. (Forget the fact that neither of them really was qualified for the preference of the chair anyway.)

If I had been in a hurry or had something else happen to me badly today, it probably wouldn’t have been funny at all. But at least today I can look at it like this: Even though none of my clothes fit anymore, I guess I don’t LOOK that big after all!

Leave a Comment

Saturday after Thanksgiving, we took a day-trip to…

4 December 2006 at 7:33 pm · Filed under jobs, people, purchases, travel

Saturday after Thanksgiving, we took a day-trip to a small town about an hour outside Santiago where they sell a certain type of earthenware pottery. It would have been a simple trip, except when we arrived in our Hyundai van, the lower radiator hose cracked. As we were climbing out of the van, we hear a whistle from underneath. Then the pop. Hmmm.

Well, that could have happened to anyone, anywhere. But in Chile, in small towns at least, after lunch on Saturday ends the work week. Very few “regular” businesses are open after 1 or 2 o’clock, and they stay closed until Monday morning. By “regular”, I mean the businesses that are for the regular folks, not the tourists.

That fact turned out not to matter much, after all, because in this small town there wasn’t anywhere to buy car parts. No, if we wanted to replace our radiator hose, we would have to drive 6 kilometers to the next town. But their car parts store wouldn’t be open until Monday. And, no, there were no hotels in town. Hmmm.

The best thing that happened to us that day, it turns out, was the decision when we first drove into town to park at a shaded parking lot with an attendant. It turned out that Mark was able to salvage the remaining hose (the cut was at one end) with a knife the attendant loaned us, tie it into place with the attendant’s string, and fill the radiator with the attendant’s water from his home behind the parking lot. That attendant earned his tip that day!

All this goes to prove something I have been learning about Chile: it’s all about who you know. It doesn’t matter if you have an idea of how to solve your problem or if you think you can do it. You will eventually need to know someone to make it all work out. Otherwise, you’re toast.

Leave a Comment

Rachel’s birthday party qualifies as a Chile Momen…

5 November 2006 at 10:36 pm · Filed under language, people

Rachel’s birthday party qualifies as a Chile Moment. She’s turing four, so our house rule is that she gets to invite four friends. The problem is that she has five friends. They are all little girls from different aspects of her life here in Santiago: two American friends have parents that work with Mark and me, two Australian friends are from our church, and one Uruguayan girl is from the preschool. An international birthday party for a four-year-old! I thought it would be a great idea.

Well the problem turned out to be that while all the girls speak and understand Spanish, Rachel and most of the friends prefer English. The poor little Uruguayan girl wanted to play with them, but Rachel was giving the rules of all her games in English. So the little girl and Rachel took turns for the entire party running outside and crying by themselves. The lifesaver was that the little girl’s mom stayed the whole party. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have had a clue how to manage the whole thing.

Funny, though, after everyone left and we were cleaning up, I asked Rachel if she had a good time. “Oh YES, Mommy! I had ALL my friends here!” It’s a good thing kids forget easily!

Leave a Comment

I made a trip today to gringolandia. It isn’t real…

15 October 2006 at 11:09 pm · Filed under homes, people, travel

I made a trip today to gringolandia. It isn’t really called that, of course, but it feels like it to me. The houses are huge, and beautiful. There is a clear view of the mountains, unobstructed by smog or buildings, and many, many gringos.

The only clue I had that I was still in Santiago was the gate guard, who clarified that, yes, I would have to walk around the corner and down the block to catch a bus. He seemed surprised that I spoke Spanish, and even more that I was going to take a bus. That’s how far off my normal route I was!

It turns out I had to walk a lot further, and then call Mark to come get me, because of a lack of public transportation. I was sure I had stepped back into the US!

When I went, I tried to guard my heart against envy of the material possessions that people in that neighborhood have. But I found that I wasn’t envious at all. I found that I felt compassion for them because they live such a spiritually poor life. I didn’t see one church, except a large rock cathedral. I wonder if they even know about Jesus, or if their space and beauty and stuff get in the way of feeling their spiritual hunger.

Leave a Comment

Last night we took the girls out for Korean food. …

27 September 2006 at 1:44 pm · Filed under food, people

Last night we took the girls out for Korean food. Sounds pretty basic, but our friend and teammate Esther was our hostess and her cooking skills are anything but basic! When we came to Chile, I figured that we would be limited in our ability to expose our children to friends, food, and customs of different cultures, since Chile is pretty homogenous. But we have a great mix of friends. Besides the other white, mid-western gringos we work with, we have Korean-American, Mexican, South African, Australian, Canadian, German, and of course, Chilean friends. It’s such a great experience for all of us. Thanks, God, for being so creative, and thanks, Esther, for the excellent food!

Leave a Comment