KATHRYN IN CHILE, POST #3

Chilean accents are a bitch to understand. It makes me feel dumb sometimes when I have to ask people what they said two or three times.

Dafna told me another funny social encounter story. Evidently, her dad was at a party, and he saw a woman who looked really familiar, but he couldn't figure out how he knew her. It kept bothering him, so he went over and asked her, "Excuse me, you look very familiar. Do I know you from somewhere." The woman replied, "Well, I'm the First Lady."

Somebody else asked me if I was Brazilian the other day. I asked one of Mom's colleagues why everyone thinks I'm Brazilian (or at least two waitresses did), and she said it might be because of my wickedly curly hair. I found that affirming, because it makes me feel more like Inara (Morena Baccarin, the actress who plays her, is Brazilian).

I found out that one of the repercussions of America's antiterrorist policies is that it has become a model (or an excuse) for other countries to take a heavy hand with discontented minorities. Many Mapuche, or Natives who live in the south of Chile, have been held without trial and interrogated harshly in the name of anti-terrorism by the government in recent years as they struggle for rights to their land. Soledad, this really amazing woman who invited Mom to teach the workshop in Chile, is worried that it could escalate to genocide if there is not enough international publicity. After she said that, I poked around on the Internet, and I was surprised to find that Amnesty International had almost nothing on the Mapuche, and the Human Rights Watch has only one two-year-old report. I e-mailed Steve Volk to ask him if he knew anything else about international coverage of the Mapuche. He said there was very little, though he had seen international media coverage of a Mapuche university student who was killed by police while demonstrating for land rights.

So...that's pretty much what's up here. And I've discovered that I really love empanadas.
And I'm really going to miss the fruits when I leave. You buy raspberries by the pound here, and they're way cheaper than in the US. I've never pooped so well in my life.