Only 44 days late- The Earthquake Blog

There is a bar in Santiago Centro called La Piojera. No other bar could be so aptly called The Flea Pit. The bar attracts everyone of all classes and castes, they get ridiculously drunk, sing, dance, snog, fight, vomit then struggle home. This may appear remarkably similar to a night out in Blackburn but what La Piojera has that Blackburn lacks is the Terremoto.

What is a terremoto? Imagine the worst possible combination of flavours you can, then throw a bit of dog poo in and you've nearly got it. The ingredients are 6-day old sweet white wine, fernet and pineapple ice cream. Yes, pineapple ice cream.

It is sold in pint glasses and gets you instantly plastered. My one night on terremotos left me with the worst hangover of my life and I spent the whole afternoon shivering on the sofa whilst watching Mamma Mia with my Danish Flatmate. In short, it was the worst day of my life. Of course, terremoto translates as earthquake, and hopefully the drink and the quake that hit last month are once in a lifetime experiences.


First the facts, the earthquake, which hit in the 27th of February at 3.34am was 8.8 at it's epicentre which diminished to 8.3 here in Santiago. It was the 5th strongest earthquake in recorded history. Last night, 44 day after the main quake, yet another aftershock hit, just one of hundreds.

I would be lying if I didn't say that the big one was brown pants time. I live on the 15th floor of my building. Tall buildings like mine are designed to sway during quakes- to shake out the earth's vibrations. You feel it more. And it felt like I was going to die.

Sunset from our flat

On the night of the 27th the initial tremors woke me up and I was sure it would pass. I lay awake, waiting for it to fade away but it just kept getting stronger and stronger. You could feel the entire building move. It felt like one of those punchbags you have as a kid. You hit it and it rolls over but somehow sways back upright. The entire building was creaking and groaning, windows rattling. My chest of drawers fell over on to my bed. Plates and glasses started to break. It grew stronger and you think that this is it but after 2 minutes things start to fade.

No electricity, no gas, no water. Not just in my flat but in the entire city. I checked on my flatmates then we went and watched flames rise from a chemical plant that had exploded to the north of the city.

The rest passed as you would expect. We tried to phone our friends but all the networks were down. We inched our way through the darkness of 15 flights of stairs and went and sat in the foyer. A man with a dog approached:

"Ah, you're foreigners!"
"That's right."
"First earthquake?"
"Yep"
"Don't worry. Could you look after my dog? I'm going to look for my mum."

Few words of advice or consolation there then. The next day we all gathered in our office to trade stories and drink Gato. I phoned our institutions- there were a few collapsed walls here and there, lots of cracks but all our kids were fine. All the under 5's slept through the entire thing and had no idea why everyone was making so much fuss.

We were all very lucky. Santiago escaped relatively unharmed. The south was devastated. Last weekend we visited Retiro, a town in the south. One in four homes had collapsed and people were living in bus stops and tents. The town's main employer, a cement works was shut as one of it's towers collapsed. The school was still shut and many services had ceased to exist. It will be many years before towns like Retiro get back on their feet

Damage in Retiro

Yet, the earthquake represented the start of a lot of things. We've worked hard to help our institutions make repairs and we've built temporary houses in the south and life goes on.

Many people have asked me if it makes me want to come home. But it's been the opposite, I've more desire to stay here than ever before. Even if the aftershocks continue to mean frequent changes of trousers...

New Years and New Beards

Christmas and New Years are a funny old thing in the southern hemisphere. Firstly it seems that no one is that bothered about Christmas here. You don't hear "Merry Xmas Everybody" or "Mistletoe and Wine" in the two months leading up to the holidays and there's no-one going around getting battered just because it's Christmas. No one buys turkey, there are no crackers, the shops are a little more crowded than normal and most importantly, you don't feel forced to be jovial. One of my least favourite things in the world.

Even the few recognisable things still seem out of place, Christmas carols in Spanish and the Father Christmas in the shopping centres look distinctly uncomfortable as they're sweating their testicles down the drain in the 30 degree plus temperature.

So on Christmas Day we found ourselves once again on the roof of the newbies apartment block enjoying a barbeque, drinking copious amounts of boxed wine and crap beer and burning to a crisp. It's really quite a spectacular place to spend Christmas as here is the view.

Granted, this may not be the best pic for it, what with the minging apartment block and all, but the 360 degree panorama of Santiago and the Andes really is quite awesome. I won't go into a lot of detail about the barbeque except that there was a water balloon fight, we played table football using hockey terminology ("Faceoff!) and using a bauble for a ball, some of us threw things of roof, we played roullette using a roullette table that cost approximately 2 pence and I saw a Canadian man's genitals.

But the biggest thing to come out of the Christmas Day barbeque (after the genitalia) was that all the men in VE decided it would be a fabulous idea that we should all grow beards.

Now, being a Wiggins male, I have inherited several undesirable genetic traits: being able to fall asleep everywhere and anywhere, extreme gangliness, a terrible sense of smell and the total inability to grow facial hair. So the last day we all shaved was December 25th and the next time we would be able to shave would be January 21st, when one of our volunteers Brys left. As a Wiggins, facial hair progress was painfully slow, I barely moved out of the bumfluff stage, but when I did, I jumped straight into the "This man should not be working with children":



And generally, I hated most of the entire experience. It was nice not shaving for a month, but it itched like hell and looked utterly rubbish. I counted down the days till the Great Shave-Off and when it finally came, I set about the "beard" with a rusty bic razor with glee.

Now, looking at the rules of the competition, this was about having the Best Facial Hair, not the most. All the lads would shave a new creation, give it it's own name and the women would vote for a winner. All the men went about doing bizarre and un-godly things with their beards. Frenchy hacked chunks out of his eyebrows, Matt emerged with dreadlocks and Jack went Taxi Driver on us. Brys and Pharoah dazzled us with the gingerest beards ever seen. Brooke, who clearly had the best, emerged with a beard that said "I've spent 4 months felling redwoods in upper British Columbia with only the love of a grizzly to keep me sane".

And me, well I called my creation "El Conquistador" but "A Weasel's Arse" would possibly have been more appropriate. The whole concept was brilliantly inane, all the boys were giddy about their chances of success and the girls just rolled their eyes. There was no prize, but massive amounts of pride were at stake.

And who won? Well, I did of course. And this proves several things:

1. Women don't like facial hair or stupid competitions.
2. If you lobby enough for the sympathy vote you might just .
3. You should have a German friend called Eva to persuade, cajole and bully everyone to vote for you.
4. The democratic process is alive and well. You can't argue with the voting process. And there can be only one true winner. Ladies and Gentleman, may I present you with the winner of "VE Global Best Facial Hair":

Camping Con Cuicos y Cristal

It had been a while in coming but I think the moment I really needed to get away was a couple of Sundays ago when the girls came round for a Christmas party. They put a tree up, made cookies, got out sprinkles, mixed icing and watched Elf. My contribution to the party was this, take a siesta when the tree was going up, loiter around waiting for the cookies, fall back asleep when Elf came on.

It's not that doing this stuff wasn't my cup of tea. It's just that sometimes, working in an organization dominated by women gets a bit overwhelming. They outnumber us 4 to 1 and I went down south with 7 of the girls to Bariloche where I had a brilliant time and heard more conversations about Will Smith's torso than I would ever like to again.

To combat the estrogen tide, Team Man was formed within VE. The concept is very simple and best explained by our mission statement "Fix Things. Drink Beer. Start Fires. Operate Power Tools. Go For Cafe Con Piernas. Play Football". Yes, it is a truly wonderful group where the only pre-requisite is to be in possession of meat and two veg. And when Suggett suggested a Team Man camping trip last weekend, I jumped at it.

And on a truly shambolic camping trip we went. Just south of Santiago is a small lake called Laguna de Aculeo. It's amazing that for a city so ugly, there are some incredible areas of natural beauty so close and Aculeo is no exception. Surrounded by the pre-cordillera, free of smog and fed by melt water from the Andes, the lake is not just an hour long bus ride away from the city, it's also a whole lifetime away. Matt, Jack, Clay and I rocked up at the campsite with what we considered the essentials. Between the four of us we had one two-man tent, 3 sleeping bags, one frying pan, one spork, 18 cans of Cristal lager, 12 eggs, 24 chorizos and a frisbee.

Realising our predicament, Clay and Jack valiantly volunteered to go to the local shop whilst Matt and I put up the tent. In some quite wonderful preparation they brought back 4 meat empanadas, another 2 litres of beer, 4 litres of Gato (boxed red wine), a bottle of Pisco (vile, vile grape brandy) and a pack of cards without any 8's or 9's.




Pisco



And thus, we were set to begin, juggling a warm beer and a frisbee we played/polished off the cans, siesta-ed and went for a swim. Jack was not only the first in the lake but also the first out as a swim into a dead fish cut short his aquatisism. Barclay and I did a little better, going for a 20 minute swim to a small island. We discovered that the island, was in fact and nature reserve and we weren't allowed to go on it. So we didn't. Instead we swam back and as I paused in mid swim I was astounded by the rolling, tree-covered hills, the dots of snow still clinging to the highest mountains and the fish head that floated past.

We made it back and scavenged for firewood (or rather the others did, I "kept an eye on our stuff" by having another kip and drooling gently on Barclay's sleeping bag) and then took on some Chilean lads at football. Whenever this happens I tend to adopt some British colonial, xenophobic impression that we're going to teach Johnny Foreigner a jolly good footballing lesson, as clearly, no-one is better at footy than the people who invented it. This is always met with appropriate response of said foreigners giving us an absolute pasting. Lucky this was not the case here. Aided by earlier beer consumption and relying on Barclay and Matt to do all the running we managed to beat the greasy weones/really nice Las Condes boys before assuring our opposition we would meet up later to share a drink with them.

As the sun started to go down and the uber-rich Chilean jet-skiing families started to bugger off home, we continued to fulfill our team man obligations by starting a fire and drinking more beer. The cards came out, the choripan got finished off and the bottles got emptied. Matt introduced us to a drinking game called hockey and assured us there was a deep tactical edge behind the need to match two cards of the same value together then shout "Goal" in the most annoying fashion possible. Sadly, this strategic edge was more elusive than El Dorado and some of us finished the game thinking we were playing a totally different game.


And so it continued to go down hill. We gatecrashed our new Chilean friend's asado and were slightly horrified to discover they were all Jehovah's Witnesses. After an i¡uncomfortable period of silence we overcame this shock and our own prejudices by trying to teach them drinking games. And we failed. Not because of their religious affilitation but because of our total inability to speak Spanish / function as human beings. The last, great idea of the evening was Night Frisbee which mostly involved getting hit in the head by the frisbee and then failing to throw it to someone 2 metres away. It could well be the next big thing

God, this is really dragging on. So to sum up in as few words as possible. Passed out in tent. Others all slept outside. Woke up. Area around our tent was a bombsite. Couldn't find our eggs for breakfast. Searched for eggs for 20 minutes. Concluded some absolute knobhead had stolen our eggs. Cleaned up. Packed up. Went home. Passed out.

It was a tremendous weekend, we fulfilled many a team man criteria and all got horrendously sunburnt in the process. Really, does it get any better than that...?


(apologies to Jack for nicking some of his pictures, but I don't do photos)

Jornada

Over the last few days I've had what I can only describe as an epiphany and I'll explain exactly what this is in a little bit. But firstly this blog will contain much less crappy jokes and tired observations and witty witicisms than normal. Which should be total relief.

Last weekend we had VE's quarterly jornada. Trying to explain exactly jornada is, is somewhat difficult. So here's what we do, once every 3 months we head up a valley in the Andes, go through the mildly attractive village of San José de Maipo and end up at a little events centre called Chalet de Piedra where we reflect, share and try and grow as an organisation and as people. This is not a cult as we don't have to hand over or first born to el jefe, nor do we give tithes of our earnings as we don't even get paid in peanuts. It is, however, quite hippyish and shortly before the first time I went, phrases like reflection and meditation shared the beejezus out of me.

I can now safely say that Jornada is one of my favourite things in the world and this is in spite of the re-birthing ceremonies, the birchings, the candlelight hoopla and the zen walking. What jornada does best is bring together a wonderful group of people and give them some renewed focus on the volunteering work they do here. We talk, write, do yoga and take time out from our normal, busy lives to go a bit deeper

This weekend I really didn't have the time for any inner journeys, yoga or even relaxing. This was no bad thing at all as I was too busy breaking frisbee world records, cooking meals that gave everyone gas, getting really pissed off at losing at spoons, diving into a swimming pool that smelled of turpentine, drawing acorns, getting up several hours earlier than I thought I had too, playing catchphrase in Spanish, attempting to win speed boats (and failing) and getting to know a phenomenal group of people just a little bit better.

The chalet is run by a mildly eccentric Spanish couple. I say mildly as whilst they named their first daughter Genesis (a Phil Collins tribute, I like to think so), their second is called Michelle. They have two rottwielers called Matt and Cindy, Shakira the Cat, and a lovely big garden and exquisite views of the cordillera. Alledgedly, the dad likes to get stoned a lot and the girls run amok and gatecrash every single activity we do. This was especially true as we gathered in the main room to start the yogic flying. Before this most serious and dedicated taller, the girls rushed in and decided which should play a form of musical statues with animals.

Naturally this was automatically accepted as the greatest idea ever and soon every single volunteer was leaping round the room, pretending to be eagles and elephants. No one cared or was self-concious, there were no rolled eyes or blushing cheeks. Just 25 adults and two children flapping their arms like chickens and barking like dogs. In many ways it's slightly embarrassing that this was the epiphany. But it was at this moment that I realised there was nowhere in the world that I would rather have been, that I'm incredibly be proud to be involved in VE Global and priveledged to be around so many wonderful people.

Three days later I left for Argentina to renew my papers. I went on my own and had time to reflect there; and I came to realise that the sooner I got back to Santiago the better.

__________________________________________________________

n.b, there was no Zen walking, yogic flying, re-birthing and most disappointingly of all, no birching at jornada. All the other activites were real. Also, one of the little girls accidently on purpose borrowed the frisbee and "forgot" to give it back. Nothing is perfect, but Jornada weekend came pretty close.

El Que No Salta.....

Right, so I'm trying to update this with a bit more regularity but this largely depends on interesting things happening in my life, so the next entry will probably be around Christmas time.

I was going to write about Entre Todas, the girl's home where I work and how it went from a really awful place to work to a really quite wonderful one. But I can't be arsed so I'm going to write about football instead.

On Saturday night Chile qualified for the world cup for the first time in 12 years. This is a very, very big deal here for several reasons.

There's really not a lot to do here apart from watch and talk about football if you're a Chilean. They love football so much (or have so little else to occupy them)
they have two seasons in one year which means your team can win the 2009 season part 1 and be champions for a whole six months, then be relegated for the 2nd part of the season.

Every single volunteer within their first week here will be asked if they're for Colo Colo or La U. Depending on your point of view Colo Colo are the people's team who best represent the country as a whole, or they are a bunch of violent pissheads who call me Peter Crouch all the time.

Peter Crouch

Similarly, according to your point of view La U are a team that represented a form of resistance to Pinochet's Dictatorship and have a proud leftwing history. Or they're a bunch of poncey middle class students.

When forced to choose between the two I went for La U. Why? They've got an owl on their badge, and who doesn't like owls? Plus I don't actually like being called Peter Crouch all the time.

Owl (barn)


But you do have to choose, nearly the entire country is divided between these two teams. Sure, there are about 12 others in the league, most of which are better than these two, but really they don't count. The derbies between La U and Colo are called Súper Clásicos and whilst these two adjectives could never describe anything in Chilean football, everyone watches it.

But the whole country comes together for when the national team plays. And this proved to be the case on Saturday night. Chile came up against Colombia knowing a win would take them to South Africa, anything less and we would have to wait forthe final game against Ecuador on Wednesday.

In a game that involved comical defending, school boy errors galore and at least 90% of all football cliches going, Chile won 4-2. The pub erupted and emptied and everyone buggered off to the square right outside my flat:





People climbed on bus stops, jumped up and down a lot, sang the same songs over and over again, got a bit teargassed and went home. We get to see this every 6 weeks from our flat and it never gets tired. Ever. The police normally let it go on for about a couple of hours, then tell everyone to go home.

The only sad thing is there is only one more competetive game, which is against Ecuador this wednesday so only one more opportunity to watch hooligans kicking riot vans and police kicking the shit out of hooligans. Nevertheless I will be back in the pub on Wednesday for the Ecuador game because

1. I now know all the national team's songs.
2. There's nothing else to do in Chile.

6 months in a nutshell. Part 1

So the blog is back after an un-eagerly anticipated 6 month absence. I can't really explain why it's taken so long to doing this again. I had previously claimed that I had been too busy to write this, but anyone who knows me will be quite sure that is a load of bollocks and the evenings spent watching Friends repeats, drinking Escudo and complaining about being too busy should demonstrate the huge flaws in my this theory.

So the first blog back will be a brief recap of what has happened in the last 6 months that hasn't involved my three principal pastimes, watching telly, drinking beer and whinging.

For some strange reason, I'm still in Santiago, still in Chile and still working for VE. It's been a weird transitional stage, most of my good friends from when I arrived in November have buggered off back home, leaving behind my current wardrobe ( thank you Paul Mannix), the laptop I'm using (to you too, Cody Rothschild) and a large supply of ladies' scented shaving foam (Jessica Ellerbach, I am forever in your debt).

Whilst a lot of good people have moved on, many still remain as Mariah is still here and will have to put up with me for 9 months more, no matter what I seem to do, Jen still wants to hang out after 5 years of me and Suggett is making great gains in destroying both our livers.

For an even stranger reason, I'm now a director of VE, to give my full title, I'm Director of Institutional Relations. Quite how I got the job I don't know. If I had known that I'd have to sit in the office listening to my American colleagues doing horrendous British accents all day, I might not have taken it. Asides from listening to Ann say "Wud ya loik a cappa tay?", my job despcription includes having to suck up to evil old director witches, phoning a hogar 15 times to get through, writing long, rambling and attrociously incorrect emails in Spanish and trying not to use Facebook all day.

I love working in the "office", I get to listen to Mariah sniggering continously about drinking Colun, Matt plays Bob Sinclair, MGMT, Muse and then plays them all again and Brooke wears some amazing slacks and brown shoes, plus I can drink as many cups of tea as I want. My Spanish has got miles better and I can now finally write properly, (With the exception of the word "institution", which, ironically, I spell wrong all the time). The Chilean work day is pretty sweet, we start at 10 and as I live in the building next to the office I can get up at 9.55 and be on time to work.

The only downside is that I spend less time in my hogar, Entre Todas. One day a week is not enough, especially considering the amazing changes over the last 6 months. But, I'm getting bored and my hangover is coming back with avengence, so I'm going to write about ET next but sign off with the nicknames I gathered there this week: Tío Sid the Sloth, Tío Flacucho, Tío Perezoso and my favourite, Tío Morbidly Obese. That's all