Study Abroad In Chile, Kent State Style

I don’t really feel I have the right to be telling this story, since it didn’t happen to me, but I also don’t think an account of my Chilean experience would be complete without it. Ashley came over to my house Thursday night for a study and knitting party, despite the fact that neither of us had classes on Friday. I’m in “force myself to stay home sometimes” mode, even when it is a weekend night, trying not to get overwhelmed with homework, which is easy to do in my classes. As soon as we took a break from my family, Ashley broke out into English because, as she said, some things are just too hard to tell about in Spanish.

Ashley and I attend different universities on opposite sides of the same Chilean city. My university is the private public school, hers is the public university. My classmates wear fairly simple clothing for the most part, hers have forgotten how to bathe properly and dress in a sort of punk grunge fusion. My school is very calm and go with the flow, hers misses several weeks of class every semester for strikes. And the most popular time to strike for young militant communists like them? Right around September 11, the date of Pinochet’s military takeover of Allende’s Communist-run government.

This year the strikes started on Thursday, which is what Ashley had to tell me about. Earlier in the week, the school had been turned into a Communist’s playground with pictures of Allende and hammer-and-sickle’s everywhere. It was obvious the strikes were beginning soon, but Ashley had no idea when or how big of a deal they would be. On Thursday, during a break in her class, her professor and some students went to the window and started speaking quickly. Then, they looked at her and said, “What do we do about her?” She was told that, because she was a US citizen, it was more dangerous for her to be there and that she should probably go home. Most of the people here have been pretty good about separating the things they don’t like about the US from us students, but you never know what excited militant communists might be moved to.

So classes ended and Ashley went outside to discover that the strikes had in fact started. She told me it was insane: people everywhere, roadblocks, everyone basically going crazy. She wanted to stay a few minutes and observe, but realized things were starting to get a big rowdy, and started heading down the hill, away from the university. And who do you think was coming up the hill in hummers and trucks but the Chilean police, the carabineros. They busted through the roadblock, and just started spraying tear gas into the crowd. Because that’s a calm response to a half-an-hour old protest. Ashley, a block away from where the gas was spraying, did the natural and intelligent thing and booked it out of there, walked the several miles to her house, and stopped for ice cream along the way.

And apparently this is normal. Ashley’s host mother had about the same reaction mine did to the flea news: uh-huh. Tear gas and parasites, these are the things we’re used to here. Ashley was terrified, but says that, since she got out unharmed, it was definitely one of those top memorable experiences. Is it wrong that I think it’s awesome that she witnessed a Chilean Militant protest and lived to tell about it? Well, never fear, Comrades, I won’t be marching over to join in but will be content to watch on the news.