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I remember during many long weeks of lonely assignment writing and anxious pressurised teaching placements I was in the computer room at The School of Education in Birmingham University when I saw a group of men and women who seemed to have a darker tan than the average Brummie might get on a Spanish holiday. Not only that they were also conversing in Spanish! I decided this was a chance to practise my own Spanish (I learnt it when my folks had an apartment on the beautiful island of Menorca and I ran around with 2 bilingual kids). These people seemed pleasantly surprised to have a fluent, if broken, Spanish speaker befriend them. I had my first taste of Chilean friendship and hospitality - within a few days I was walking round to the group’s flat, at their insistence, for supper together. There I had a Chilean rice and chicken dish as they showedme pictures of snow-capped volanoes, beauiful lakes, desert plains and the enchanting Andes Mountains. This group of headmasters were on an exchange to the UK where they were updating themselves on the latest pedagogical trends and developments in educations. I exchanged my email addy with the chef, Jorge, and soon after he was inviting me to come out to his country and teach English. At first I was flattered but didn’t give it serious thought. However 2 years later, he was still asking…
I had decided, very reluctantly, to leave the secondary PGCE course in the final placement school, after a series of problems and had returned to my native Belfast to look (unsucessfully as it turned out) for work. My father had suffered a massive stroke that nearly killed him earlier that year, and I found myself torn between staying to help my mother and this clear call to go to exotic and intrigueing South America. Hard choice? Well, once my mother gave the green light it didn’t take me long to book my flight to Santiago, put it that way.
It was the longest plane journey I had ever been on. There were 4 flights to get there - Belfast-London, folowed by London-Frankfurt, Frankfurt-Buenos Aires then Buenos Aires to Santiago. 13 1/2 hours on a Jumbo in the penultimate leg, sitting next to a backpacking Israeli teenager who I found rather hard to engage in conversation.
The welcome I got in Santiago from Jorge was that of a long lost brother. He had arrived with another teacher from his school and enthusiastically drove me off through the streets of Santiago. I had my first real experience of the sights and sounds of South America. And what an experience! This was a total other world to me. Alive, bustling with expresssion and colour and heat. Latino America! I was in at the deep end too. After the excitement of seeing the mixture of Hispanic and native indian faces on the street and the excited talk in Spanish from the driver and passenger, who was also my landlady I was brought down to earth when shown my room - cold concrete floor and one small window (with bars). Tin roof but it was so warm it felt like cavity wall nsulation would be a waste…
March 27th, 2008 at 10:41 am
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