July 18: Social Tour of Santiago

Today was my low point on the trip so far. I was feeling really sick and tired, which was frustrating and then on top of that I felt really challenged ethically by the activities we undertook that day.
We went on a unique tour of the city, looking at the different social classes in the structures where they reside. We started out in Los Dominicos, at the end of the #1 subway line, all the way up near the mountains in Las Condes. It’s an old adobe village full of shops with beautiful woolen goods, metal/wood working, jewelry and for some reason, tons of birds. Although it was super touristy, we had a really fun time and a lovely lunch. For anyone who’s planning to visit, you can get most of the stuff they sell there at the Mercado Santa Lucía or other places for way less, although its not all necessarily as high quality.
We went up to Cerro San Cristobal, to see the best view of the city. It was a pretty clear day for Santiago, so we had a great view. We talked about the difference between the vertical and horizontal cities we saw below us: the vertical representing wealth and power in high rises and office buildings and the horizontal representing the poorer parts of the city, areas with huge inequalities in access to services, education, etc.
We drove on one of the roads that circumnavigate Santiago. Because it’s almost 200 km around the whole city now, there was obviously no way we could see every neighborhood, know here as comunas. Instead, we focused on seeing comunas that were representative of different social classes. We drove through Ñuñoa (where I’ll be living starting Saturday), Florida (the largest comuna in Santiago- middle class from the most part) and several other poorer neighborhoods. Unfortunately, at this point, I fell asleep since I was just feeling exhausted (and we didn’t even go out the night before).
When I awoke, we were in El Espejo, one of the poorest poblaciones (slums) in the city, which struggles with drug addiction among other problems. We visited Casa de Acogido, a drug rehabilitation center, started by an amazing pobladora(community member). While it was amazing to see the sophistication in technique and relative success rate of someone without any formal training, I felt like we were intruding. Of course, it’s kind of hard not to feel this way pretty much everywhere when you’re walking around in a giant gringo pack of 15 people...This feeling only got worse when we went down the street a little to Las Turbinas, one of the worse communities in Santiago, and one that has been that way for over 3 generations, pllagued by at least 60% unemployment, lack of running water, abysmal housing and desperation. While most shantytowns have progressed over time, bettering themselves mainly through large scale social movements, for some reason, this has not happened here.

While I appreciate that we needed to see the conditions of the poor communas, I felt really frustrated by the experience. I felt that if we were going to see the conditions of these places, we should be doing something to help their inhabitants or at the very least, talking directly with them about their struggles rather than about them, as if the inequalities they experience were nothing more than an academic problem. I think in many ways this has been one of my challenges throughout college: to accept that I need to understand the causes of things before I try to take action on them, even if it means I have to study things in a way that seems unnatural and denies a voice to individual suffering. Walk, crawl, run: I guess it’s how it has to work.