Santiago Atitlán is a town on Lago Atitlán that is almost entirely populated by the Tz’utujil people, a group of indigenous Mayans. Before the founding of Hospitalito Atitlán, if anyone needed emergency services they had to travel to the only hospital on the lake in Sololá. Not only was time a factor here, money and culture also prevented the people of Santiago Atitlán from utilizing this resource. The cost of a boat across the Lake, as well as the cost of the medical care, was often too much and deterred people from going to the hospital. Also, if someone were to die in the hospital across the lake, their family would have to find more money to transport the body back across the lake in a timely manner, according to the Mayan tradition of burying the body in a fixed amount of time after death. Although these two towns are geographically close, the language spoken across the Lake is different enough to create a linguistic barrier to access to health care. These three barriers – distance, money and language – prevented the population of Santiago from accessing healthcare, both emergency as well as primary care.

Hospitalito Atitlán sought to ameliorate these problems. By providing emergency care as well as primary care closer to home, with sliding scale fees and staff that speaks the dialect of Tz’utujil found in Santiago, Hospitalito is making access to healthcare a reality in Santiago. This hospital is the nicest hospital I have ever seen in a developing country – with operating rooms, inpatient and outpatient areas, even specific areas for birthing (including a garden for women to walk around in during labor!). The hospital is not complete yet and construction on some of the inpatient rooms is ongoing. This is actually why Somo Hermanos went to Lago Atitlán, to help with the construction and move cinder blocks up the second floor- fun! Some of the construction workers were also volunteering their time and it was great to be able to work side by side with them.

Another great thing about this hospital is that midwives are permitted to help with births. In government run hospitals, this is not the case – midwives are not even allowed over the thresholds of a hospital. I  spoke with a midwife here in Xela, who said that its very discouraging for her to bring women who are having problems during birth to the hospital and have the doctors ignore her. They won’t even listen to her about important information like how long the woman has been in labor, for example. Because Hospitalito Atitlán is not a government hospital, it can have midwives assist during births inside the hospital and at the same time strengthen their connection to the community.

Bari Laskow is a volunteer with Somos Hermanos in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. For more on her experiences, check out her blog.

Smog in Santiago

Among Santiaguinos, the general assumption is that the region of Aysén is frozen, isolated, and quite a bit behind-the-times. When I was first assigned to work in Patagonia, my Chilean friends in Santiago all laughed and warned that I’d be bored to death. And cold. None of them even considered visiting me, because, in the words of my friend Rodrigo, “Te vas a la m$%&#da, Nereida!”

But most Santiaguinos have never been to Aysén. Further south than Puerto Montt, air travel is necessary if you don’t want to be stuck freezing on a bus or a boat for over 36 hours. And neither is the region very popular for tourists: those who are determined to see Chilean Patagonia, despite the logistical difficulties, tend to skip Aysen and fly directly to Punta Arenas, enchanted by the siren song of Parque Nacional Torres del Paine.

Aysén, then, can be conspicuously un-Chilean. Argentinian culture plays a large role in the region, because of its physical proximity: the border is only an hour away, much easier to get to than the rest of Chile. Ayseninos drink mate, say che, and dance chamamé (an Argentine folk dance) — customs all but unheard of in the rest of Chile. Thus many natives of the region feel a strong affinity for Argentina, rather than a weak enmity, which is the norm in the capital.

Now, Aysén feels very far away. Santiago feels like a different world, or just a larger and more developed country. And I feel like a country bumpkin, like Carmela from San Rosendo in La Pergola de Las Flores (the first Chilean musical). And there was a time that, coming from New York, I thought of Santiago as a sleepy town! I guess I’ll know to brace myself when I land in JFK on Saturday morning.

Nereida Heller just recently wrapped up a volunteer stint with the English Open Doors Program in Puerto Aisén, Chile. For more about her experiences, check out her blog.

Photo by Flickr user s-a-m (Creative Commons)

Travelers are always seeking a road less traveled. Sometimes you travel to embrace new challenges.  Other times you travel to escape current ones. Either way, the act of journeying to another place lends itself to finding truth. It takes you away from your day-to-day routine, and forces you to ask yourself hard questions.

I recently read The Road Less Traveled by psychiatrist and M.D.M. Scott Peck. The book is broken up into four main parts: discipline, love, personal growth and religion, and grace. Regarding personal spiritual growth, Peck shares some pretty incredible insights about how to achieve it. His main premise is that pain and suffering in life should be welcomed because you cannot achieve spiritual growth without it.  They go hand in hand. “We must always consider our personal discomfort relatively unimportant and indeed even welcome it in the service of the search for truth. Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs,” he states. Sometimes you may resist the truth because it’s not what you expected or were hoping for, but achieving balanced mental health is seeking and recognizing that it is, in fact, truth nonetheless.

He also says, “If your goal is to avoid pain and escape suffering I advise you not to seek higher levels of consciousness or spiritual evolution. You cannot achieve them without suffering. Then why desire to evolve at all, you may ask. If you ask this question, perhaps you do not know enough joy.” I think the average traveler can relate to this point in some form or another.

But perhaps my biggest takeway from the book was related to love. In a philosophy I’ve gathered for myself, I’ve realized that love is not the dependency of “needing” someone or something. Love is wanting someone to flourish as an individual so much that you are willing to do anything within your power to aid them in their person growth and development, no matter the cost. Even at the cost of your own happiness.

Talk about a selfless love. From living and volunteering here in Chile, it’s something I’m aware of everyday.

Lindsey Chapman is now back in Chile and enjoying her time after extending her commitment with the nonprofit, VE Global.

I’ve been thinking about these questions due to the recent wrongful behavior of my good friend’s former boss.  My friend, whose name I will not mention, had been working for an English institute for the past four months.  Before starting, he signed a contract and followed the rules of the contract like a good employee does.

This past week his parents flew down from the States to visit him. He took a week off work.  (Technically, he took two days off because his institute only gave him enough classes to fill up a whopping two whole days of the week.)  During his break, his boss decided to fire him and tell all of his students that their beloved teacher would no longer be working with them.  The only problem is he neglected to tell my friend.

I just so happen to be moderate acquaintances with his students, therefore learning about the firing incident while my friend was still on vacation.  When my friend returned, he talked to his boss only to find out that his company was overstaffed and therefore had decided to let him go. Finding out that he was secretly “let go” instead of secretly “fired” did make him feel better, but the situation still displayed an unprofessional level of distrust between him and his boss.

It made me think about trust, and whether it’s a universal concept or varies from country to country or from people to people. Should I say Chileans can’t be trusted, English Institutes can’t be trusted, or people can’t be trusted?  Should we go through life always expecting to be screwed over?

I am an optimist who trusts the majority, so my answer is no. This explains why I was strangely more upset than my friend was when he found out about the incident.  I trust everyone until they give me a reason not to, and when they break the deal I act like I never saw it coming and get dramatically upset.  I think trusting people has its benefits, but I wonder if it’s the best way to go.

Carly Barrie is currently an ESL teacher with BridgeLinguatec in Santiago, Chile. She was more than thrilled to find out that her friend’s former boss was offered a position in another country and therefore will be leaving the institute for good.

After living in Santiago, Chile for over three months now, I couldn’t agree with this idea more. My decision to move abroad all started the summer before my senior year in college. My boyfriend of four years had just broken my heart, my parents were going through a divorce no one saw coming, and all of my business school classmates were getting psyched for the upcoming Fall Job Career Fair. I suddenly realized that if I didn’t want to head down a road of normalcy, I didn’t have to. I was in complete control of my life and there was no one who could tell me otherwise.

My previous study abroad experience in Spain helped me to conclude that a Spanish-speaking country would be my destination, because speaking español makes me feel alive and extraordinary. It connects me to people, makes me feel whole, and leads me to new and exciting opportunities. I chose Santiago because I love big cities, and many of my friends and family couldn’t even pick it out on a map. I wanted to go somewhere that was far away, yet still be a place that I could call home.

I wake up every morning patting myself on the back for the decision that I made. As an ESL teacher, I get to learn from my students about the “Chilean Jungle” and all about a culture I previously knew nada about. I hope to continue learning more about South American as I finish up my time in Chile, move on to a long yet so short two months of traveling, and then end my year volunteering in Ecuador.

Volunteering is new for me, and something I can’t wait to finally get my hands on. Sleeping in a hut with no electricity, living off $1 a day, and meeting people only I can dream about sounds like magic. When I eventually return back to the States, I hope to be exactly what I read about on that blog; just a better rounded version of the young rubia I am today, with endless stories to share.

Carly Barrie is currently an ESL teacher with BridgeLinguatec in Santiago, Chile. This is her first post on La Vida Idealist.

But I’m blessed with a wonderfully kind friend, Maria Jesu, whom I stayed with when I first arrived while I searched for a place to live permanently. A few days after I arrived a man contacted me on CouchSurfing wanting private English lessons. Another good friend of mine hooked me up with a part time job at an English institute. When I returned to my volunteer work at Anakena school,  Tía Leo and my class greeted me with a dance to Shakira’s “Waka Waka.” It was absolutely adorable.

I ended up finding a place to live through CompartoDepto. It’s a small house in a quiet neighborhood in Nuñoa, a little further outside the center. I now live with a Chilean raw vegan chef, a musician and a French nutritionist. We have a garden, a piano and an enormous kitchen, by Chilean standards anyway. It’s wonderful.

Now that I live outside the city, I went on the hunt for a bike. A friend of mine contacted me and said his roommate had one that he never used and I could probably have it. So for the cost of a beer, I had a new bike.

I am currently finding a new role in the office at VE Global. I would like to work on training development and progress evaluation using statistical analysis, from a broad perspective. My first projects are going to  be revising our training manual, developing a VE Global cookbook for fundraising purposes, and finding statistical significance from our past volunteer satisfaction surveys. The nerd in me is completely thrilled about this.

Life is good back in Santiago. I feel so blessed to be surrounded by so much love even when I am so far away from home.

Lindsey Chapman is now back in Chile and enjoying her time after extending her commitment with the nonprofit, VE Global.

I’d forgotten just how good freshly-made raspberry juice is, or how quickly the spring sunshine can burn even on a chilly day. I’d forgotten how imposing the mountains are when the haze doesn’t obscure them, or how easy it is to forget they are there when the pollution they trap renders them invisible. I’d forgotten that Santiago’s sunsets blaze with orange and electric salmon, how they reflect in the hi-rise glass and bathe the Alameda in dusky pink and evoke the radioactive sunsets of DeLillo’s White Noise. I spent seven months in Santiago de Chile and then seven years away from it, during which time I forgot almost everything about the city except a vague sensation that I just didn’t- well, that I just didn’t like it very much. I returned this weekend, and now I know I owe Santiago an apology for all the times I told people: “Chile is stunning, but Santiago? Meh.”

In other words, Santiago: it wasn’t you, it was me.

Santiago's Alameda at sunset

What I remember from my study abroad months: The cold of winter, and a physical exhaustion from shivering all day. I could have acquired an electric heater instead of avoiding the broken gas heater which terrified me, or at the very least some long underwear. Being hungry. Instead of relying on my host family’s irregular mealtimes, I could have just bought food. Being lonely. In retrospect, I should have switched host families, explored the city on my own, called people. Feeling one step away from grievous injury: knifes that cut me, buses that threw me. I could have just waited for the darn thing to come to a complete stop, instead of emulating the hop-on hop-off street vendors but forgetting to account for inertia. What I’d forgotten: How young I was (20), and how unaccustomed to culture shock I was.

Some cities are a good fit, some never are, and some just need to be appreciated in their (and our) own time. In 2007 Santiago revamped the transit system; the buses that once were my lifeline now look different and have different numbers. The Metro has expanded; neighborhoods that once seemed far by virtue of being the end of the line now are, really, relatively central. The disorienting effect, as I wandered around this weekend, was to displace the Santiago I once knew both spatially as well as temporally. Vague half memories were replaced by some wonderful new museum spaces and proper meals with friends. Only at the end of day three did my two Santiagos start to coalesce into one that allows for both the continuity and the change, in the city and in myself. With a hallulla in hand and the sun tipping behind the Torre Entel, I realized this is the one regional trip I’ve made since March where I haven’t been downright homesick for Montevideo. I may have snubbed Santiago for years but I’d forgotten that it will always have an element of home for me. Hopefully it will be less than seven years before I make it back.

Flora Lindsay-Herrera is currently a Fulbright Fellow in Montevideo, Uruguay. For more about her experiences, check out her blog.

9:38 a.m. I receive a second call from my mom and realize she may actually have something important to say. I answer to hear my mom in tears as she says, “Grandpa died.” I immediately think about his sense of humor, his generosity and his strong character, and how much I will miss him. Rachael and Jarvi offer their condolences and hug me tight.

Me on the left with Grandpa LeRoy

10:37 a.m. Delta officially changes my flight from Thursday to the following Tuesday.

The next few days friends and relatives pour into the little town of Glennwood, MN in honor of Grandpa LeRoy. It means so much. One of my grandpa’s good friends was in Omaha on his way to meet his family in Colorado and turns around to come to the funeral. It’s funny how death puts life back into perspective.

My cousin Julie flies in from New York and runs the funeral service. My sister and I sing and play piano, and read scriptures. My cousin Mike shares Grandpa’s obituary and a prayer. My dad and my uncle, and a few of my grandpa’s friends share fond memories. My mom reads aloud a few stories my grandpa had written. We all eat hamburgers at the A&W after the funeral because that was Grandpa’s favorite place. It is all very special and unifying as a family. I will always be grateful that I was able to share such an intimate time with my family as we mourn the loss of someone we love.

11:59 p.m. It is Monday night, and I am excited and feel ready to depart for Chile tomorrow. I will carry with me the wisdom, the confidence and the work ethic Grandpa LeRoy exemplified to me. I will remember the ways he put others ahead of himself, and the way he loved to make people laugh. I will look forward to the future with hope and determination to beat all odds, because that’s what he did.

Lindsey Chapman was recently a volunteer with VE Global, at Colegio Anakena.

The short answer is that I’m here because the Chilean government put me here. Chilean English education, in the public sector, is pretty abysmal. Few native professors can speak the language, and fewer know or care how to teach it. Most use Spanish ninety-nine percent of the time in order to control their classes. Thus, instead of learning how to communicate, students learn about English, as if it were history or science – the language is taught as content, rather than skill. In 2003, the Ministry of Education procured funding from the United Nations to start English-focused programs; one of these was the direct recruitment of volunteer English teachers from all over the world to come and help the Chilean professors.

That’s how groups of foreigners end up coming to Northern Patagonia every year. We must be a strange sight in such an isolated place. The terrain here is so treacherous, and the climate so extreme, that land-routes are a development of only the last thirty years; Puerto Montt, the nearest big city, is just fifty minutes away by plane (when weather permits), but it takes twenty-four hours by land, and thirty-six by sea.

Puerto Aisén, my home for the past six months, has a long history of ‘used-to’s’: it used to be the capital of the region until the 1980s. It also used to be a real port, but since 1991, due to a volcanic eruption, large amounts of sediment in the river have blocked its access to the sea. There also used to be a healthy employment rate, until an immune-deficiency disease hit the salmon population in 2007, leaving thousands jobless. Since then, incidences of unemployment, alcoholism, abandonment, and domestic abuse have been on the rise Puerto Aisén and dozens of nearby towns and islands.

No, I did not choose Puerto Aisén – the Ministry assigned me to a school here. But I did request Patagonia when I offered myself to the Chilean government as a volunteer. After living in Washington Heights doing stressful, underpaid non-profit work for a year, running away to an isolated, beautiful place seemed ideal. Since then, I’ve learned a lot about what it means to experience such isolation, and to live and work with people who’ve never known anything else. I thought that I had experienced culture shock moving to Santiago de Chile a few years before – but I soon found that the difference between New York and Santiago, while impressive at the time, was nothing compared to that between Santiago and Puerto Aisén.

This is Nereida Heller’s first post on La Vida Idealist. For more about her experiences, check out her blog. For more about teaching English in Chile, check out “Intern Spotlight: Opening Doors in Chile” and “Can English Really Open Doors?” by Meridith Price as well as posts by Amanda Patterson.

Your time abroad is whatever you make of it. As Andy Garberson said in his entry “Location, Location, Location,” your current position on the globe isn’t what provides you with the life lessons you hope to learn, or goals you hope to achieve.  You have to seek out the challenges that will stretch you beyond your comfort zone, because the difficult things in life are the things most worthy of your time and energy. Furthermore, I don’t know anyone who has learned and honed a truly valuable life lesson or skill during the easiest and happiest time of their life.

As I am about to depart, it’s very grounding for me to think about the fact that Mom is still working at Otsego Dental everyday, Dad is heading to American Family Insurance carpooling with his buddy every other week, and Royce is starting up her first year teaching at Elk River high school after enjoying the summer off with her friends.  I’m not sure how they are going to feel when I tell them I want to leave again. I already know that I am not ready to head back into the working world in the States, as there is still so much I would like to do and learn abroad, especially with my Spanish.

But I’m finding I don’t mind the uncertainty of the future because uncertainty just means possibility. All I know is that I would like to continue working with the disabled whether I can find a paid position or not. And if all paid positions fail, I can always teach English on the side. I also learned that native English speakers can find jobs really easily in Santiago, so if you’re looking, I’ve got the hook up.

Even though friends and family will probably not encourage another departure abroad, it’s important to follow your heart. I’ve come to gain a new respect for the work of American mythologist, writer and lecturer Joseph Campbell who coined the phrase, “follow your bliss.” He also said, “When you follow your bliss… doors will open where you would not have thought there would be doors; and where there wouldn’t be a door for anyone else.”

I think his theories are important for everyone but especially for the life of a traveler, because life abroad isn’t the norm. If you read his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, you’ll find that following your bliss doesn’t mean merely doing what feels most fun at the moment. It means figuring out what you are passionate about, and doing it. When talking about the journey of the hero he says, “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

So whether you are thinking “Should I go or should I stay?” or “Should I give up or push through?” follow your bliss even if it seems to go against all logic. Because in the end, it will have been the only logical decision.

Lindsey Chapman is currently a volunteer with VE Global, at Colegio Anakena. For more reflections on leaving a volunteer post, check out “Signing Off: Reverse Culture Shock and Lessons Learned from a Year Abroad,” “Hasta Luego,” The Things I Have Learned,” “The Centries: Handing Out Awards to Central America,” “How Much Difference Did I Make After 5 Months of Teaching English?” “Those Final Few Days,” and “Dear Latin America.”