Chile, Day 11
There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.
To make the most of it. That’s what the Spanish word aprovechar means, my host mum Jona teaches me during our dinner conversation today. What a beautiful word. Because there is so many things to be made the most of here, the dinner conversations have become a bit rare. That makes me value them even more. We talk about my plans for the week and the weekend – the plan is to wave goodbye and leave Viña del Mar on Saturday, headed to Santiago. She tells me that the day after I leave, a new student will arrive. Another European wanting to experience Chilean culture and learn or improve their Spanish. I ask where they are from and she says she isn’t sure. She goes upstairs to grab the homestay contract so we could find out and I ask her if I could also read the contract that was made over myself. After a quick calculation, the total payout stated on the paper seems very, very little. She’s been making me food, I showered, washed my clothes. What are their motives to take us on, I wonder.
In class, everyone is slacking. Most of the group has fallen ill and besides I came to the conclusion that we must have hit a point in our language learning where progress has slowed down, much to the frustration of us all. Combined with 10 days of full-on eat-learn-see-celebrate-converse-sleep cycles, it has become very tiring. I imagine it like the narrative of a novel: the setting and characters have been introduced, we have been exposed to the problem (the Spanish Project) and the action has been rising. Suddenly, our first crisis. Anyway, if the climax is to be fluent knowledge of Spanish, there are many crises yet to follow.
As there is no point in moving on in our curriculum today, we choose to speak about Chile. We’re spoken to in Spanish and are trying to ask questions in Spanish, reverting to English where necessary. The topic of money seems to be following me around. As we speak about average incomes, minimum wages, costs of education, rent and public transport, mortgages, interest rates and the subvention system for “affordable buying”, something suddenly becomes very apparent: many Chileans are constantly living on the edge. Holidays aren’t an option, neither in the sense of being off work nor travelling anywhere. The figures our teacher scribbled on the whiteboard show income and expenses – and they don’t add up. It now makes sense to take on students for little money, to keep hot water in a Thermos bottle so you don’t have to run the kettle throughout the day, to wear jackets indoors instead of heating, to be able to speak perfect English but never have been to an English-speaking country.
This is story 5/5 of my Chile short stories. Read Chile, Day 4 now.
