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Their Chilean constitution / my Chilean education

The majority of the protests were always peaceful. La Serena, Chile, October 2019.

Chileans have chosen to write themselves a new constitution.

Being British I didn’t grow up with the idea of a constitution in my head. Whilst we have constitutional principles, there is no single rigid document that defines them. We do have some important documents – like the Magna Carta written in 1215 – which state how our countries systems function together, but we don’t have a single quotable text.

As such, the word constitution wasn’t one I’d really considered

It’s possible that prior to going to Chile the word hadn’t passed my lips. I couldn’t spell it. Instead, I was focused on the challenge of voting in the British elections, which, when I left, were only a possibility, but since Britain was bashing its metaphorical head against a wall, seemed likely and did, in December, occur. All I vaguely knew about Chilean politics was that it had previously been a dictatorship but was now a democracy.

It wasn’t the first few days of the protests, when buildings were burning, and we were caged under a military curfew that I became aware of the constitution issue. For the first few days my only real concern was staying safe and working out what was happening on the streets. My phone filled with news and fake news and the media gave a side of the story which grasped the scariest parts but missed the core.

When I went out into the streets though, with a friend who had promised to make sure I got home safe and that we would disappear the moment things became violent, I started to really learn. Of course, leaving the house that afternoon I was scared, in the way a British woman wandering around in a Latin American protest ought to be, but I was also excited.

What’s worth noting here is that I might never have gone if it weren’t for the father

The mother jokes that trying to persuade me to do or not do something will just make me more determined to do it. She fears that if she says ‘don’t go to Colombia’ then I’ll go. In reality, the father did say ‘don’t go to Colombia alone’ and I didn’t, I went to Chile. I rang him and told him what was happening. I didn’t want him to be too alarmed, but I wanted him to have the truth.

The father said, “As your father, I’d prefer you to stay at home, but…”

And so, I left my house and went out to investigate

The people chanted songs I don’t know and words I didn’t understand, but in their hands, I could see placards with words they’d painted on. Pieces of card and board stuck together with words crammed on them. Chilean flags everywhere. Profanities everywhere. Hope.

From amid the crowds I read the words and I tried to understand their meaning

I went home and searched the internet, scavenging for understanding, hunting for clarity, but finding more questions than answers. I learnt that the Chilean democracy was shackled by a constitution written by the dictator Pinochet. My weak Spanish frustrated me; it is always so far behind where I need it to be. Then I downloaded books, fiction and non-fiction, and in those weeks without work I begged my friends for explanations and devoured Chilean literature. Before I started to realize that I would never comprehend entirely and would never solve the sorrow for my borrowed country or my fierce anger at the ridiculousness of it all.

After summer, in the new year, I returned to work determined to use the run up to the plebiscite to ask questions and learn as much as I could from my colleagues and friends. I didn’t want one opinion, I wanted lots of opinions.

Then, instead, the pandemic happened, sending me back to England, to watch from afar

I feared for my friends living under considerably more stressful situations than myself. The loss of incomes, the inadequacy of the health services, the step up in authoritarian control – curfews and restrictions all over the place.

It’s not so strange then that I choose to predominantly teach Chileans when emotionally so much of me remains there. I don’t solely teach Chileans, but the majority of my students are Chilean and almost all of my students live in Chile. With their resilience and fear, their boredom and frustration, they have no idea how much they’re teaching me.

Yesterday, the plebiscite took place

My students described the long queues and the excitement of going to the polls. I worried about violence erupting, as it had done earlier in the week. I hoped though, that each of them would use their democratic right to vote and prayed that they would be heard.

While they were sleeping, I awoke and checked the results. Chileans have chosen to write themselves a new constitution.

Teaching: a guessing game

Summer in the Alps, July 2018

As far as I can tell, after spending so much time watching people who supposedly know what they’re doing and being formally educated on the topic – teaching is mostly guesswork. Once you start reading into anything at depth you realize how little evidence there is that any technique actually works.

Coming from a scientific background I go searching for evidence

And for the criticism. Any evidence seems inconclusive and there seems to be bucket loads of criticism all over the place for every technique going. There seems little in the way of a benchmark of how fast anyone picks up a language. There’s a lot of beliefs about how people learn and a lot of assumptions.

Students ask me how long it will take them to get to a certain level and this is a reasonable question, to which I have no ready answer. In secondary school Spain, the students took two years of English classes to get to A2 on the common European framework then another two years to B1 then another two years to B2, but the only students who would achieve all that were ‘la crème de la crème’ (the best).

And there are all these students, stumbling around in fits and bursts

Like two-left-footed dancers missing the rhythm but bouncing along nonetheless, the luckiest of whom can laugh their way through, and somewhere along the line they learn that having your feet pointing in the right direction is more of a metaphorical need than a literal need: sometimes we sideways shuffle into success.

The truth is that the teachers themselves stumble through too, guessing how much input to give their students, balancing the accidental overwhelm with the pursuit of progress, trying to make things natural but wanting to demonstrate a learnt skill using specific language.

This talking to one another thing can get a bit tangled at times

In classes, we try to keep things structured and organized, but all that ticking little squares and faff that I detest is merely a tidy imitation of the language in action. Communication isn’t a checklist. Memorizing the dictionary won’t make you eloquent. My mother designates my father as the ‘putter upper’ of the umbrella and suggests hiding something in the ‘out-of-the-wayest’ place and my sister whom she is speaking to doesn’t even blink. This, despite being slightly unexpected, is still all English.

English is not a tick-box exercise. English is a living, breathing, sweating language with a uniqueness in every mouth it escapes. And that’s more than a billion mouths the vast majority of whom are using English as an additional language. There has to be a balance between analysing the language and developing a gut feel of what works.

So teaching is intelligent guesswork

It’s a game of balancing between too much and to little. With too much correction, the student becomes confused and demoralized. Too little correction, and they don’t progress: their errors become set in stone. And every student is going to have their own point of equilibrium and that point, from Monday to Friday, is going to change.

It keeps me guessing.

Orichette pasta and other solutions

Sunset at the Ponte Vecchio, Florence. July 2018

[Written earlier in the summer.]

This morning I go to switch on my computer and it fails

The computer used to belong to my father but knowing I couldn’t afford to buy myself a new one when the previous one died, my dear father gifted me his own. My mother had something to do with it.

The agreement between myself and my mother was simple, she would see that I had a computer, in return, I had to write.

This is because my parents are the best

Whatever I seem to throw at them they breathe very deeply, swallow their surprise, and then work out, amid all the chaos, what matters.

As daughters go, I’m sure I’m a bit of a nightmare; I don’t provide my parents with the easiest time. I’ve been known to go from sulking around the house helpless victim of my circumstances to announcing I’m heading off to the other side of the continent, alone, on a train. I get bored, book a plane ticket, and disappear to borrow someone else’s life. One moment I’m sending back photos of glaciers, then next I’m calling with a “Please help.”

I work too hard, or not at all, and my plans can’t exactly demonstrate evidence of a long-term stable future. I expect everyone else around me to have the similar binary attitude to working, but the reality is that most people seem to just do what it takes to get by and then have a weekend.

On Friday I decided to cook a pasta dish from my Italian cooking recipe book

I read the recipe and it required a certain type of pasta. I could have replaced it with any packet pasta. Tubes would have worked fine, as would spirals or those fancy little butterflies. Instead, I decided to make the pasta.

In the process covering every surface in the kitchen with tiny pasta ear shapes of varying quality. I read recipes and watched videos and dedicated myself to this crazy task.

It took me hours

But now, after doing hundreds of them, I can say that I can flick off orecchiette pasta with my kitchen knife and they really do look like little ears.

Sometimes I get angry at myself for being like this: stubborn, driven and facing an unexpected direction. I don’t have a paralysing perfectionism, but I’m not willing to compromise on what I want. Yes, it comes at a cost – I have a tendency for going a little crazy in the moments in between – but I don’t really understand how to be anything else.

My problem is often boredom

Boredom is a problem that I’ve never been very good at admitting to. I have the Spanish error of mistaking ‘bored’ for ‘boring’ in how I think about the two concepts. I assume that if I am ‘bored’ it must be because I am ‘boring’ and being boring is so very shameful to me that I would never admit that!

As such, I never leave any space in my life for feeling bored. My brain needs to be hot with plans, excitement and energy or if nothing else works anger. Then I write furiously and plentifully although not anything that you might want to read. Boredom is an absence of engagement with one’s surroundings and sometimes I counter it by trying to fight the world.

This isn’t perhaps helpful – boredom is apparently an essential component of creativity although I’m not sure I quite believe that. However, it’s not my creativity which I tend to worry about. For me the threat is the lack of engagement. After all it’s not a long step from boredom to apathy and from apathy a short skip to depression.

Orecchiette pasta shapes are a good example of me trying to find the new in the everyday

I’ve got the sort of hands that are used to making shapes. I was good at play-dough as a child, papier-mâché at school and although I rarely do any craft, it tends to come easily to me. Orecchiette pasta therefore although a challenge, is a fair challenge for me to tackle. I know how to get the information I need, and I genuinely believe that there’s no reason why I couldn’t do it as well as an Italian nonna if that’s what I so chose.

The Pros and Cons list

Saint George and an unfortunate dragon, Prague, 2014

My mother was making a decision the other day, whilst we were hula hooping, and I asked if she had made a pros and cons list.

One of the characteristics of the decision she threw out was that it is ‘scary’. Twirling around the living room I stated, “so that’s on the pro list.” To which my mother grinned in a silly fashion and concluded that, “perhaps it could be on either.”

In May I took a five-hour spontaneous drive in a hire car, across a desert into a quarantined zone to catch an aeroplane home. I wasn’t sure if I’d make it on time, but I knew I had to try.

Fear didn’t pay much of a part in all this. Or, it did, the adrenaline rushed around my head and while I was waiting for the chap at the desk in the hire car agency’s offices to learn how to use the computer, I paced up and down. Fear came along for the ride, sitting in the back seat, but fear comes along anywhere I go. Fear is an innate part of life.

If fear had had its way, I would have sat on my bedroom floor and cried.

However, although all my fear responses were screaming like sirens, I maintained a focused calm. I’m not trying to pretend that I wasn’t speaking at ten thousand miles an hour or that my body didn’t shake and twitch, but as soon as I decided to drive, my thoughts calmed.

The beauty of being human is that we can make a decision that isn’t solely dictated by our physical response.

I knew that I had to deal with the problem one step at a time. First, I had the get the car, then I had to drive north. At some later point in time I would worry about my lack of boarding card and the police cordons and how to actually get to the airport. Mostly, I had to keep myself together for the next 96 hours because this trip I was doing alone.

When I sat down in the car, I touched the gear stick and smiled to myself that at least it wasn’t an automatic. Never mind that the gear stick was on the wrong side which inevitably results in me bashing my wrist against the car door. I hadn’t driven a car at all in months but for some reason it didn’t seem to matter.

When the midget turned twenty-one, I took her to Europe. In a café in Vienna, after many protests, she ordered coffee with the shakiest of hands. It was a large central café and I was pretty sure that the waitresses would understand enough English to give her a coffee, but the Midget was terrified.

My dad did the same to me when I was a child. He gave me money for a burger in an airport lounge somewhere and told me I could have one if I bought it. The Midget was with me then too, but she was smaller than the counter. Stuck between my dad’s generosity and my sister’s pleading eyes I somehow managed to be brave enough to order the food. We both ate burgers that day, with fries.

By the end of our Europe trip, the Midget was asking at the desk for international rail tickets with more confidence than she’d managed for that first cup of coffee.

Sometimes you don’t however realise how many small steps you’ve taken until you look back at something you’ve just done – like a spontaneous 5-hour drive to catch a plane in a foggy desert – and realise that as a big picture it all looks rather brave.

But bravery is often not something big, but merely a small step against the current. A mere shuffle forward in fact. Shuffle after shuffle after shuffle.

I sat in that car and pulled out of the supermarket carpark and realised that I didn’t need to try and coerce myself into feeling better about the situation. Nor did I need to cry. My sole job was to pay attention to the road and get myself home. And all at once I knew that however ridiculous my situation was, I was going to be able to handle it.

I’ve dealt with worse.

So yes, when you make your list of pros and cons anything dangerous ought to be on the negative side of the page, but just scary… I’d leave that off the list entirely. Fear will always come along for the ride, just don’t let it drive.

How do you hold yourself to a beneficial routine?

Viscacha, Machu Picchu, Peru. January 2020.

[I get asked some challenging questions sometimes… here’s my attempt at answering this one.]


That’s an interesting word isn’t it… ‘hold’, because it can be quite severe as well as protective. It can be restrictive as well as supportive. And I guess that in some ways I’ve ‘held myself to a beneficial routine’ with both senses of the word.

The preferred method is the supportive one

I try to do those things, like sleeping regularly and eating healthily, because I’m trying to support myself. I’m on my own side. This isn’t a fight where part of me wants something that’s not good for it and the other part is angry about that. No. I’m a team within myself and I fight on my own side.

But that wasn’t always the case and in times when my mind was at risk of self-collapse and the idea of the different parts of me working together in some cohesive team quite an alien idea, holding myself to the necessary routine was severe and restrictive. Sometimes you have to stop negotiating with yourself and set a simple clear boundary – particularly I think when it comes to the things that have the easy power to send you spiralling into a pit of self-loathing.

I was given a gift during my greatest moment of lostness in my mother

After all she made sure that I was receiving three healthy meals a day and it was she who woke me up each morning from the never-ending swamp of nightmares. Waking up at a normal time resulted in me going to bed at a normal time, and so she did a lot of the holding, protectively so.

Meanwhile, I focused on remembering to clean my teeth and wash my face. My sister will attest to the fact that when she calls me feeling less than 100%, the first question I tend to ask is likely to be nothing more complex than “Have you cleaned your teeth?”. I hold myself to a beneficial routine by focusing on the small but necessary. The basics are non-negotiable.

I tend to then focus on accepting that I’m a mess and that I need to do something about it

Even though on a typical day now I’ve got a gentle grip on my routine, when the anniversary of being raped came around I woke in a fog with the echoes of nightmares inhabiting my limbs. The painful recognition of how close I will always be to feeling like I’ve been smothered by the impossibility of existing can be terrifying. I was alone.

I was alone and with my biggest ally and greatest friend: I had myself.

I got out of bed and focused on two very important things

One, this was temporary. Even if such feelings lasted months rather than days, I knew that it wasn’t a feeling that would last forever. Two, I focused on the fact that I could do something about this very real feeling. I got up and made my bed. I then went in the shower with a biro gripped horizontally between my teeth and under the hot water I lifted my arms and struck a fighting pose. You’re thinking that this sounds very simplistic – it took most of the morning.

I know I cannot flick a switch and make myself happier just like that, but I’ve already decided that apathy towards myself isn’t something I can indulge. Even though my parents are amazing, at the end of the day I’ve got to take responsibility for me. If I want a happy life, I’ve got to get on with putting happiness in the world.

How do I hold myself to a beneficial routine? With all the depths of my human heart.

The Midget got married

Wild rose, Asolo, Italy. May 2018.

The Midget got married so she and the Blacksmith may now collectively be known as the Siblings.

And these dear siblings of mine are all adorably in love and what with the house smelling of roses and raspberry and white-chocolate cheesecake, they had a most perfect little wedding. The Siblings have a grin that could swallow the world. The clouds and the rain couldn’t compete. The sun tried its best to, and so summer finally turned up, but nothing could beat the Sibling’s smile.

Understandably I’ve been busy doing hair (the smaller sibling’s) and sewing because the Father wanted a tie to match his new waistcoat and so presented me with the material and made his request and smiled and being a dutiful daughter what could I do but clamber back into the loft, find the machine and learn how to make one. Back into the loft I say because I’d only just put the beast away – so much bunting.

The midget-sized sibling wanted me to plait her hair and so I did in a thousand plaits with handmade paper roses, long blue ribbons and my mother’s headdress. The one worn many years ago, before I was born, when she and the Father said their vows to each other.

And the Midget was beautiful and ever so elegant and managed to be entirely herself even though I played with her like a doll and she even let me put mascara near her bright blue eyes. She was pandering to me, but it’s not often that I get to play such games. I painted her toenails and promptly stood on her feet. We never mastered this hair and make-up thing like other girls do. I remember watching another bridal prep – one where I took the photos – and there were makeup artists and false lashes and trays of paints and an expertise I couldn’t understand. I did the Midget’s make-up the same as I do my own, and I did my own in the same as I do any other day and she looked like the Midget and I looked like me.

The Little Mermaid said she’d prefer to have lots of beautiful clothes rather than lots of beautiful make-up. I told her I’d rather a plane ticket and good food with friends. A dear friend of the Siblings and I fell into a conversation about ceviche and I told her I’d take her out for dinner the other side of the world and buy her a pisco sour. It’s a good plan.

But even before the bubbles and chinking glasses, the wedding was most definitely an adventure. Planned and re-planned, with risk assessments and hand sanitiser and masks and the Tall Aunty alert system – the fastest pandemic news source on the planet. And yet despite the world being in chaos around them, never knowing what would be in the next call from the registry office, the Siblings seemed to keep it in perspective and whilst the Mother negotiated and renegotiated with the catering, the Midget thought and talked about the adventure that would follow – being married.

So in my mind, the Siblings deserve every milli-second of their joy because they’ve worked out that if you want a relationship to work, you work at it. That love isn’t simply a game of infatuation but an act of warrior like bravery. That it’s an act from the heart of pure and unfaltering courage. That, as a wise man once said to me, the wedding is nice, but it’s the marriage that counts.