Chilean Odyssey

Within six months of our marriage more than forty years ago, we (Fred and Jan Bales) left for Chile where we would work and learn and live for the next twenty-two months. This South American, all-expenses-paid, extended “honeymoon” was underwritten by the U.S. Peace Corps. During our Chilean odyssey and our time in training at the University of New Mexico, we wrote the 75 letters that form the heart of this book. Almost all were sent to our parents.

Our Peace Corps experience lived up—or down—to the cliché about job searches and hirings: Neither side gets exactly what it expects. In Chile we were immersed in—or, more accurately, overwhelmed by—a foreign culture and considered by most Chileans as good neighbors, although on occasion we were perceived as naïve, exotic, or devious. We also came to know ourselves and each other in settings that could not have been matched at home, an outcome that was predicted accurately in the Peace Corps literature.

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The worldly sophistication of the Chileans often impressed us. My main work setting at the cooperative federation, a faded one-story office building in downtown Santiago, also housed a furniture outlet. A young salesman there, lacking a high school education, used to chat with us volunteers and one day asked this: “Is it true that in the United States men take their mother’s maiden name for their middle name?” He cited the cases of two presidents: Lyndon Baines Johnson and John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I answered that although it was not uncommon, it was not uniform, either. In short, it was a choice and not a prescribed custom as with the Latin American practice of including the mother’s maiden name in a man’s full formal name. I was left to wonder how many college graduates, let alone non-high-school graduates, in the United States could manage to come up with the last name the Chilean president, Eduardo Frei, never mind the first and middle names.

Chileans were endearingly curious about another aspect of American life: our automobile junkyards. With an air of disbelief, many a Chilean asked us whether such “graveyards” actually existed, and we had to admit as much. Even for those in a country that hardly ranked as the poorest of the poor and one with a substantial middle class, the existence of a nation so rich as to tolerate used cars sitting idly in large numbers strained the imagination.

Sometimes, though, sophistication was nowhere in sight, as in the jarring culture gaps that yawned wide in otherwise routine encounters. My unforgettable favorite is the following exchange one day when I had been introduced to a Chilean man:

He: Where are you from?

Me: A small town in the state of Indiana.

He: Did you own a car there?

Me: Yes, I had a car.

He: Did you ever drive in the Indianapolis 500?