My Chilean Host Mom: A Face of Resilience

After a week of training in Santiago, I was put on a bus with a few other volunteers that were going in a similar direction and told that I would stop in Curicó, where someone would be waiting to pick me up to bring me to Sagrada Familia, the small town that I’d be staying in. I arrived with my small carry-on-sized suitcase, a traveller’s backpack, and a smaller day pack, stepping off the bus and blinded by sun. A tiny, bouncy, older woman grabbed me by the hand, smiling brightly — Emma! She was accompanied by a taller, younger woman who looked stern and had glasses sitting on the bridge of her nose. Priscilla, my partner English teacher that I’d be working with.

I attempted some Spanish pleasantries, and lapsed into silence, happy that at the very least my host mom had warm, loving vibes. In her sixties, she was still vibrant and full of laughter, plagued with occasional migraines but without other major health concerns. To ward off the migraines, she would drink mate (a type of tea, where you stick a metal straw into the loose tea leaves, add lukewarm water, and drink it up), and eat a full lemon, rind and all, the two remedies that she swore by.

Like everyone, my host mom’s life was not perfect, nor did she believe she made all the right choices throughout, but it rarely showed in her daily demeanor. I always wondered about this, this ability of women to stay happy and cheerful in spite of everything that did not go their way. As men grow older, they become sullen with their jobs, angry, bitter that their lives haven’t gone as desired. Women just shoulder on, as if they are continuing to protect their kids — or themselves — from reality. And yet, she still had the amazing capacity to be honest and admit where her life had taken wrong turns, or derailed slightly.

Every night, we would sit down, the three of us — mom, dad and adopted kid, although occasionally their youngest son would join us — for Once (pronounced like the Spanish word for eleven, oan-say), the Chilean version of a light dinner, usually consisting of large quantities of bread with an array of spreads — jam, smashed avocado (my personal favorite), cheese (never a hard block of cheese; always a version of queso fresco; light, airy, and wobbly cheese that jiggled gelatinously and had a mild taste, freshly made and bought from a neighbor), meat that may have been salami or bologna but I was never sure, and/or a store-bought version of dulce de leche that was called manjar. Sometimes, I would secretly scoop out spoonfuls of manjar when no one was around like how I used to eat peanut butter as a kid (which, by the way, is new to Chile and now is sold in Lider, the Chilean Walmart) — a creamy caramel sauce with the texture of nutella, I wanted to hate it but couldn’t.

For a while, Once was the time for me to talk and practice Spanish with my host mom. It was also really her only time to relax. She worked as a janitor at the Liceo, the public high school, that I worked at as well, and would come home well after me, prepare Once, sit in peace for an hour or so, and then start cooking tomorrow’s lunch, which she would bike and I would walk home during our lunch hour to eat.

My host mom (hereafter just called mom, to simplify, and because I hold her dearly in my heart) had bought an English-Spanish kids’ dictionary to assist us, and always loved to whip it out when there was a word I didn’t understand. She loved explaining the different meanings behind words, and the way it was to be properly used in Spanish, versus the way Chileans used it.

“We have a dirty mind, us Chileans,” she’d tell me frequently, laughing and beaming every time she said it. My own prognosis was that Chileans had never progressed from third grade humor, and so still found poop jokes and sexual innuendos to be hilarious, but that’s beside the point. Who would’ve thought that one’s sense of humor could be a cultural barrier?

My mom’s husband was a quiet man. According to his wife, he used to be quite a heavy drinker, to the point that he was home one time and had been sipping and fallen asleep and hadn’t noticed that a portion of the house had caught on fire. I can’t recall what had caused the fire, but as news spreads fast in small, rural towns my mom heard about it and rushed home during lunch to find everything under control at that point.

It was common for men to drink often there. It was also common for women to worry about it but put up with it. He was 11 years older than her and one day he was told that his blood pressure was too high. He quit drinking. On weekends during get-togethers he would stick to one glass of red wine, usually Merlot. Sometimes he’d have a glass during lunch to accompany the food.

I saw him tipsy once. It was then that I understood why he used to drink: he was emboldened, a larger version of himself, one who had the courage to joke and look people in the eye. We had had family over at our house, which included my mom’s side of the family; her two sister’s, Lala and Nana (to this day I mess up which name is for which person, although they were very distinct); Lala’s husband, who was from Uruguay; and my host brother. Most likely my host sister and her partner with their kid was there as well, but I can’t be sure. My host dad started to tell stories about his wild youth, where he was raised further south near Concepción, and how he had had three girlfriends, two of which were married.

“This is why I don’t trust women,” he said. “They were married and still seeing me!” Why that couldn’t translate to women also not trusting men was unclear.

My mom became irritable. “Why are you always bringing up the past?” she said. “It’s as if you haven’t gotten over it.” And, of course, the conversation was at her expense.

But she had her own thoughts on her marriage. She was much more outgoing than him, and younger, with a lot of spunk still. Her husband would always join us during Once, and eat his food quietly, occasionally contributing a story or two. The only time the TV was really on was also during Once, where we’d watch the Chilean telenovela La Colombiana, and then a Turkish one afterwards, to which my host mom would remark about how much more serious and dramatic it was than the Chilean one. The last few months of my stay there the season of La Colombiana had ended and it was replaced with Wena Profe, another funny telenovela that was incredibly Chilean. I enjoyed watching them for language purposes at first, but soon became engrossed in the simple plots as well. Would the Colombian end up with the older Chilean who always looked at her with doe eyes but was trying to resolve his relationship with the woman that had his two kids? Would the Colombian become a doctor like she wanted, or would she continue to face discrimination for being a foreigner?

I started drinking three Lipton teas a night, using the same tea bag for two cups and then switching to a new one, squeezing the tea bag out with a spoon as was the Chilean (or just polite?) way. Growing up, I would always pull the tea bag out, let it dangle for awhile to cool off, and then use both fingers to squeeze out the excess flavor, wincing as my impatience always made me touch the tea bag too early. The things I learned while in Chile.

After my host dad was finished eating, he would usually retire into the living room area to watch his own show, leaving my mom and I alone in the kitchen, where we could chat.

“I don’t know why I married my husband,” she told me one time, smiling sadly. “He’s so serious and I’m not!”

She hadn’t married until she was in her late twenties, old for a woman then. She grew up in the years of Allende and then Pinochet, years marked first by food shortages — “hours in line to buy a gram of sugar,” she told me — and then by curfews and disappearances under the army dictatorship.

She moved to Uruguay with her sister, living there for years until she returned to live with her other sister, who had a young newborn and was living in Santiago at the time. She brought up the time when the buses stopped, when there was absolutely no public transportation to speak of, and how she would get up early for work and walk out and hail down a nice person in a car that could drop her off. She spoke of hiding her sister’s son when they heard gunshots in the night, gunshots from the government’s police force that hunted down radicals and enforced the curfew. She told me of her high school boyfriend, who had been an outspoken socialist and was eventually killed by the government. She had no love for Pinochet, unlike other people within rural areas, who spoke of Pinochet as being a “necessary evil,” one who righted the economy. These were usually men just young enough to not have experienced the dictatorship first hand. My mother’s generation was different: scarred from the realities of the day.

I believe she moved back to Uruguay, or maybe I got my timeline messed up and she lived first in Santiago and then Uruguay, but I remember her telling me that she was not in Chile during the yes/no vote that ousted Pinochet in the early ’90s.

“But why did so many people vote to keep Pinochet in power?” I asked her, naively.

She shrugged. “People became comfortable, accustomed to the security. They felt safe with the curfews.” The liberties we will give up, the deaths that we will accept, all for the name of safety.

As I sat and watched her laugh about questioning why she had married her husband, I wondered how she wished her life had turned out. And I wondered at how easy she made it seem, to accept the life that she had, regardless of what could or should have happened. She called her husband her guatero, her heater in bed that kept her warm. She continued to give him cariño, affection, regardless of if he was the right choice for her or not.

Guatero’s are essentially a plastic container that you fill up with hot water, seal, and put in your bed to help keep you warm, usually at your feet. Without any indoor heating, things would get quite chilly during the winter months. On occasion, a story would appear in the news that someone’s guatero had broken and badly burned the slumbering person, but such stories were rare.

Perhaps she was just comfortable with how things were, willing to look at both the good and the bad with wise eyes, able to acknowledge benefits without being crippled by bitterness.

And then her work: my mom was lumped into the bunch of “auxiliars” as her job role at the Liceo, the only female out of the crew, essentially janitors but with a wider scope. The head honcho was an old, lewd man who made most young women uncomfortable and who I tried to stay away from. To my surprise, my mom quoted him at only being in his forties — life had done him no favors; I had thought that he was in his sixties. He was balding, had large sun creases in his face, was short and soft, and wore baggy clothes that only exemplified his pudgy figure.

The other two were also men, one young who was a huaso (think Chilean cowboy) and also a pretty boy, around my age with 4+ kids, some horses, and who spoke only slang Chilean Spanish so that I found him particularly difficult to understand. His promise to take me horseback riding never came to fruition. The other was older, who had landed the cush job of being in charge of the library, the room where I taught my classes. He was incredibly lazy, told prejudiced jokes about Haitians, and talked frequently about his kidney stones and the pain they caused him. He had no qualms talking to others while I was attempting to teach, and occasionally would yell at my classes if they became too loud, much to my chagrin as that destroyed my power and made me dislike him more. I was not a fan.

Ah, and there was a third I had almost forgotten about: the young gossip who was supposed to do the same work as my mom (mopping and cleaning, essentially), but spent most of his time hanging around with 3D, the small junior class that was focused on humanities/liberal arts — the Liceo was a trade school, so junior year students would pick a focus: agriculture (A), engineering (B), nursing (C) or humanities (D). Humanities was the least popular, agriculture the most, although engineering was a close second. If you couldn’t guess already, the A and B classes were largely men, the C class predominately women, and the D class a small group, with a healthy mix of both genders.

The third-mentioned auxiliar, whom we shall call Rodrigo, and many other teachers as well, was what I considered quite inappropriate with some of the female students at school.

In Chile, the boundaries between professor and student are not the same — or, more precisely, there aren’t boundaries. The exception was my partner English teacher, who had done a brief stint in New York and liked to display an image of respectability and borderline haughtiness. She was not well-liked.

My mom was not above gossip, although it was almost always explained simply, rather than in a judging manner. She was my link to anything and everything: she told me about the history teacher, who was happily married and whom I thought to be an upstanding man (albeit quite friendly with me), and how he had had a kid with a senior student a few years back, to which he had admitted to my mom that he paid her, but would not admit to it being his kid.

“Well, why do you pay her then?” My mom wisely asked him, to which I am assuming he had no real response.

There was also the computer lab guy (what title to call him, I don’t know — he just manned the computer lab), who had married a former student and had kids with her, and then they eventually separated. My mom, again wisely, attributed the separation to the woman’s age.

Rodrigo was always nice to me, and not in a creepy manner like he was to some of the female students. He went out of his way to greet me, and so I never harbored any ill thoughts against him because of my own personal interactions with him: but I was not a fan because of how his sloppiness at work affected my mom.

The principal was a man who did not get involved in most manners. So in short, the school was not well run. The head auxiliar himself was lazy, so he did not put any real controls over the other auxiliars. And Rodrigo had managed to ingeniously get on the principal’s good side, so when he didn’t sweep or mop the rooms, or did so half-heartedly, nothing happened. My mom frequently mopped areas that were deemed his sections, because he didn’t do them. She would come home, frustrated, her back hurting, and do it all over again the next day.

So much sexism in Chile, and yet the group of auxiliars, full of men satisfied with their lower positions of power, were completely okay with allowing their oldest auxiliar, who happened to also be a woman, work the hardest out of all of them. Maybe they had fooled themselves into thinking that they contributed more than they really did. Or maybe they utilized sexism — mopping is women’s work, right? — to feel okay about themselves.

In Chile, like many countries, it is normal for women to work outside of the home, but men are not expected to do work that is traditionally considered women’s work. And so, the double duty of housewife and income generator falls on many women. Nannies and hired help are not common: generally, family members are relied upon as help support.

My mom’s husband was retired. He used to be what I believe would be called an interior designer, and had built the majority of their home himself, so he still tittered around here and there. He was also helping build a house for their oldest daughter, who lived in Santiago with her partner and kid, but was building a second house under her name. This was now common in Chile, my mom explained to me: partners stayed together but didn’t marry, and frequently would build two houses, one under each person’s name, as it was one of the most efficient ways to guarantee some form of wealth, especially since from my understanding there were no property taxes. America is complicated, my mom would say a lot. So many rules; I’m glad I live in a county that is more simplified. I agreed in many ways.

There were a few realms that he had accepted delving into: making the salad, to which was a side for most (if not all) lunches; buying groceries from the fruit and vegetable stand two blocks from our house; warming up lunch before my mom and I arrived from work; and sweeping the house throughout the week, to which everything was just swept outside, no dust pan needed. He took great pride in his salads, which were simple but delicious: neatly chopped cabbage, lots of lemon juice, some olive oil, and a hint of salt. When my mom occasionally prepared the salad, he would always take a bite, ponder the quality of the salad, and declare that it was okay but not at his level of expertise. But beyond those realms, the rest was up to his wife to complete.

My mom had a rigorous schedule, more rigorous than mine, although that was easy to beat, considering that I only worked at the school three days a week. She had to be there at 7:30 a.m., me at 8:00. She left at around 6:00 p.m., me at 4:45. It is not abnormal in Chile to work long, long days that also consist of a long lunch and 15 minute breaks throughout. The work days are long, but the productivity also slower, a huge and difficult adjustment for me, a by-product of the industrial revolution and the Puritan viewpoint of work ethic as being the most sacred of all values.

My dad had no desire to learn how to cook, and so my mom prepared the food for lunch on the stove late at night, after Once was complete. Often it was soup, full of hearty foods. Cazuela was normal, a soup with on-the-bone chicken, small pieces of corn on the cob, a full, skinned potato, usually rice, and other veggies of the cook’s choosing. The broth was water and some oil, I believe, which always separated and made little circles in the broth.

The first time it was served, my mom showed me how to eat it, so excited to share her knowledge. The soup is served in a bowl (obviously), but with a plate underneath. And so you sip the broth with the smaller veggies first, and leave the chicken, corn, and potato, to which you then transfer those three larger items to the plate, and use your fork and knife to eat. Thankfully, my host dad liked spicy (unlike most Chileans), so usually I added a hefty dose of spicy pebre to the soup.

Occasionally, when my mom had to leave to go somewhere, she would have her son cook (she would never just let me fend for myself for lunch, something always had to be prepared), who was a decent cook, but never would her husband cook. And never was he asked. It was an unspoken agreement, one that must have spanned years and years of living together, one that perhaps had caused animosity and tension in the past but was accepted now.

And so here she was, an older woman who married a stoic man who lacking cariño and, even when retired, did not pitch in to do the majority of the housework. A woman who worked harder than all the men around her, and who came home to work more. And yet never would she let anything get her down.

I hope I will grow to be half the woman she is.