runner´s high, earthquakes, powerful dreams, and jazz band concerts (miercoles, 25 agosto)

I returned to my house in a fantastic mood, both relaxed and energized. Completely in love with life. Even though school hadn´t been fun today for several reasons (mainly my host teacher), I felt like life is great and I am thoroughly enjoying my experience here. There is so much to be not just happy, but thrilled about. I don´t know what I´d do if I wasn´t a runner. It is completely meditative for me and allows me to stay positive and energized about everything. Even when I´m dead tired and go running, it puts things in perspective for me.

Compared to the awesomeness of my run, there really wasn´t anything worthwhile about Monday to write...same old story today as any other school day. Although my seventh graders were doing their oral presentations today about their favorite famous person. One kid is a piano player and chose Beethoven. During his oral presentation he accidentally said, ¨Beethoven was a computer from the seventeenth century.¨ I started laughing but then realized he´d meant to say ´composer,´but it was still pretty funny.

Yesterday I struggled to stay awake during all of my classes, which consisted of the students finishing their presentations. After school I helped out with the choir for a while. Today was sectionals so I worked just with the girls in the choir. It turns out there is one alto who cannot for the life of her sing in tune. She can´t match pitches and will sing a note a fifth below all the other altos and she can´t tell whether she´s too low or too high. Her voice is very nasally and she moves her shoulders every time she breathes. When I first heard the dissonant pitches I thought there was some sort of fire alarm going off somewhere in the school. The other director and I tried to work with her but I´m not sure if she´s slow or just not musically inclined, but it didn´t get better at all. We aren´t allowed to kick kids out of choir (it´s a Christian school and anyone who wants to participate can). I am not sure what to do with her because she sounds awful, and without her, the rest of the choir is very talented. Her being there is causing an otherwise talented choir to sound horrible. I try not to cringe, but it seems like she always ends up a tritone off from the pitch she´s supposed to be singing. The girl is also really nice which makes it hard, and she is enthusiastic about choir. The other kids have tried to help her but that isn´t working, and they are becoming frustrated. One of them blurted out, ´is she coming with on the trip too?´Unfortunately, she is. Besides that, choir was fun.

Last night I was sitting at the computer checking my email when the house started to shake. It was shaking quasi-strongly for about a minute straight. I asked my host brothers what to do, and they just laughed and said to stay in the house, that minor quakes like this happen all the time. They said it wasn´t really an earthquake, but a tremor (temblor in Spanish), although by my standards it was definitely an earthquake!!! Things were falling off the desk and rolling across the room. After about a minute the shaking stopped. My host dad´s response: ``Don´t worry, it was just the earth breathing´´ which I thought was kind of a neat and beautiful way to look at it.

And then the power went out in our entire neighborhood (the south side of Iquique). We felt our way downstairs where the dad went outside to turn on the car´s headlights in order to shine some sort of light into the house. We found some candles and proceeded to sit around the kitchen table. My host dad said that either there would be a small shake (aftershock) or that there would be a worse earthquake. (Sometimes small ones are followed by worse quakes, but usually this is not the case). I guess I looked pretty freaked out because my older brother was laughing at me. He was saying he can´t even count how many earthquakes he´s experienced. My host cousin was sleeping when it happened, rolled over, and went back to sleep. After a minor 3 second, small aftershock, my host dad decided it was safe for him to drive to my host mom´s work to pick her up (it happened right before she was supposed to get off shift). My host brother asked him to get some pop on the way, and asked if I could lend him a few cents. When I went upstairs to get the change, my eyes had adjusted to the dark, but when I came out of my room, my older host brother Santiago was hiding on me and jumped out at me in the dark. After I got done screaming I thought it was kind of funny.

After almost an hour the lights came back on. No worries, I´m fine. We don´t know where exactly the quake started, but now I can say I´ve experienced my first actual earthquake here. I hope none of them are serious, but they say it happens a few times a month, and some are so small no one notices them.

Last night I dreamt where I watched myself die. It was a really powerful dream I haven´t been able to shake off all day. I was somewhere landlocked in Chile, but this enormous blue tidal wave came up and enveloped me. I remember thinking in my dream that I was dying and knew for certain life was over, but I knew it was going to be a peaceful death. Part of me knew it was a dream because I remember thinking that a giant tidal wave couldn´t happen so far from the ocean. As I spun around in this spiral of water, I realized I was breathing through my lungs, and not drowning, but I knew I was dying. I remember feeling frantic that I wouldn´t get to say good-bye to the people I cared about. I heard spirits in the water telling me that this was the end of life on earth, and that the world was ending, and after life all things are the same. I remember spinning around in the water feeling reassured that wherever I went next I wouldn´t be alone, and the spirits were telling me that some people have it so much worse. It was really weird and I´ve been thinking of it all day. I´ve always believed dreams are important and that they usually have some sort of important message.

A few nights ago I had a prophetic dream about something that actually happened later that day (well, things did not happen in the same way as in the dream, but the outcome was the same). Immediately after the dream I felt reassured and not worried, and of course, things were fine. I think part of the reasons I´ve been having these dreams is because I bought a lapis lazuli ring the other day. It is a traditional and ancient stone of Chile, used by shamans for its healing qualities, but it has energies relating to intuitive senses and dreams, and here it is believed to be very powerful. I didn´t know that when I bought it, but I read about it and think there´s a truth to that. It has also changed colors since I´ve been wearing it. It was blue at first with little specks of white, but now it´s more of a bluish-purple color. I really wish I´d brought one of my books about crystals with from back home, but I still have the Internet. The other thing is I´ve been remembering the majority of my dreams lately. I definitely think there is a lot of truth to what the ancient shamans believed, and what many of the indigenous people here still believe, that everything, living or nonliving, carries a certain energy along with it.

And then I woke up to Artemio telling me it was time to wake up for school. I don´t know what´s with him lately...I told him to get me up at 7:30am, but today he started yelling for me to wake up at 7am. Yesterday it was 7:15. I sincerely hope tomorrow he doesn´t get me up earlier. I don´t like where this pattern is going. I just know I never like mornings.

Today school has been interesting. I arrived with the intentions of teaching classes. The school system here is a lot more disorganized than in the US, but sometimes like today it turns out more fun that way. The choir director found me and said I wasn´t going to teach today bc the jazz band needed me to play tenor with them because this morning before school a bunch of the jazz band students decided to give concerts in the auditorium all day in order to raise money for the choir/ jazz band trip (most of the kids in the jazz band also sing in the choir). The director got permission from my host teacher (the crabby one) to miss classes all day. In fact, the students have also been missing classes all day. I guess this happens at least once or twice a week of impromptu events. IT has been fun, playing Pantera Rosa (the pink panther), Moonlight Serenade, and Summertime all day. Jazz band is way more fun than teaching classes, even though I enjoy my English classes and students.

At any rate, my planning period is almost over so I´ll write more later:)

written by  Sara Florecita on August 25, 2010 from Iquique, Chile
from the travel blog: año de dos inviernos (Chile 2010)
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