Wednesday, October 24, 2007 "Me dejo marcando el ocupado"

Wednesday, October 24, 2007 "Me dejo marcando el ocupado"

I’d gone to bed at 4:30, but I woke myself up at 9:30 to finish my essay and around 12:30 headed out to campus. I didn’t have a Chilean edit it so it definitely chalk full of mistakes, but I think it had good ideas and ended being 6.5 pages. If I take nothing else from my experience in Chile, it will be that I can write papers much better than before. And just imagine how easy it will be in English!!

I printed off my paper and went to class, which was more than half empty with all the other students that didn’t finish the essay. After class I hung out in our usual gringa blob and Christian came and ate lunch with us. Then I went to Biblia class where I learned something blog worthy. As they say in Chilean,
• “Me dejó marcando el ocupado” It left me marking the busy
• “mueve el piso” or Moved the floor
• “cambia el esquema” Changed the schema

As you can see there aren’t really any good translations, but basically it rocked my world. Are you ready? Read on: Cardinal Ratzinger, before he became Benedict XVI wrote a letter called Libertad Conquistada in which basically said that people can act against the decrees of the church if and only if they act in good conscience which has been thoroughly analyzed and prayerful discerned. Wow. This class has really been reaffirming a lot of things I’ve thought about faith, religion, God, Jesus, etc. and it makes me feel honored to be Catholic and proud to tell others I’m Catholic. Now we just need to get everyone else to understand the church in the way our professor explains/presents it! About the text, I obviously can’t explain it as well as Ratzinger wrote it, but I asked my professor to email the copy of the text so I can post it for all to read. It should be up soon.

After class I had our Pobreza class where we learned about Neoliberalism and how crappy the United States policies are. This class did not make me feel honored nor proud. Nevertheless, it was really interesting to learn. I took the metro home after class sense it was kind of chilly. I had once with Olga then worked on my blog. I talked to Trevor for a while, then finally got to talk to Anamarie, my best friend from home. We’d talked once since I’d been to Chile so it was great to catch up. I went to bed after 1 am, which was late because I knew I had to wake up early to volunteer. Oh well, I can sleep when I dead!!

p.s. Great News: I’m finally caught up on my blog!! Just in time for me to leave on my next trip! We are going to Pucon, the “adventure capital of the world”, which is about 9 hours south of Santiago. This trip is with the program which means 1. we don’t have to do any planning and 2. it’s already paid for so it feels like its free! So once again I won’t be able to blog for a while but I’ll do my best to not get two weeks behind like I did this time!