Let me tell you about el Río Elquí and its tributaries

I was lying in bed, unable to sleep, swearing I could feel those mysterious, tiny insects stinging and chewing and poking and devouring my slowly dying body, until 6am. I woke up at 8:30, then managed to sleep a little more, before getting up, cancelling my physical therapy appointment I wasn’t going to be able to make it to, and heading to class for my Chilean geography test (though not before squeezing the last of my trial-sized vial of mystery cream onto each every picotazo that now attractively cover my body.

I don’t know a thing about Chilean geography. Sure, I’ve been able to make a few cognitive leaps thanks to my Carleton geology background, but anything beyond the basaltic Cordillera de los Andes in contrast with the granitic depression intermedia, or the formation of copper from the melted rocks that rise up to the surface as oceanic plate subducts under the continental plate, pretty much has me beat. And so it was that I spent three solid days pouring over notes, reading, census figures, tourist brochures, and Wikipedia trying to learn and memorize everything there is to know about regions I-IV of this utterly bizarre country (Tarapacá, Antofagasta, Atacama, and Coquimbo, from north to south…yeah, I also know each of their populations and population changes per the 2002 Census, in case you’re interested). I memorized climactic zones, mining history, tourist-based economic diversification, Chilean vegetative terminology, types of rivers (exorreic, endorreic, pluvionival, fluvionival), and the names of all kinds of valleys and basins, ports and cities. After my solid three-plus hours of sleep, I walk into the classroom, join in on the communal jostling for seats, and look down at the test just as every single person around me starts asking those sitting around them for the answers. I went about answering the questions—loathing how much I’d suffered through studying for a test that was four questions long, didn’t ask for the population numbers I’d so successfully memorized, and was apparently a group effort. That did come in handy, however, when I couldn’t remember how to spell the country’s biggest copper mine (Chuquicamata…it’s tough). I asked Cristian later if our professor realized that every single person in the class was cheating. The high and mighty honor system seems to have fallen a bit by the wayside in this country.

Besides that, however, I stick by my earlier words; I look around and I see home in peoples’ eyes. It may not be the home I’m used to, and it’s certainly not one I expected to find, but it’s there all the same, and it overwhelms me in the best of ways. And I think that you can see it in my eyes, too.