Alcoholism in Chile

Last week we discussed about social issues and we concluded that the most important social problem in Chile is inequality, which is also related to how much money somebody can have – because we know that in this country you need to have money if you want to access to good quality education, health, food, etc.-. But I think that there’s another big problem in our society and it is related to alcohol. Chilean people are known as alcoholics, this is because we drink a lot and we make up dates and opportunities to drink. I know this because I have heard some comments from my foreigner classmates and they’re impressed with our “alcoholic culture”. Yes, our identity has been created associated to alcohol since our origins. Fiestas Patrias, for example, it’s a special date in which we celebrate the first government meeting and people get crazy drinking and eating as pigs. 

Maybe this could explain why alcoholism in Chile is not so important than inequality, because we have included it to our normal life. Obviously the government has made some politics to change this like “Ley Emilia”, for example, or the IVA rising in alcohol, but it’s not enough I guess. And it’s a big problem, not only for adult people but in teenagers and young people too. For example, I know some classmates who are drunk every day and they start to drink early in the morning. And the big thing is that they can’t drink alone, they have to do it with more people and now some others classmates have started to drink excessively.

I guess that this social issue won’t change until people understand that alcohol doesn’t mean fun, and been drunk doesn’t make you look cool. We need to take out the alcohol from our identity.

Internet and teenagers

How has the Internet affected younger generations? I believe that teenagers today are quite different than teenagers at my time. Maybe I sound like a grandma, but I know it’s true. Internet open the access to a huge amount of information, but it’s not like a library, because this platform doesn’t need an intermediary, this means that a kid from 3 to 17 years old doesn’t have control of the things he is watching at the computer. And this is a big problem I guess, because parents normally don’t know how to use computers or they don’t know the websites their kids like. This explains why kids today don’t surprise with anything. They could watch people dying (like the video of the guy who jumped from Costanera Center), animals suffering, etc. and they wouldn’t feel sad. In my time, when the people from my generation were kids, their parents controlled what they watched in the TV for example, teenagers couldn’t watch adult’s programs or violent movies. That doesn’t happen today. Maybe that’s the reason why kids today don’t react against bullying, or they do cyber bullying.

But I guess that this access to information has some advantages too. For example younger generations can learn things through Internet and sometimes this could be better than the education from schools, or sometimes Internet can act as a complement. I see this in my sister, for example. She’s 14 and she would like to be a doctor, so she watches science channels in youtube and she learns about it. She also uses this website to learn English. It’s common today that younger generations know more about English because internet, they had to learn this language because the whole network uses it. 

I believe that Internet it’s a good technology, but we need to control it access to our children.

The bes holidays I've ever had

I did this exercise before and I talked about a holiday I had with my boyfriend and his family in the south of Argentina, so for this blog entry I’m going to talk about a holiday I had with my family two or three years ago (I don’t remember exactly when it was).

We went to Valparaíso by bus and we stayed there for one week. It was special for us because we hadn’t one week of vacations in years! Normally, we go to the beach for one or two days.

We stayed in a guesthouse. I liked it a lot because we were five persons and the house was big enough for us. The beach was ten minutes from the place we were staying and we didn’t need a car to get there, we could walk to beach, so we didn’t spend money in transportation, at least that we wanted to go anywhere else.

We went to La Sebastiana, one of the Neruda’s houses. I’m not a big fan of Neruda, actually I hate him, but I like to visit cultural places. La Sebastiana is like all of his houses. It has a lot of weird things –Neruda was very strange-, most of them related to the sea. The bad thing about it is that is hard to get there. You need to take a bus and the trip takes half an hour or more.

We ate sea food. I like sea food, specially fish. We went to El Mercado of Valparaíso – I didn’t translate it as “market” because obviously is more than a market, you can eat Chilean food there and buy fresh vegetables-. I ate fried merluza and rice. We had mote con huesillo then. Once we finished a musician started to play for us.

We went back to Santiago by bus again.

Highs and lows of my neighbourhood

First of all I live in El Bosque, Santiago, near to the air force school. I like to live there, but obviously I would like to change some things about my neighbourhood.

The highs of where I live are: first, I live in a house. I don’t like apartments because you can’t have a neighbourhood life. You don’t know the people who live next to you and you don’t have much space (Santiago’s apartments are very tiny!). Second, I don’t have to deal with noise pollution (something common here in the downtown). And third, I have a park close from where I live (like 2 blocks from my house).

The lows of my neighbourhood are related with two things: first, the facilities. My university is in the downtown or if I want to buy something in the supermarket I have to take a bus to get there. The security it’s a huge problem too, because there are drug dealers near my house (the funny thing about it is that everybody in the neighbourhood knows who these people are because they live there). Thiefs are a problem too. I like my neighbourhood, but it needs to be safer for the people who live there.

Chilean educational system

Everyone is talking about the students protests because of the problems we have in our educational system. Since 2006 we have been demanding a reform of the entire system and finally the government has decided to hear its society, but not all the people agree with it.

Some think that the problem lies in people who can profit with the system. Others think that the problem lies in the quality of the education.

I believe that one of the problems we have is the social segregation and our educational system is just a reflection of that. Because we do have good schools and good teachers, the problem is that they stay in the private sector. This means that the people who can pay for these schools will have good education and good education means good jobs.

Obviously there are some teachers who work in public schools. The problem with those schools is that they select the students who enter, and they always keep with the best of them.

In universities the problem is almost the same. First, as primary and secondary education, our country has good universities and bad universities and most of the people who enter a good university come from a private school. But the worst thing about it is the tuition. Nobody with a salary of two hundred pesos can pay that which implies that students, and their families, must get into debt with more than 3 million pesos every year for five/six years. Do the math, somebody who studies for five years must pay 15 million pesos in tuition! This explains why the country is claiming for free education in all the educational system levels, not only for universities. The state grants are not enough anymore. Education is for everyone not just for a few.