I have a new project published in La Tercera. It is part two in my exploration of issues in the presidential elections in Chile. In this part, I examined access for people with disabilities, public transportation and access to affordable housing (vivienda). All of these stories were done with the production help of my collegue Nicolás Alcalde.
An interesting fact about Chilean elections is the candidates can put their signs wherever they want. Whoever gets to a pole or a spot, gets that position. My story for the first topic featured Francisca Mardones, a champion wheelchair tennis player, who finds it difficult to navigate Santiago due to poor accessibility. She showed me around her neighborhood, pointing out many of the points where access is difficult, particularly for someone who is not as strong as her. You will see in many of the photos of her, signs with candidates’ faces in the background. The other curious component to this is that a certain number of days before the elections all of the candidates must remover their signs or face fines. Thus, for four days before the elections, there was no advertising of the candidates. This is to insure that the candidates remove their signs because the lawmakers suspect that if they are required to do it after losing an election, no one will clean them up.
For the topic of vivienda, I spoke with two women who had or were living in a campamento. The first woman, Ema Uribe, the woman whose interview drives the narrative, had lived in a campamento for nearly 30 years. She arrived there as many do. She was young. She moved to the city from the countryside and first lived with relatives. However, after a short period of time, they could not afford to keep her and she moved to a campamento. Her children and grandchildren were born into it.
A campamento is what people of the US would think of as a favela, although the images of constant violence, as in City of God, are not accurate here. They are informal living structures build on a piece of unutilized land, typically in urban areas. The houses tend to have access to electricity, although this can be cut. They do not have running water. Water is trucked in, and stored in any available container. Uribe did not speak of crime – which is frequently cited, but she did speak of garbage and filth. As well, she spoke of the kinship amongst the inhabitants. “You are never alone,” she said, whenever you need something, everyone runs [to help you]” What she spent the most attention on was stigma attached to those who lived in the campamento. She knew of a woman whose daughter was to celebrate her birthday, but didn’t invite any friends. When asked why, she said it was because no one would want to come to the campamento.
Uribe, with the help of Un Techo Para Chile, has been relocated to a house whose construction she planned and oversaw. Rosa Reyes, the second person I met for this story, is in the beginning of this process. She has been transferred to a smaller campamento, with the assistance of Un Techo Para Chile, and is planning for her own home. She has two adolescent children and a bright personality. She showed me how they cope without water and, with pride, the little store she has opened since her move to this campamento.
For the story of transportation, Nicolás Alcalde and I interviewed a city bus driver. He spoke of the changes he’s seen, the importance of the system, and how for him, driving a car is more nerve-wracking than driving a bus. This is the story with which I have the most reservations. I wonder whether it could have been done more dynamically. It shows the bus system, which has many problems, but perhaps I should have spoken more with the users.
Initially, I had planned to give the video camera to Nicolás and have him ask people what they thought of the public transportation system, but, upon boarding the bus, I realized that the noise was horrible and movement doubly so when the bus was moving. I worked for a while trying to capture the perfect footage of a person boarding the bus, and passing their bip card by the sensor to pay. In one instance, after taking footage, I explained to a woman that I was working for La Tercera, looking at the public transportation system. She asked me what I wanted to know. I asked her what she thought about it. She gave me a very lovely answer, that was all but unusable with the noise, and decided I would stick with a single subject.
I find that I have the noise issue often. I was taught by one of the multimedia greats, Jim Seida, the importance of absolute silence. He described the tactics of Brian Storm who goes as far as to unplug refrigerators. I know the rules – rooms with soft surfaces, no ticking clocks, no televisions, no radio, no traffic noise, avoid tables, rolling chairs are a nightmare (so are chairs that squeak), no air conditioners, etc. And, if it’s on video, make it look beautiful. Enforcing these in the field, I’ve found, can be a bit more challenging, particularly finding the balance between beauty and silence.
