unity is hope

Barack Obama has inspired those across international borders. anyone who needs any sort of proof should just look at the pictures sent around post-election 2008 (people hugging random people/kids sharing flags/celebrations in Japan, Australia, Europe, Africa). above is a bit of a sketchy painting but you don't have to look long to figure out who that is (unidad and esperanza- that has to be the new US president!).

now there isn't too much discussion about the US. in fact, Chileans only seem to know random folks in the US. fact of the day, people generally love Whitney Houston internationally, not sure if it was "the bodyguard" or her voice. anyway, i would say pretty consistently i am surprised by who Chileans know and who they don't. They might know Angelina Jolie but not Johnny Depp. pretty rando...

this collective belief in Barack Obama was highlighted by a class i had during the first week of school. the assignment was to look through 3 popular magazines (Time, Newsweek and People) and find three images or articles and write about them. students completed the assignment with varying degrees of motivation and interest. the one i was most impressed with was inspired by a photo of an african american hand (not clearly Obama's- but could've been) holding onto many different hands all in a chain. the students wrote a montage of qualities that emanated from the photo for each of them: words like fraternity, strength, equality, power and union. they wrote more and with more interest during that assignment when compared to any other so far. they also wrote sentences like "Mr. Obama is the first black man to be president." they could have written about Batman, Heath Ledger, Britney Spears or any other cultural influence the media produces from the United States but they decided to write about him.

kind of exciting to see a mural of our president in a country populated by pictures/phrases/paintings of Che Guevara and other revolutionaries.