The Boy From Chile

By Jaime H. Fuentes

This book is about Jaime H. Fuentes, born in the city of Santiago, Chile, a South American country along the Pacific Ocean. It details the everyday occurrences as a child living without the luxuries of having a TV, a telephone, nor the family owning a car, so for fun and entertainment, comic books were rented from a local kiosk, and for transportation, either a taxicab or the local bus was used to go shopping and to visit friends and relatives. But there was never a dull moment as congregating with the kids in the neighborhood playing hide-and-seek and riding go-karts was a lot of fun and their father took them to the stadium almost every weekend to watch their professional soccer team Colo-Colo play.

Once their grandmother made the transition of moving to the United States, their hopes were elevated as they also dreamed of moving to America, but it would take years after their mom followed their grandmother to America for Jaime, his brother, and his sister to finally make it to the United States.

Once in America, he experienced the differences in the schools, the multiple cultures, and being able to afford a color TV set, a telephone, and a car and at the same time adapting to the cold weather including seeing snow coming down for the first time and the struggles in learning the English language and discovering the challenges of dating that includes the drama and the pain and suffering when it does not work out. And finally, this book takes the reader from childhood to adulthood of the author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9798887512778

Book preview

cover.jpg

The Boy From Chile

Jaime H. Fuentes

ISBN 979-8-88751-276-1 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-88751-277-8 (digital)

Copyright © 2022 by Jaime H. Fuentes

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

About the Author

To my father, who took care of us with devotion when Mom departed to the United States

To Isabel, who gladly handled the daily household chores with love and enthusiasm

To Julio, who has always been there in time of need

To Tony, who is unselfish in taking care of Mom

And a very special thanks to my grandmother and Mom that through their hard work and sacrifice, we made the dream of living in the United States a wonderful reality.

Tributes

To all of my beautiful cats that have brought me love and companionship throughout the years: Burrito, Blackie, Pelusita, Felicia, Sunny, Mickey

And to my wonderful puppy, Osita, who stole my heart—I love her so much.

1

It was windy and cloudy the winter day that I left my country to my new home in the United States in June 1969. After three years of planning and gathering the necessary legal documents, the much-anticipated day had finally arrived. As my family did not have a vehicle, a friend of my father's took us to the airport in his truck for the forty-five-minute drive. I had mixed emotions of sadness and excitement prior to boarding the airplane as it was very difficult saying goodbye to my father, whose name was Misaldo, not knowing if I would ever see him again. My only sister, Isabel, who is the oldest of my siblings, and my older brother, Julio, were also making this journey with me. My mother, Silvia, and my younger brother, Tony, were already in the United States as they had arrived in 1966.

Born in Santiago on March 17, 1958, at the end of the summer season in Chile to a traditional family where my father worked and my mother tended to the everyday household chores while my siblings and I went to school, I was not very healthy when I was a child. I have a vivid memory that I can remember when I was about two or three years old and my mother used to wrap me up in a blanket in the middle of the night and took me to the hospital via a taxicab on those nights when I was sick.

My father used a bicycle for transportation, and sometimes I rode with him on his bicycle by sitting sideways on the bar of the bicycle with my hands holding the middle of the steering handle bar while my feet hung close to the front wheel. One unfortunate day, when I was riding the bicycle with my father, my feet got tangled with the front wheel, forcing the bicycle to a brunt halt, sending my father and I tumbling to the hard ground. We both required medical care, so the ambulance took us to the local clinic for treatment, but we were lucky that the injuries were not serious. From that point on, my father always reminded me prior to riding with him, Keep your feet away from the wheel.

When I was about four or five years old, workers were completing the construction of our house, and I remember seeing the men up on the roof putting the roof together. Some men were busy nailing while other men were soldering the rain gutters. My father lectured me to stay away from the workers and not to interfere. As a very young boy, this was all new to me which was also the first time that I saw cement being mixed by the bricklayers.

There were other houses being built in on our street, and sometimes my brothers and I played in those half-finished houses when the workers were not working. On the yard which was to the front of our house, there was a section of cement which in those hot summer days my brothers and I cooled ourselves with the water hose. We did not have a telephone, so at any time, either friends or relatives dropped by the house to visit.

Our closest relatives were an aunt and an uncle who lived about thirty minutes away, and they had a son named Mario and daughter named Esperanza. My cousins were much older, and Mario was married with kids. Esperanza was single but had a pololo, which means boyfriend, and her boyfriend was from Argentina that she bragged about that he was so good looking; but at that young age, I did not comprehend the meaning of dating.

About two or three blocks from my house, there was a soccer stadium for the minor soccer league; and as the name implies, it was similar to the minor baseball league in the United States, which is one level below professional soccer. The outside perimeter of the stadium was enclosed by vertical steel bars that went around in a circle for several blocks, to which we often walked about a quarter mile of this stadium to get to our house when returning from shopping or visiting family members late at night, and this fencing was a popular spot for young couples to meet and to be with each other as cars were not affordable and parents were very strict in allowing their kids to date; so it was somewhat comical seeing all those couples pinned against the fence, making out. They were all lined up around the stadium just a few feet from each other, and I remember my father telling me not to look at the couples as we walked back home.

The school season in Chile starts in March and it ends in December, and to accommodate more students, the school days are divided into two sessions—one in the morning and the other one in the afternoon. Schools in Chile are much more strict from the curriculum that is required at each grade level and to the attendance policy that it is enforced. The school uniform, which is also required, consists of a white dress shirt, a blue necktie, grey slacks, black shoes, and a blue blazer with a patch on the left upper pocket with the name of the school.

I remember watching my older sister and older brother wearing their neat school uniform which made me want to enroll in school prior to the age of seven but was not allowed, so my days were filled with playing in my yard and comic books for entertainment as we could not afford a television set. Only the upper class had television sets, and the programs would begin sometime in the afternoon and ended around ten or eleven at night after the local news. Most of the programs came from the United States such as Star Trek, The Invisible Man, and The FBI.

What some families would do when they could not afford to buy a TV set, they would buy at layaway, and then they charged kids around the neighborhood about a dollar to watch TV. It was quite a scene as about twenty kids would cram into a small room with no furniture and no carpeting but did not mind sitting on the cold concrete floor as watching TV was a privilege.

As most of the lads in the neighborhood were very poor and lacked the means to buy the latest toys, most were very creative, who could build just about anything for entertainment, and one of the most popular were go-karts that the kids would make out of plain wood and roller-skate wheels. It was made with one flat piece of wood of about three by four feet, which was the base; and on each end at the bottom of the flat piece, a long piece of wood with a wheel at each end was nailed across to create the axles to the base, and the front axle was made to swivel to be able to turn the wheels, which were controlled with strings that was used as the steering wheel.

Three kids were able to ride these karts at a time—one kid at the front which controlled the kart with the strings, another kid in the middle, and the other kid in the back which would push the kid in the middle while running to make the kart go down the street at about ten to fifteen miles per hour. Another game that we used to play was hide-and-seek, which was very challenging as there were vacant lots creating many places to hide, but it was a lot of fun to play.

2

During the fall, flying kites was a favorite pastime. My brother Julio was quite an expert in making kites. With just the special thin color paper, a couple of wooden sticks, and glue, he went to work. The paper was cut in a shape of a square with the four sides cut evenly at twenty by twenty. The first piece of wood was glued from one end corner to the other corner, which created the top and the bottom. The second piece of wood was glued somewhat across the first piece of wood from one side corner to the other side corner, but it was not placed straight across.

As the pieces of wood were flexible, the middle of the wood was bent in an upward curvy position and placed at about four inches below the top of the first piece of wood, and the tail was placed at the bottom. To complete the project, a special twine was tied to the kite to make it fly. Now getting the kite to fly was a challenge as you had to get the wind at the correct angle of the kite, and if that did not work, running with the kite was another option. It was an awesome feeling once you got the kite flying high up in the sky.

There were many kite-flying experts who were able to fly kites so high that you could barely see those kites up in the air, and at any given time, you would see so many kites flying as there were competitions of who could fly their kites the highest. There were also kite battles as to who could cut the other kites line by crossing the lines together, causing friction until one line was cut, sending the kite spiraling down, creating a mob of kids running through neighborhoods chasing the kite until it landed; and as most kites flew so high, the kites landed several miles from the original spot that it was flown from.

There were three type of twines that were used for flying kites. The first one was the regular twine. The second was regular twine that was cured with eggshells that was glued to the twine. The eggshells were cracked into small pieces but were not glued to the entire length of the twine. The eggshells were glued from about five feet from the kite for ten to fifteen feet of the twine, which was usually in the section that the lines came in contact. So the kite battles between regular lines and eggshells; the eggshell lines would cut the regular lines within seconds of contact. The third and most dangerous was twine that was cured with shattered glass that was hammered into tiny pieces using the same process of the eggshell lines but were no match to the lines without glass.

My family was neither wealthy nor poor. We were somewhere between lower and middle class, but more toward the latter, and my parents did not have the best marriage by any means. My father was much older than my mother, grew up in the south country, came from a large family, was somewhat of a drinker and a mild physical abuser toward my mother. My father also had roving eyes for other ladies. As the proof to his infidelity, I had an older stepbrother that I did not get to know very well, and I was too young to understand the intricacies of marriage relationships.

My mother, who came from the city, was an only child who was raised by my widow grandmother. We lived in a modest single home similar to a rancher-style home in the United States. Houses in Chile are enclosed on all four sides with about an eight-feet wall in the back of the