SANTA CLARA

HISTORY

http://santaclara-cerronavia.skynetblogs.be/ STORIES FROM SANTA CLARA, CERRO NAVIA, SANTIAGO DE CHILE

It’s not my intention to even try andwrite the complete history of thevillage of Santa Clara, Cerro Navia,Santiago de Chile.However, for more than 35 yearsnow I have been hearing andreading stories about Santa Clarafrom members of my family wholived in Santa Clara for many years,and from people of Santa Clara.I have spent a couple of weeks inSanta Clara myself, but above all:I have had the pleasure and honor to meetand get to know some of the fine andcourageous women who invested theirtime and energy, their life, into changingSanta Clara from a dump for displacedslum-dwellers into a village where hope,support and real chances are offered toall those who believe in creating a betterworld for themselves and their children.Should you not agree with any of thestories that I am planning to write, pleasefeel free to react and correct or completemy words where

necessary.This is a story of a girl in her early twenties, inspired by one idea: to help the neediest people she could find. She eventuallyfound her way to a shanty town in Santiago, Chile, as part of a Mill Hill Mission. Soon after her arrival in Santiago, she tookthe dramatic decision to give up the “standard approach” to “helping slum dwellers”. Instead of staying in a comfortableplace herself and supporting the people of Clara Zetkin from there, she built her own wooden cottage inside the slum andwent to live with the people, share the dirt and poverty with them and fight together with them for better living conditions.For more than 12 years, she lived with the people from Clara Zetkin. The first half of this period, she shared their lives inconditions unworthy of man. The last part, she accompanied them in the new social barrio to which they were displaced,named Santa Clara.This is the year 1978, and the girl I am writing about is my sister, Marlies Adriaens.

I am Edgard (Eddy) Adriaens from Nederhasselt-Ninove, in Flanders, Belgium.

WORD FROM THE AUTHOR

There is no such thing as One Truth. Especially not when it comes tointerpreting and writing about the history of people. But this shouldnever refrain us from telling Our Truth.

An other sister, preparing tocontinue the sister’s job at Hogar deCristo, finally could not go. Withher mind meanwhile turned to thesufferings and needs of the poorpeople in Chile, Marlies promisedthe sisters that she would go to Chileherself to help the people who mostneeded her help and assistance.

A period of specialized courses andpreparations followed. Then came asurprise telephone call from oneAntonia Beentjens in Holland: Wouldshe be interested in a joint trip toChile? Six months later, the two girlsfound themselves lodged with twoseparate families in the suburbs of Santiago, to learn Spanish.

Marlies was the third of sevenchildren and grew up in a deeplyCatholic home in Terjoden, a smallvillage near Aalst in Flanders,Belgium. After graduating as anurse, she took short courses in allsorts of practical things. Whilstworking as a nurse in a hospital inAalst, she became friendly with anun who had just returned homefrom Chile.

A SHANTY TOWN NAMED CLARA ZETKIN

Marlies and Anthonia were lodged inMaipú, in a respectable suburb of Santiago. Yet, on the other side of the road was a campamento: acollection of about 400 shackshousing about 3.000 people.According to local gossip, thecampamento was a hotbed of vice,drugs, violence, robbery andprostitution.The reality, such as Marlies andAnthonia observed it, was that thesewere families who had fled thepoverty from other regions andwere hoping to find work and build adecent living in Santiago.Soon, they started frequenting thepeople from the campamento.They immediately learned that thepeople from the campamento,though treating them with thegreatest respect, were suspiciousabout their real intentions andafraid to talk about their problems.After all, this was 1978 and thecountry was being ruled with ironhand by Pinochet.People – especially poor people -were not allowed to organize, andthe oppression and intimidationfrom army and police had left thepeople very conscious of theirvulnerability and afraid of retaliations should they dare tobreak the law.

The first initiatives concentrated onthe children. First, a “childrenrestaurant” was organized withleftovers from adjacent marketsand food begged in shops. Butsoon, lack of space forced them toswitch to a system of “villagekitchen” in which teams of womenprepared the meals, which werethen taken home and eaten infamily circle.Knit-teams made the uniforms thatallowed the children to go to schooland the smartest youngstershelped the slow learners amongstyounger children.Once started, the people wereeager to learn and create opportu-nities: lessons in dressmaking, haircare and electricity were organizedand the municipal authorities werecontacted about items such asdistribution of water and electricity,collection of household refuse andmedical assistance.

Marlies Adriaens, aged 23, soon after her arrival in Santiago de Chile.

To live with the people and be part of their life, was a first step.The second step was, to becomeaware of the problems. There was noshortage of these: poverty, unemploy-ment, malnutrition, in some caseseven bordering on starvation,especially in the children. In addition:widespread neurosis in the womenand alcoholism in the men, both thefruit of frustration and despair. Therewere the health problems related toliving in conditions not worthy of man:skin diseases, respiratory problems,allergies, parasites, …Step three was the most difficult:convince the people to organize.“They will imprison us, they will raidour houses, shoot at us, …”The tragic truth was that, unless theyorganized, they would lose all theyever hoped to find in Santiago.Families would fall apart, peoplewould die. There was no alternativeto organizing. And so, they organized!There was something else hinder-ing the relations between thepeople from the campamento andthe two European girls. “How canyou help us? You don’t evenunderstand our reality” they weretold over and over again. “At night,you go to sleep in a warm bed;during the week-ends, you eat atrestaurants and watch movies inthe cinema … you don’t know howit is to spend your days in mud anddirt, not being able to send yourchildren to school, or to pay adoctor when they need one.With some trepidation, the twogirls decided to built their own littlecottage and settle down amongstthe people of the slum. “One day,no more than one day, that is howlong it will take before you areraped and robbed”, the goodpeople of Maipú warned them.“I have been robbed”, Marliessmiles: “But never in Chile. Someyears ago however, in Brussels, theradio was stolen from my car”.http://santaclara-cerronavia.skynetblogs.be/

From Wikipedia,the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, searchStamp of the GDRBanknote of the GDR

Clara Zetkin

(née

Eißner

; 5 July 1857- 20 June 1933) was an influentialsocialist German politician and afighter for women's rights. Until1917, she was active in the SocialDemocratic Party of Germany, thenshe joined the Independent SocialDemocratic Party of Germany(USPD) and its far-left wing, theSpartacist League; this later becamethe Communist Party of Germany(KPD), which she represented in theReichstag during the WeimarRepublic from 1920 to 1933.

Contents



1 Life and work



2 Posthumous honors



3 See also



4 Further reading

Life and work

Zetkin was born

Clara Eissner

inWiederau, a peasant village inSaxony.

[1]

Her father, GottfriedEissner, was a schoolmaster andchurch organist who was a devoutProtestant, while her mother,Josephine Vitale Eissner, came froma bourgeoisie family from Leipzigand was highly educated.

[1][2][3]

Having studied to become a teacher,Zetkin developed connections withthe women's movement and thelabour movement in Germany from1874. In 1878 she joined the SocialistWorkers' Party (

Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei

, SAP). This party hadbeen founded in 1875 by mergingtwo previous parties: the ADAVformed by Ferdinand Lassalle andthe SDAP of August Bebel andWilhelm Liebknecht. In 1890 itsname was changed to its modernversion Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).Because of the ban placed onsocialist activity in Germany byBismarck in 1878, Zetkin left forZurich in 1882 then went into exilein Paris. During her time in Paris sheplayed an important role in thefoundation of the SocialistInternational socialist group. Shealso adopted the name of her lover,the Russian revolutionary OssipZetkin, with whom she had twosons, Kostja and Maxim. Ossip Zetkindied in 1889. Later, Zetkin wasmarried to the artist Georg FriedrichZundel, eighteen years her junior,from 1899 to 1928.In the SPD, Zetkin, along with RosaLuxemburg, her close friend andconfidante, was one of the mainfigures of the far-left revolutionarywing of the party. In the debate onRevisionism at the turn of thetwentieth century she, along withLuxemburg, attacked the reformisttheses of Eduard Bernstein.Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg, 1910Zetkin was very interested inwomen's politics, including the fightfor equal opportunities and women'ssuffrage. She developed the social-democratic women's movement inGermany; from 1891 to 1917 sheedited the SPD women's newspaper

Die Gleichheit

(Equality). In 1907 shebecame the leader of the newlyfounded "Women's Office" at theSPD. She started up the first"International Women's Day" on 8March 1911, launching the idea of itin Copenhagen, in what laterbecame the Ungdomshuset.During the First World War Zetkin,along with Karl Liebknecht, RosaLuxemburg and other influential SPDpoliticians, rejected the party'spolicy of

Burgfrieden

(a truce withthe government, promising torefrain from any strikes during thewar). Among other anti-waractivities, Zetkin organised an

WHO WAS CLARA ZETKIN ?

WHO WAS CLARA ZETKIN ?http://santaclara-cerronavia.skynetblogs.be/