Educator

I admire my brother. If there is one word that defines him, it is Educator. When he discovered his vocation, a process I was lucky enough to watch, I thought a school classroom would be too small for him.

Our father told us on his deathbed that the inheritance he was leaving us was our education. For him, that was the most important legacy you can leave your children.

My father was an educator too. He was one at every moment, even when he had to stop being one formally. That was his essence. Just like my brother, you could define my dad with the same word: Educator.

And that is what my brother is doing right now with Antofagasta, the city in northern Chile where he settled to pursue his vocation. My brother is not on an environmentalist, political or anti-establishment crusade, or trying to wake up the Sleeping City.

My brother is doing what he has done all his life: educating his fellow citizens and the mining companies. He is showing them that there are ways to do the right thing. That economic development cannot come before people’s health, because health is priceless.

It all started with this video:

A hashtag on social media, #estepolvotemata (“this dust kills you”), is the start of my brother’s campaign to show the harm caused by the way copper concentrate is transported and handled at the port of Antofagasta.

Let me tell you something, a note on the stupidity of this whole process that ends up affecting my brother.

Many years ago I heard a man say that we Chileans are stupid, because we exported copper ingots to foreign countries and then bought copper wire from those same countries.

It turns out that now we don’t even export the ingots. Now we are shipping the concentrate out of the country, which is barely more than the dirt that was dug up; it does contain a high concentration of copper, but it also includes other minerals, like gold, molybdenum and silver. The complex refining process of large-scale mining, the one that adds value, is lost with these new mining companies setting up in the north of my country.

The price copper has reached lately is so good that the idea is to sell it in the shortest time possible and get it abroad at the lowest possible cost. A cost the mining company doesn’t pay, a cost paid with a worse quality of life for those who have no part in this profitable business.

As El Chavo del Ocho used to say, we went from Guatemala to Guatepeor: from bad to worse.

As a sample of commercial laziness and lack of respect for others, these mining companies haul the dust in trucks across the desert and through the city. Anyone who has visited the desert knows how the wind blows there. How is it possible that these companies, so fixated on costs, don’t notice the waste in this means of transport? Because this way they lose thousands of dollars a day, leaving them deposited in the houses, the sea and the lungs of the people of Antofagasta.

Ebenezer Scrooge would not forgive such waste and loss of profit. The intellectual level of these mining executives doesn’t even qualify them as small-time misers; they are not worthy of a story by Dickens or Henry James.

Up against these greedy spiders, as James would put it, stands my quixotic brother. I admire him for that, because he goes beyond digital inactivism. Unlike all the comfortable people who settle for giving a like or retweeting a hashtag, and then feel they have a clear conscience and the adrenaline of being “cyberactivists”, my brother is committed to this cause, which is surely causing him more than a few headaches.

In this photo my brother is standing in front of a truck, protesting in his own style. Accompanied by a robot. :)

That is how my brother was when we shared a small apartment in our student days: playful, cheerful. An idealist, but defending something very concrete. That is how I like to see him now, thinking about educating, and he knows that the best way to teach is by example. Accompanied, surely, by some of his students.

I like seeing him again in his role as educator, in his style that I call “Rogerrabbitian”, because as Roger the rabbit says: “A laugh can be a very powerful thing. Why, sometimes in life, it’s the only weapon we have.”

A philosophy teacher who loves comics and uses humor in his classes, next to a robot, standing in front of a truck trying to teach. Teaching the greedy that there are better ways to do things. Teaching his fellow citizens that they must wake up and defend their right to a better quality of life, and teaching everyone that they must leave the comfort of retweeting and posting selfies on Facebook and, once and for all, do something more concrete than clicking.

I’m not a fan of this style of protest; I’m very different from my brother. I’m not sold on flash mobs, or robots, or dressing up as a zombie to protest.

But can I tell you something? The most I have ever done is attend marches and political rallies in my youth. I have never organized a protest or a movement, so I have no authority to criticize, because apart from writing down my ideas, I’m not a man given to action; that’s the truth.

That is why I admire my brother, and why I like seeing him do this. His problem doesn’t affect me; others do, but I don’t really do anything about them. At least he, ridiculous or not, let each person judge that, is doing something to educate and to defend what he considers fair. The rest of us, well, the rest of us just criticize and click.