Introducing Marrying Santiago by Suzanne Adam
She hadn’t seen it coming. Her new Chilean husband had changed his mind, or, rather, the military coup changed it. Instead of their relocating to her native California as planned, he wanted to give his country a chance.
Raised in the lush landscape of Marin County, Suzanne never expected to settle in a vast foreign city like Santiago. Once there, she faced a series of daunting challenges: from understanding the country’s idiosyncratic dialect to food shortages and a military dictatorship which became more than personal when she learned that her maid’s boyfriend was a terrorist. After a visit home, she returned to Chile with a California redwood seedling in her pocket. Together they would push down their roots into that distant soil.
That was more than four decades ago. In the intervening years, Suzanne has raised children whose language and lives are often incomprehensible, dealt with the reality of a cross-continent life where aging parents are a world away and a husband who comes home at nine every night might as well be. Among these everyday challenges, she has found rich veins of love and friendship, and alongside her redwood tree, learned to love a country where a day might bring desert sands above the tropic of Capricorn or a fossil-filled Patagonian plateau.
Marrying Santiago can be purchased here.
Suzanne Adam served in the Peace Corps in Colombia before moving to Santiago, Chile, where she lives with her husband. Before turning to writing, she worked as a teacher of learning disabled children. Her rich love of nature narrative essays have been published in The Christian Science Monitor, California Magazine, Persimmon Tree, the Independent Journal and online magazine Nature Writing.
She blogs at Tarweed Spirit and through Peacecorps Worldwide at Introduced Species.
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