BY PABLO BACHELET

pbachelet@MiamiHerald.com

SANTIAGO'S CHILDREN: What I Learned about Life at an Orphanage in Chile. Steve Reifenberg. Texas. 250 pages. $24.95.

In Chile's recent history the 1980s seem like a forgettable interlude. Gen. Agusto Pinochet's reign of political repression gave little indication of the democratic prosperity that would later ensue. But Steve Reifenberg's new book shows how the 1980s contained the seeds of regeneration.

Reifenberg, in his 20s in 1982, knew little about Chile when he quit a teaching job in Colorado to spend a year as a volunteer in an orphanage in a gritty working class neighborhood. At the time, Chile was mired in a deep economic depression, with Pinochet pressing his campaign to stamp out what he considered Marxism and a succession of violent strikes challenging his rule. Reifenberg takes us to a more innocent Chile, one inhabited by the children of the foster home Hogar Domingo Savio.

Well served by his conversational prose and his habit of keeping a personal journal, Reifenberg brings the orphanage to life, with entertaining details about the warm-hearted and firm-handed founder Olga Diaz and the 17 residents, all of whom share a bathroom. He pokes fun at his gringo klutziness with soccer and his inability to grasp Chilean elasticity with time management. His Spanish, he writes, allowed him to understand ``just enough to get me in trouble.''

Santiago's Children recalls Andrés Woods' 2004 Chilean movie Machuca, in which an Allende-era program sends a poor slum dweller on a scholarship to a private school. His world collapses after the 1973 coup. In Reifenberger's book, the country's dark politics also plays havoc with good intentions. Diaz and Reifenberg ponder the risks of taking on an 11-year-old girl whose brother is a member of an underground armed group opposed to Pinochet. In another incident, one of the boys tells Reifenberg that classes were canceled because a police bullet had killed a classmate.

Reifenberg, who now serves as director of the regional office of Harvard University's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, avoids an easy caricature of an evil Pinochet ruling over a cowering populace. Chile was caught, he writes, between ''two competing versions of `the truth'.'' Many Chileans seemed happy with the law-and-order ethic and the shrill anti-communism embodied by the ruling junta, while those on the receiving end of Pinochet's actions were understandably infuriated. Reifenberg writes: ``One thing I learned in Chile was that politics intruded into people's lives, whether they were interested in politics or not.''

Santiago's Children illustrates how Chile's divided society also contained the ingredients needed to build a better future. Think tanks kept opposition professionals employed and ready for future government duties. Unions took the lead in organizing anti-government strikes. The Catholic Church was given some space.

Reifenberg's account of how he and a dozen or so hard-luck Chilean children found a pathway to useful lives is in a larger sense the modern story of Chile itself, a country that emerged from political turmoil to its current status as Latin America's most stable and prosperous democracy.

A longer version of this review appeared in the spring issue of the Americas Quarterly magazine.

Read the Americas Quarterly Spring 2008 review.