Two entries in one day, wow! Again, I’m playing catch-up. The last entry was started about this time last week, but because of feeling so lethargic from being sick, I never got around to finishing it before today. And then you factor in that I was at Cor the last three days…I know, no excuse, but that’s the reason.
My time at Cor – and in Argentina – is flying by. I can’t believe I have just over a month left! I feel like I’m finally getting comfortable with the city and with my ability to speak with and understand the Spanish spoken here. Working with the kids has both helped and forced me to speak with confidence. When I first talked with Lukas about volunteering, he mentioned that he and another volunteer often took the kids to a park for a few hours. My first reaction to this was something like “What?! You can’t expect me to take these kids to the park, what if I don’t understand what they’re saying, what if they don’t understand what I’m saying? They’ll never listen to us, they’ll take off and we’ll never see them again and that will be the end of us working at Cor!” I started having flashbacks of the few times I had substituted for 4th and 5th grade teachers and how even after only half a day I felt like I wanted to lock myself in a closet until the bell rang. If that’s how a group of rowdy English-speaking children made me feel, I thought I’d be helpless in the face of a group of kids whose language I spoke only passably. How could I project confidence in my voice when my head was constantly questioning whether I was using the right gender or putting the direct object pronoun in the right place in relation to a verb? In other words, this was exactly thepush I needed to get me out of my cautious use of the language and build my confidence in my own abilities.
That’s not to say it has worked completely. I had a tutoring session today with one of the ISA staff and I’m clearly still making a lot of mistakes in my spoken Spanish (still struggling with when to use the preterite as opposed to the imperfect tense and vice versa). The problem with working with kids all the time is that I rarely get to speak with native speakers my own age. And seeing as how I have only about a month left, it almost doesn’t seem worth the trouble to try and strike up some friendships now. But I’m trying to be positive. The tutoring is a good resource and someone from my intensive month class told me about a weekly intercambio group that meets on Wednesdays. So I may be checking that out soon too.
The tentative plan for tomorrow is to visit Tierra Santa, a theme-park by the JorgeNewberryAirport that is designed to resemble Jerusalem in the time of Jesus. They have regular espectáculos featuring the resurrection of Jesus and tomorrow they’ll be putting on regular reenactments of the Last Supper. They’ve got special events going on all this week for Semana Santa (Holy Week) leading up to Easter, so there’s a chance I might go again on Friday for what appears to be a Passion play. I’m not a religious person, but I don’t think I can pass this up. Only in Argentina!
I’ve picked up a little bit of a cold the last few days, of course, right as the weather starts being consistently nice! But no matter how nice the weather may be, I know I’ve also been slacking on writing. Perhaps these sniffles are a hint for me to get busy on bloggin’. So let’s play catch-up.
My tiny bedroom BsAs
The first bit of news is that through many trials and tribulations I have finally managed to get a firm internet connection in my room, at a price (naturally). It took a lot of running around, pleading, yelling, foot stamping and cajoling – all in Spanish! – but I now have a working USB modem from my cell phone company, Personal, that I charge up with credit like a pay-as-you-go cell phone. What made it such a challenge, and necessitated all of that cajoling and running, was that the majority of Personal employees seem to know nothing much about the products and services they are selling apart from how much they cost. The chip in the modem is like a regular SIM card, but I can’t put credit on it like a normal SIM card (contrary to what I was told when I bought it) and I after I do put credit on it (which I cannot do over the phone, again contrary to what I was told by a salesperson), I must call the Personal customer service line in order to activate it (the most crucial step, which I was not told until I had been to the local branch office twice). I have come to think of this experience as The Great Internet Scavenger Hunt, and I think everyone plays it in some form any time they take up residence in another country. My family played it in Ireland (they also played a Phone Service Scavenger Hunt before I got there), I played it in Trier my first few weeks living in the Studentenwohnheim, and I have no doubt I will play it again at some later point when I am traveling and/or living abroad. It is one of my least favorite games, but it always broadens my vocabulary – never again will I forget the meaning of recargar (to recharge) or enchufar (to plug in). Plus I got some excellent listening practice ;)
Poster advertising the march on 24. March
My second bit of news has to do with Argentine history. This past Wednesday, March 24th, marked the 34th anniversary of the start of Argentina’s last military dictatorship, which ended in 1983. The military junta seized power after Isabel Peron’s government had failed to keep leftist guerrilla activity in the country under control. The military junta led a crack-down on leftists that resulted in the disappearance and kidnapping, torture and murder of as many as 30,000 people – known collectively as los desaparecidos, “the disappeared”. Exact numbers of how many people were disappeared are hard to come by, because the main players in this campaign of state-sponsored terror did not keep very good records). The nebulous figures mean that those in government during the “Dirty War” (Guerra Sucia), as it’s known, have continued to deny that such a large number of people were killed, and many maintain that the desaparecidos simply left the country because they were afraid they would be imprisoned.
Banner commemorating los desaparecidos
After the first couple rounds of disappearances, families of the disappeared started asking questions and trying to get information on what happened to their family members. A few mothers began making more of a nuisance of themselves and eventually began regularly gathering in the Plaza de Mayo – traditionally a place of protest and demonstrations for porteños – and began demanding to know what had happened to their children. This was quite a gutsy move, especially considering a few of the mothers themselves were “disappeared” after marching – but the group continued, carrying pictures of their disappeared sons and daughters.
I wish I could say there was a happy ending, but there’s not really. The military dictatorship fell apart after the disaster of the Falklands War but they made sure to pass a host of amnesty laws preventing anyone involved with the dictatorship from being brought to trial for what they did. The Madres continued to march and the group grew, marching weekly. A few of the Madres knew that their daughters or daughters-in-law had been pregnant at the time they were disappeared and set about trying to locate their grandchildren – the babies had been born in the detention centers and “adopted” by families with connections in the police or military. So far these Abuelas have managed to locate a handful of such children and at times have used the court system to reunite them with their surviving biological family members (two great movies about this are The Official Story and Cautiva, both in Spanish). Another bright spot is that former president Nestor Kirchner repealed the amnesty laws after taking office in the early 2000’s, allowing many of the torturers and murders to be brought to trial and held accountable for their actions.
The Madres marching in the Plaza de Mayo
The Madres now march half an hour around the Plaza de Mayo every Thursday for remembrance and in support of other social causes. The day after the parades of March 24th happened to be a Thursday, so a friend and I headed to the Plaza to experience this emotional event. Unlike most happenings in Argentina, it started right on time. A group of about 40-50 people assembled at the Plaza with large banners, a few carrying pictures or placards with the pictures and names of their children and the date they had disappeared. At first they walked in silence, a few times circling the Plaza. At the forefront were a handful of ancient-looking women wearing the recognizable white kerchiefs on their heads. After going around the Plaza once or twice, a group off to the side announced that they would be reading a selection of names from the 30,000 people who had disappeared. They started reading the names off, one by one, and after each name was called the group of marchers answered with “¡Presente!” (present or here).
I feel like I still don’t have words to describe what it felt like to witness the Madres march. I was overwhelmed by the emotion of it and on the verge of tears throughout. I would compare it to visiting a former Nazi concentration camp: you know that you are witnessing the results of unimaginable human suffering. Additionally, I always feel chilled whenever I read anything about the Dirty War, because I have a feeling that had I grown up in Argentina at that time, my political views could very well have put me in the same circles as the disappeared. My writing skills are completely inadequate to express my emotions over those two days of marches and remembrance. I feel like nothing I can write about them would ever do justice to the suffering as well as the strength of these women (and men) who continue to march, continue to remember, and continue to fight for justice in the face of a government and a large part of society who would prefer to just “turn the page and move on” (to paraphrase one of the former Argentine presidents, Menem). It was a truly remarkable and unforgettable experience.
The volunteering has officially begun! I had my first visit to FundaciónCor last Friday with Federico, ISA’s ELAP coordinator. We took the train from Belgrano (the barrio where I live) to San Isidro, another barrio further north of Buenos Aires proper. The train takes about half an hour and another 20 minutes of walking puts us at the door of the hogar.
From the street, you’d have no idea that this house was any different from the other single-storey painted stucco structures on the same street. Same cracked sidewalk tiles, a front patio encased by a wrought-iron fence and partially covered by a corrugated overhang. A heart-shaped sign hanging on the outside wall reads “Cor”. Fede rings the bell and a chorus of young voices erupts from within the house. I notice a few small boys peeking out of a window while a woman dressed in a green smock (one of the cuidadoras, or caretakers) comes to unlock the gate for us. Camila, or Carmela, I don’t quite catch her name, but we exchange besos and she leads us inside.
The inside of the house is dim and pleasantly cool. A few kids are sitting around tables, some working on homework, one carefully arranging pieces of a puzzle. Fede seems to know them all and several of them rush over to give him hugs and demand to be picked up. We exchange besos with the other cuidadoras, whose names I manage to mishear once more, and after a bit of chatting we manage to make our way through a hallway and into an office crammed with books, papers, a few chairs, and a small woman who looks almost identical to every 50- or 60-something abuela in Argentina. Fede introduces her as Silvia, la loca, and another round of besos ensues. We spend the next half hour talking about all kinds of things – Fede asks about some of the kids who have left the hogar since he was last there, we decide which days I’ll be coming to Cor (Sundays, Mondays, and Tuesdays, to start), Silvia uses some colorful language to describe the political situation regarding donations to organizations like Cor, and finally I’m offered the chance to buy a raffle ticket to put me in the running for a 32” LCD television, which I accept (I figure I’ll leave it with my host-mom if I win). After snagging a snack of toast and dulce de leche from the kitchen, Fede and I head back into the city. We decide I’ll start that coming Sunday by going with Lukas on the train.
Sunday
So Sunday marked my first official day of volunteering. Altogether it was a pretty uneventful day. Lukas and I took six of the kids to the park. According to Lukas, this is always an “interesting” adventure for a number of reasons: 1) kids are kids, and I have not met a single kid on earth who is happy to leave the park when it’s time to leave the park (these kids are no exception), 2) kids of different ages like to egg each other on, so once you get one out of the tree, another one will climb up it, 3) not having the greatest command of the language doesn’t make you sound like a very convincing authority figure, especially when the authority figures these kids are used to can also yell a lot louder than Lukas or me. Getting all six of them out of the park and back to the hogar without anyone being hit by a car or disappearing into a random shop was challenging, but we managed.
Monday
Monday we were scheduled to go to San Isidro again, but the trains were shut down for over an hour because of some mysterious mechanical accident. By the time they were up and running again, it wouldn’t have been worth the time to get out to Cor and back, so Lukas and I let them know we wouldn’t make it that day.
Tuesday
The next day, Tuesday, had been arranged for Lukas and I to cook dinner for the kids with another volunteer, Tessa – the meal consisted of hamburgers, oven fries, salad and crepes with apricot jam (Tessa’s Austrian contribution). Not exactly what I’d envisioned when I had thought about cooking “healthy meals”, but I didn’t choose the menu for this one ;) Either way, the kids loved it! The cuidadoras kept shooing them out of the kitchen while we were cooking, but I managed to snag one of the girls I’d taken to the park, J*, for a few minutes to help me tear up some lettuce leaves for the salad. The kids were so eager to be involved, it made me think I might have a good chance of getting some sort of cooking thing going with them on a regular basis. After the (charming) chaos I’d observed the past few days, I assumed mealtime would be more of the same, but I was wrong. I’ve never seen so many children eating so calmly! Not only that, but about three quarters of them wanted salad, and ALL of them ate it! These are kids mostly ranging in age from five to eleven and here they are requesting salad. Not to mention almost every plate came back cleared. After that, it was off to bed for most of them. Brushing teeth, changing clothes, taking medicine, and out like a light.
As much fun as we had that night, before I left I got a stark reminder of why I am here at Cor, and also why the kids are here. Not all of the kids at Cor have HIV, some are just from families where the parents are positive or have passed away from complications related to AIDS. But many of the kids here are positive. No one tells you who is and who isn’t, kind of like how at Voices we’re not always told everything about a particular client. But you figure it out on your own, you talk to other staff about what you notice, you familiarize yourself with medications, you learn to recognize reactions and behaviors – they know that you know, you know that you know, but everyone saves face by not asking directly. It may seem cryptic, but it helps to maintain a sense of normalcy, so that your day-to-day life is not just about the virus, about jail, about the abuse – the person is not their illness, or their past, they’re a person.
This hit home for me as we finished up dinner with the kids. One of the girls I had taken to the park, L*, was called over to the big medicine cabinet to take her meds before going to bed. As I was walking by, I noticed a chart taped to the inside of the cabinet door; the chart consisted of boxes with kids’ names, followed by the list of medications they were taking. The first name I saw was L’s, and at the top of the list of six or seven medications was AZT. I felt like I had been hit in the chest. The little seven-year-old who could barely write her name and who insisted I carry her to the park on Sunday and push her on the swings until my arms gave out, L was positive. Somehow it made the situation much more real and it made me sad, but in a way also hopeful. Sad because it was entirely not L’s fault that she contracted HIV, it was so unfair, and it would probably mean a lifetime of preventive drugs and dealing with the social stigma that still dogs many people who are HIV-positive. But in some ways I feel hopeful, too. Like I said, you would never know any of these kids have HIV just by looking at them. If you didn’t see them at medication time, you wouldn’t know they were taking medications at all! The technology for antivirals has gotten so advanced that for these kids, managing their HIV is like someone managing type 1 diabetes – sure it’s a pain in the butt sometimes, and it means being extra careful, but kids can learn how to do the day-to-day management part of it. And they are troopers the whole time.
I’m so happy I chose to do the ELAP program, and I’m so glad I chose to do it with FundaciónCor. I can just tell this is going to be a really fun and challenging experience and I’m very excited to get back to the hogar on Sunday and see the sweethearts again. I’m hoping to do more research on how organizations like Cor are funded and run, how kids get accepted to live at the house, and if there’s any way they link up with other organizations (like Lutheran Social Services, perhaps? *wink, wink*). For now, though, it’s time for me to call it a night. More updates coming soon, and maybe pictures later!
* I'm following the tradition of the social sciences and educational fields of not using names when talking about specific kids. Part of it is because of the HIV status and part of it is because they're kids. Hopefully this won't get confusing for those of you reading, if it does, just let me know and I'll try to clear up any ambiguities!
Two things: The internet and the volunteering. The internet situation in my apartment is getting increasingly frustrating - lack of connectivity, incredibly slow connection speed. So until I sort that out, I might not be posting as much as I would like here. Bear with me!
The volunteering: I went to Cor for the first time on Sunday with Lukas and was supposed to go today (Monday) but there was an accident on the train tracks and the trains were shut down for a little over an hour. It takes us almost an hour to get out there, so by the time we would have gotten there it would have been late, some of the kids would be eating, and we would have gotten back quite late on the train (read: train stations are not the safest places to be hanging around in the dark). So Lukas and I decided to go tomorrow (Tuesday) as usual and called the hogar to let them know (they were fine with it). I will write more about this later when the internet situation has improved. Besos!
*Apologies if the formatting on this post appears strange, something weird is happening whenever I copy and paste text from a Word document. But I have to do it that way because of the lack of a stable connection in my apartment. Sorry if it's hard to read!
As good as my intentions were to write an entry before I left for Patagonia for four days, my body had other ideas. I (not 100% positive, but almost certainly) have IBS, as I figured out back in 2006 after a particularly stressful year at Hamline. The last few years I’ve been able to keep my IBS under control by following a diet of lots of organic whole grains and veggies and trying to keep my stress to low levels (part of why I haven’t gotten as involved in campus life at NMU). I’ve still had a few flare-ups brought on by stress, but they’ve always been manageable and short-lived. Looking back on the week leading up to my trip to Patagonia, I had been ignoring warning signs that I should slow down and take better care of myself. And so the day and night before I was scheduled to leave I didn’t write anything or sleep a wink because of being sick. Thankfully I got it under control by the time I got to El Calafate (whew!) and ended up having a great time seeing glaciers and riding horses.
The trip to El Calafate was one of ISA’s scheduled excursions, but had a lot of free time for us to explore the area on our own. We left Buenos Aires incredibly early in the morning in order to get south as early in the day as possible. I didn’t realize until looking at a map on our last day how truly far south we were, further south of the equator than Marquette is north of it! People aren’t kidding when they refer to it as the ends of the earth; it definitely felt like that at times.
The first day after getting off the plane was spent viewing the Perito Moreno glacier. The views of this monster were just amazing. I’ve seen a good few glaciers in my life (thanks, Mom and Dad!) but this was something else. The sheer size of it coupled with the sound of it – huge chunks of the glacier cracking loose and crashing into the lake below. It was unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my life and since I have no words to describe it that don’t sound like clichés – breathtaking, astounding, jaw-dropping, etc. – you’ll just have to go see it for yourself ;) Here’s a link to some videos of it. We did get to see the glacier calving (breaking) into the lake right before we were about to leave, but because I was watching through my binoculars (thanks, Dad!) I didn’t get any pictures of it. Like I said, you’ll just have to go see it yourself!
After the planned excursion to the Perito Moreno with ISA, we all had two days to do our own activities around the area. Many people chose to go to nearby El Chalten to visit other parts of Parque Nacional Los Glaciares (the park that Perito Moreno is in) but I opted to stay in El Calafate and see some sights around there. Because of a mix-up with times and companies, I ended up doing not one but two horseback riding excursions that first day. The first turned out to be just me, the guide, and four scruffy dogs for two hours! The second lasted closer to three hours with seven other tourists and two guides and included an enormous asado (Argentinean barbeque) at the end.
For my second free day I booked an excursion called Todos Glaciares, or All Glaciers, and was up bright and early to see…all the glaciers! Well, all the glaciers on Lago Argentino at least, which meant most of the glaciers in the park. The excursion lasted all day and I got some beautiful pictures of the glaciers and the lake. Here’s a link to see the rest of my pictures from the trip on Facebook. That night I went with Ashley (another NMU student whom I had never gotten to know before this trip, which is crazy because we know a lot of the same people and frequent many of the same places in Marquette!) to a restaurant called Pura Vida where we had a fantastic meal. I got a dish called Carbonada de Calabaza, which was a rich stew – with potatoes, carrots, squash, onion, and peaches! – served in a half of a pumpkin. I am definitely going to try to recreate this when I get back. Any volunteers to taste-test?
So, when does my volunteering finally start, I’m sure you’re wondering, or am I going to spend all my time here gallivanting around glaciers and devouring whole squashes? A fair question, dear reader, but not to worry: I met with Federico, ISA’s ELAP coordinator, yesterday and I am going to FundaciónCor this Friday to meet with Silvia, the presidenta (not to be confused with Silvia my host-mom!), and meet the kids and see the house. We’ll also figure out my schedule for the next eight weeks; after talking to Lukas, who’s been at Cor for several weeks now, I want to try to schedule my days over the weekends, because there are fewer volunteers who want to do weekends and they need more help. I think this will work out great for me because it will leave me some days during the week to see sights around the city and maybe go on a few day trips outside it.
In order to keep myself focused and busy while waiting to start at Cor, and during the eight weeks when I have days off, I plan to visit at least one museum or cultural center each day I’m in city and not at Cor (most museums are only open in the afternoon, so on days I’m at Cor it might not be possible to get to one in time). So many museums have reduced admission for university students so it’s a very affordable way to pass the time and learn a lot. I’ve already been to the Larreta Museum, La Redonda, the Carlos Gardel House, the EvitaMuseum, and the Latin American Art Museum of Buenos Aires (MALBA), as well as both the Recoleta and La Chacarita cemeteries, the San Telmo art and antiques fair, and the Carlos Thays botanical gardens. Among the next things on my list are the planetarium, the city zoo, and the Museum of Fine Arts. I’ll make sure to keep posting updates of the things I see as well as my time at Cor.
Amazing to think I’ve been in Buenos Aires for over a month now! I finished classes at the end of the month and passed my final exam without breaking a sweat, ha-ha ;) I did my oral exam on the preparation and tradition of drinking mate, a sort of herb tea that’s brewed in a gourd or wooden cup and is very popular in the Rio de la Plata region. As soon as I get back to Marquette, I’ll be sure to show you how to “take” mate, porteño-style (in Spanish you often use the verb tomar – to take – in the sense of drinking something). The written exam wasn’t terribly easy, but it wasn’t impossible either. I didn’t have a perfect exam, but my final cumulative grade ended up being a 10/10. Yippee!
It was a good way to end the week, because I’d been feeling a lot of frustration at that point. Four weeks is usually the point in any study abroad experience where the “honeymoon” of living abroad ends, often abruptly. All of the times I’ve lived abroad or spent significant time away from home – Ireland, Germany, even going away to Minnesota for college! – I’ve experienced a similar feeling after approximately 4-6 weeks into the experience. Every little thing about the host culture starts to bother me, from the food, to people’s modes of interacting with each other (and me), to the weather, all across the board. Any little thing that’s different suddenly becomes a massive annoyance, where before it was just a curiosity.
Even things I knew about, like the fact that random men will make comments about women as they pass by (these are called piropos, a word which refers to both the comments and the men saying them) and that this tends to happen more foreign women. Even though I knew this, I didn’t honestly think it would happen to me, especially after I noticed I didn’t exactly fit the standard of beauty here. But much to my surprise, I started getting piropos all the time (and noticing them more as my Spanish improved). Initially, it amused me, then it annoyed me, then it got me hopping mad. I don’t like people I know complimenting me normally, and I certainly did not enjoy creepy (in my opinion) strangers leering at me and whispering “Que linda sos” as I strode past. One day a security guard at a park asked me where I was from and, after letting me talk for a few minutes, started commenting on how pretty my eyes were and then asked me if I wanted to go have coffee with him (in Argentina, a woman agreeing to go off somewhere private with a man always means you want to do something much more than just have coffee…). Initially, I laughed about it, then it made me feel icky, and afterwards a little scared. Wasn’t it this man’s job to protect people from such lecherous behavior? If even a security worker looked at me as a piece of meat, what hope did I have against someone with actual bad intentions? After this encounter, each piropo made me more and more annoyed and I started projecting my annoyance onto everything I saw and did in Buenos Aires. By the time I was taking my exam, I was feeling really homesick and just wanted to run away back to Marquette.
It wasn’t just the piropos, there were other things that were causing me a lot of frustration. But at the same time, I don’t think it’s worth getting into the details anymore, because that feeling went away. It took some work on my part: all I wanted to do was sit in my room and pine for Marquette, for Will, for yummy vegan food, for cooler weather. But I knew from my experiences in Ireland and Germany that the only way to get past this point was to keep going, keep doing things and find something interesting to do. So I did. I went to parks, I went to a museum, I went to the feria in San Telmo, I went to the movies with friends, I went to dinner. I kept myself busy, and I’m still keeping myself busy. And yes, I did spend a lot of time talking to Will and to my parents, because even though I know I need to immerse myself in the host culture, the three of them are good listeners, and they always give me the little boost I need or a different outlook on things. Just enough to keep me grounded. Plus, I feel almost an obligation to put on a cheerful face for them, so it helps me think of how to put my experiences in a more positive light.
I hope to write one more entry tomorrow before I leave for Patagonia early (4am!) Thursday morning. Now that my class is over I’ll be volunteering with FundaciónCor about 3-4 days per week and I’ll be writing more about the kids and the organization. I’m getting really excited after hearing about the kids from Lukas, another NMU student who’s volunteering with Cor. I’m interested to know how the child and family services organizations are run here, because it seems like there are a lot of key differences between the programs here and those in the US. And after visiting the EvitaMuseum today and reading about all of the social welfare programs she founded, especially for children, I want to know if Cor is in any way related to the hogares de tránsito, which were a type of shelter for women and children. So much to learn!
For those of you following this blog who don’t have a Facebook account, here is a link to some of the pictures I’ve taken over the last month. Sorry there are so few, I didn’t have a lot of time to go sight-seeing while doing the intensive month class. There are sure to be a lot more once I get back from Patagonia next week. So until next time, ¡chau chau!
