Paso a paso

            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 4^th and 5^th 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 the  push 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 Jorge Newberry Airport 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!