Last one of my trip, but a few miscellaneous pictures to follow

A Few Things That I've Learned

Just a few….

• 1.       With the love of family and friends you can have a higher quality of life with far less than with a whole lot of stuff that we are used to.  Family—spouse, children, siblings, grandparents, mother, father, cousins, whomever you are lucky enough to have within reach are revered and part of your daily life.  It has been inconceivable to some that I have left my family for so long.  But, in the long distance life that I've found myself in I still feel connected—to my husband, to my sister, to my brother, who have written to me and encouraged me the whole way.  The same with my extended family—my good friends—who have done the same.  Family gatherings, family meals, family successes and troubles are shared.  For one month I have been welcomed into a small place with big hearts and made to feel a part of everyday life.  Meals are cooked with love, not as a chore. 
• 2.      When you language skills are lacking, people may assume that you are stupid.  I think that we do that in the US to someone who is trying to communicate with difficulty.  We speak loudly.  We add strange accents to words.  I believe that if we take the time to listen carefully, not caring about grammar or pronunciation, and reply not in a loud voice or pseudo foreign accent but more slowly, we may be able to converse.  And yes, that has been my experience on the other end.
• 3.      When you get a person on the other end of the phone line for whom English is her or his non-native language, consider that it may be someone like Vicky.  She doesn't actually work for Best Buy but a company who contracts her out.  She has been working for them for four years while going to medical school and makes 7 pesos an hour.  At today's rate, that is $1.78 an hour.  She is truly bilingual, which is how she got this job, but she is not doing it because she wants to but because that small amount that she brings home helps to run her family.  The things that she has been trained to say in response to a query are beyond belief, but just remember that that person who seems stupid, again, because she or he is not getting the subtly of what you are asking, is probably making even less and has nothing to do with the decision to use non-native speakers for our companies.  Romi, who works for a clothing manufacturer, was yelled at the other day because of a communication breakdown.  If we do not like the situation, the person on the other end of the phone in another hemisphere is not the reason we are having difficulty with customer service.
• 4.      Vicky is going to the public medical school, which means that her education is free.  When she gets to be a resident and paid for those hours she puts in to the hospital, it will be 1000 to 3000 pesos a month.  That is $255 to $765 a MONTH.  How much depends upon whether she goes to a private hospital that has more technology and fewer paying patients or a public hospital with little technology and many patients.   And if she remains in a hospital, starting salaries will be at that $765 a month range.  Apparently people do not go into medicine to become rich.
• 5.      Health care, because it is free in the public hospitals, attracts people from other countries as well.  I, for example, could use the public hospitals.  So do Bolivians, Ecuadorans, Peruvians.  Vicky called it 'vacation medicine'.  I already knew about many people taking vacations to BsAs for plastic surgery because it cost less, but never that it would be cheaper to make the trip for care than to use your own country's facilities.  It would be as if people from Great Britain took the plane over to get dialysis.  Probably not a good example, but apparently many dialysis patients here are not citizens.
• 6.      There is nothing like a national sport to unify the country.  No matter what your political beliefs are these days everyone is Team Argentina, Maradona is forgiven all his transgressions, and when Argentina scores a goal you can hear people from their homes all screaming, simultaneously, GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAL. 
• 7.      Two of my countries—Uruguay and Argentina—will be in the quarter finals.  I will be here for those games.  But I am leaving on July 4^th for the US.  Why I am leaving early is a story itself, but I will leave it at the fact that my mission has terminated.  I wonder if I would have considered changing my ticket instead of taking more Spanish lessons a few months ago.  As much as I'd like to say of course I would, I just don't know.  I love it here, I love my family here and my teacher here and the lifestyle is the most comfortable I've felt in a long time.  But I miss my family (including my two kitties) and now that the mission is off, I feel as if remaining would be enormously selfish.  So, I will be watching the finals of the 'Campeon del Mundo' July 11, 2:30 EST in my new, yet to be seen, apartment.   NOTE:  Uruguay just won their game against Ghana.  If I have time I'll write about it.  I know that I won't have finished this by the time Argentina plays…let's hope that is good news as well since I have myself a shirt.
• 8.      Mayonesa:  Okay, so I knew that this was something of a staple in Chile because when I was investigating opportunities for volunteering, I spoke to a guy who had spent a year in Chile in a home stay.  This is kind of what I've been in—a room and board situation, only he did not go in to it selectively as I did but was placed by the program with which he was volunteering.  The family he stayed with received a certain amount with which to house and feed him.  And for some reason they fed him, almost nightly, hot dogs and a huge dollop of Mayonesa.   (Just as an aside, he told me that once he returned to the US he swore off meat and became a vegetarian.)  Anyway, generally the mayonesa comes in a plastic bag like container, much the same as the milk (leche) does.  The milk is put into a container from which it can be poured after the corner has been cut or the top unsealed.  The mayonesa has a turn off and on top near a corner so that the product, which in all cases has been some type of Hellmanns, can be squeezed.  It has been used in my 'family' at every meal for something—straight up on a salad, on a torte (which would be something like a quiche but made in a pan the size of a pizza and, in deference to my being a vegetarian, often made of orange squash or swiss chard).  But nearly everything, sometimes even pasta, gets a dollop of mayonesa.  I'm posting a picture of Romi holding a bag of it.  I was there four weeks?  I'm sure they went through one bag a week for three people.
• 9.      The racism here—but that is probably a misnomer—is sometimes difficult to take. I've written about it before, but I have to recount another situation just to put things in perspective.  The people with whom I've encountered blatant –ism have been middle to upper middle class, or used to be, and not overly educated.  I do not know which state does more to shape a very palpable mistrust-dismissal-distaste for 'others', except that both variables have been present in the greatest expressions I've encountered.  In this case, I'd received a heartening message from Johan, my student from La Boca, thanking me for what he'd learned, and my encouragement, and that he hoped that he would be able to visit me in the US some day.  I felt good about the message, and it was simply written, so I understood about 90 percent of it.  But I asked a to-be-unnamed person to confirm a few words.  And she fixated on his name—Johan whatever whatever.  "He's not Argentinean," she said.  "But I know that he was born here…we did an exercise and he was born in Argentina and grew up here."  "But he has some blood from somewhere else.  No one from Argentina is named Johan."  "But being born here, doesn't that make him an Argentinean?"  "What color is he?"  "He's very white."  "But somewhere…his father or his grandfather was Bolivian.  He's not Argentinean."  We went on a little bit more but I was starting to feel uncordial because I didn't see the point of it.  But I knew, actually, and my little historian friend Ric had confirmed it, that the people who truly consider themselves Argentinean have some connection in the family tree to either Spain or Italy.  That's the –ism I'm talking about because the only people who are not white white with dark hair (or honey blonde or whatever) have the higher cheekbones and darker complexion of Peruvians or Bolivians or Paraguayans.    I know that this is not just an issue with Buenos Aires and that it exists in all the lands, but it is very pronounced, once you get comfortable with certain people, and thereby uncomfortable. And it has something to do with Che if I can explain it.  Last night I had a conversation, saying that I wished I had bought  me a postcard when I was in San Telmo, and the living-in-comfort guy I was talking with told me that it was just a tourist thing.  That if I knew the true story of Che, his having been raised well off, his having been a doctor, and his having wanted to do for Argentina what he would have been better off doing for the likes of Bolivia and Peru, that I would realize that the people in Buenos Aires despise him.  And I find that very strange because my teachers—every last one of them—has had a picture of Che or a workbook exercise of Che.  And of course La Boca Los Pibes has its huge poster and almost every shop with postcards in San Telmo has one of Che.  And while I know people called San Telmo touristy there were actual people who lived there who were not denizens of hotels and hostels and they seemed to have some kind of connection.  I don't want to come down here on one side or another but it is simply the fact that there are very different ideologies in BsAs and this person went so far as to blame the economic breakdown from within the last decade on Che.  The people I know in Belgrano forget that I have lived here for three months prior and that I know other people and other things so I think that we go round and round simply because of that—they think that I have no other perspective to mediate what they say.  Just the other day one of the chicas was saying that she wished some day that she could visit La Boca—that she had grown up all her life in Buenos Aires and never been there and my having gone made her think she might be able to go safely. 
• 10.  Well, Argentina lost in the octo-finals, but Uruguay won (amidst allegations of cheating) so now I only have one South American team to root for in the quarterfinals.  I have team Argentinean  shirts, one for me and one for Fredd, and while they are the same color, they really won't pass since they have players' names on them.    There was a collective sadness, but in a matter of fact way, on Saturday as people walked the streets with their baby blue and white striped shirts and decorated dogs.  I never got an Urugayian bandera (or flag) so I have nothing to wave when they play, but nonetheless I'll be rooting for them.
• 11.  I am writing this on the last leg of my trip home.  How different it all is—I understand most of what is being said to me on the plane, on the ground, over the loudspeaker.  I do not mean all, but certainly much more than none.  People still respond to me in English after I open my mouth, but that's okay.   But the one thing I was not counting on today was the extra, extra security any plane flying into the DC metro area would get because it is the Fourth.  I bought one last bottle of Malbec in BsAs and had no problem with it in my carry on bag.  But, unbeknownst to almost everyone, an extra security check was called at the gate for the plane going to Dulles so all our hand carryons were opened and pawed through and we were patted down…so my nice bottle of wine was either going to have to be gate checked as part of my purse, or left behind for a Panamanian party.  I took option two but still stomped my foot a little about why they couldn't have told me not to buy any liquids in BsAs and I was told that these security checks are just ordered randomly and this was probably because of the holiday.  The plane also took off late.  People were called to the front of the plane and asked questions; a woman came down the aisle and asked certain people if they corresponded to the name in that seat on the manifest. 
• 12.  I need to finish this before I land because once I'm again in the land of lots more and bigger cars, I need to cap off my adventure.  If you have read this I hope that it gives you a glimpse of a time spent in-between.  Life was not so very different in that I could adapt easily, but life was certainly not the same.  I think that I may have made a difference in about three lives, but that's better than none, and I know that the people and the language and the culture and the joy that remains even when more becomes less has left a profound impression.  If you want to know where this goes after I reach my new city tomorrow, please keep in touch.  zstavri@gmail.com