Sunday, October 23, 2011

Buenos Aires

October in the US is a time for pumpkin carving, raking leaves, football, and playoff baseball; in Paraguay October means that school is wrapping up, the temperature is getting hot, and people are planting their cash crops. For me this past month has brought a vacation to Buenos Aires and a security situation that created a lot of uncertainty about the future of my job. It all started around the end of September when rumors were going around about a State of Exception in some areas of Paraguay. Initially these rumors were determined to be unlikely but a week later, in the midst of my time in Buenos Aires, a State of Exception was put into place. The cause of this state of martial law was the killing of some Police in my state of San Pedro and growing political unrest in the northern States of the country. The State of Exception allows the police and military to rule with more or less a free hand, they can search anyone at anytime and detain whoever they like. So with such an infringement of legal rights Peace Corps was just about ready to evacuate all volunteers in San Pedro to Asuncion. But before this happened they put in place a standfast in which it was necessary for volunteers to stay put in their communities. The justification for this procedure is that we are integrated within our community and our neighbors will help and protect us in case of trouble. About 2 weeks into this standfast, after seeing no problems coming from the State of Exception, we can now travel again and life is pretty much as normal as it gets here in Paraguay. So a slightly stressful situation resolved itself with few repercussions and life will go on normally.

When the State of Exception was put into place I was in the middle of my vacation to Buenos Aires in Argentina. Five other volunteers and myself traveled down via an 18 hour bus ride to the 2nd largest city on the South American continent. The reason for our travels at this time was that half of our group was running the BA Marathon and the rest of us tagged along to support them and have as much fun as possible in the process. We stayed in a place called Giorgio's House in the heart of Buenos Aires and were within a subte (subway) or bus ride of everything that we wanted to see. The house itself is an apartment that is rented out on a day to day basis on the top floor of an office building. It has a kitchen that we utilized several times, several patios that we enjoyed for grilling and chilling whenever it was not raining, and high speed internet that allowed us to fall back in love with youtube. The house concierge, Anastasia, was extremely friendly and helpful and guided us through our options in order to enjoy her city as much as we could during our stay. The first day she informed us that everything happens in BA at night and almost nothing happens in the morning as people generally start to head home from their late night activities at 4 or 5am. So us campo kids from Paraguay had to go through a crazy transition of our normal bedtimes of 8pm and waking up at 5am to staying out out night and sleeping in until 11 if not noon. It was a rough transition (even rougher coming back) but a necessary one so that we could enjoy the nightlife that BA had to offer. While in BA we did everything from exploring the bar diversity (from a reggae club to freestyle hip-hop), going to the zoo that was full of free ranging animals, learning to tango, drinking a lot of wine, seeing the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum, eating a lot of footlong hot dogs, exploring the architecturally beautiful parts of the city, seeing Real Steel, watching a Marathon, drinking some more wine, and thoroughly enjoying the Argentine people that greeted us with nothing but friendliness. The people in Buenos Aires are largely of European descent unlike the largely mestizo population of Paraguay. As a result we encountered the phenomena of people thinking that we were from Argentina and people asked us for directions on the street. For some reason the people of BA get a bad rep for being stuck up and prideful, which may have some truth, but in our personal encounters in a city comparable to NYC, we found nothing but genuine friendliness. On one occasion as we were walking though the rain looking for the dinosaurs we asked an older gentleman for directions and he then insisted on taking us to the museum himself and in the process he spoke some pretty good english to us considering he had been only to New York once and spent almost all his life in BA. The man literally walked a mile out of his way to bring some tourists to their destination. We continued to experience this type of hospitality throughout our trip.  Upon leaving we were all dazed and enamored by the city of Buenos Aires and agreed that we had to go back and for me personally I decided it could be one of the few cities that I could live in on a long term basis.

Once vacation was over it has been back to work. But due to a teachers strike my computer classes has been put on hold only to resume this week. I am now teaching 11th graders english as their teacher is on maternity leave and currently I am spending Monday through Wednesday entirely in the schools. This leaves me Thursday, Friday and the weekend to interact with the rest of the community. This past Thursday I spent the morning with my friend Karai Nelson cooking up breakfast and working in the field a bit with me planting some watermelon that we will hopefully sell to help boost his income. Additionally, I am now working with a recently formed Women's group that is working towards obtaining a chicken project from the government as a way to improve household income. So things have been fairly busy and I am almost to the halfway point of my service which blows my mind. November promises to be an exciting month with Thanksgiving and a wedding to attend. But we will get into that next time around.