Political Activism, Cheap Wine and Buenos Aires

It's hard to think that I've been here for a week and a half. It's at the point now where it's starting to feel less like an unreal vacation and more like real life. I'm starting to form real close relationships with the people from our WM group (there are 6 of us) and some of the people here.

The Comission: We started our classes last week at La Comission Por la memoria. The comission is a government sanctioned organization based in Buenos Aires with an office in La Plata. I can't say enough great things about everyone we've met there so far. It's a VERY liberal organization that deals with current human rights violations through activism and also does research and education about the tragedies in Argentina in the recent past. For those of you who aren't aware (it's not even spoken about that much here...which is why the comission's work is so important) Argentina went through a period of barbaric dictatorship from 1976-1983 I believe. Basically the people in charge of the government would steal anyone they assumed to be affiliated with the communist party and thus a threat to their government. They stole these people (who later became referred to as los desaparecidos, the dissapeared) in all hours of the day and night, tortured them and killed them on what became known as death flights where they would bind parts of their bodies and throw them into the river from an airplane. About 30,000 people, including a high percentage of youth and scholars were thus victimized in this period. La Plata, the region of Argentina that I'm staying in, had a particularly high concentration of desaparecidos making the past particularly relevant and intertwined within the local culture here.

We're taking 12 credit hours of classes at the Comission and are offered a Pasantia (internship) in one of 4 areas. So far we've had one week of intensive spanish grammar classes. It's just the six of us in their little library for 2 hours with our teacher Marcella. It's very different taking a spanish class from someone who doesn't speak english and she has just as much trouble understanding our questions as we do with her lectures sometimes. Some of the others really dislike the classes and think they could have found a more beneficial teacher but I like that she can offer me something different than any other spanish teacher. Granted, I screw up all the time with my spoken grammar but I have a strong enough background in spanish grammar that I generally know all the basics of verb conjugations and grammatical structure and need more practice with smaller details such as articles, conjunctions and word choice. Most spanish teachers wouldn't be able to tell me, for example, that I should use the verb ocultar when talking about hiding an abstract concept and esconder in reference to hiding a noun. The 4 departments we can choose from to have internships for are the DIPBA archive which does research on particular cases of desaparecidos and publicizes and maintains certain important documents, la ensenanza which is a program through which we would help local students in the process of creating projects about the dictadura period to present at a conference, the art center...I'm not entirely sure what they do because we havent toured them yet, but presumably something related to artistic expressions of the time period, and the committee against torture which is the legal department that gathers statistics and interviews prisoners about human rights violations. Right now I'm leaning towards the committee against torture, but the ensenanza interests me alot as well.

BUENOS AIRES:
We went on a tour of Buenos Aires all of Sunday which was an absolute BLAST except for that some of us were exhausted after staying out really late the night before. It's normal in la plata to stay out past 5am...we were some of the first ones to leave the discoteca at 5am...crazy. The bus trip was alot of fun as we were all talking about some of the hilariously awkward international moments from the night before. Probably the highlight of my night was blasting lady gaga in our argentine friends' apartment or learning a really fun Argentine drinking game that's kind of a combination of BS and F.you pyramid. They want to learn beer pong this weekend...ping pong balls are surprisingly hard to find here, we're going to have to look around. We got to Buenos Aires around noon and met up with our tour guide, Nacho (nickname for ignacio?) that also works for the comission. We saw several parts of the city including Boca which was RIDICULOUSLY tourist-y, Palermo (less catering to tourists, some good shopping), Santermo, the plaza de mayo, plaza del congreso and a few other places that I'm not really sure of their names...I thought the coolest part of the day was getting to walk around the casa rosada (argentine version of the white house) and stand on the balcony outside where eva peron gave a famous speech that's a popular depiction of her leadership. We all capped off the night by going out to a pizzeria. They cooked the pizza with alot of cream and grease so we didn't eat so much there, but we had a great time joking around at dinner and I can absolutely see vast improvements in terms of the linguistic skills of everyone in our group.

Random thoughts:
I never realized how much you can learn about a person without really understanding the majority of what they are saying. I've always considered myself a verbal person with a fairly good ability to read people, but I feel like I'm getting alot more touch with my impressions of people based on vibes and intuition. At first I thought my personality wasn't really translating into spanish which was frustrating and that only the kids would like me because they were less used to relying on a complex vocabulary to interact with people, but it's actually been alot easier than I thought to get to know people and make friends.

Within our group we always compete to see who can be mistaken most commonly for an Argentine and we take it as a personal victory whenever someone comes up to us speaking fluent spanish or asking for directions. So far I've been mistaken for an argentine, brazilian, chilena and irlandesa (a bit of truth to that one obviously...) We asked our tour guide to rank us in terms of how argentine we looked, and he said that I was second which surprised me. I think it has more to do with the curly hair and chill style (or lack of style) than anything. I wouldn't consider Argentina a really diverse country in the same way that the US is, but they certainly have a variety of European looking people as well as a large indigenous population. Having blue eyes is a rarity here so I've gotten some comments and curiosity. Several people have called us princesses as we've been walking around, but I think that may be only because we are white like the disney princesses or because we're huge tourists that like to shop...

Words to be careful with: PERO= but, PERRO= dog, PERON= popular past president, also referred to as San Peron...don't insult him in public PEDO= fart PERRA= bitch...mixing these up could be dangerous ;-)

I also spent about 5 minutes being confused when my argentine aunt and cousin were trying to explain to me that POLLENA is a common argentine dish made from chicken and flour (harina) because I was confusing the word for flour (harina) with the word for sand (arena). My lack of spanish skills has certainly provided some group entertainment...oh well!

Love and miss you all, besos para todos