Descalzada

Ok, finally getting caught up to more current stuffs: Iguazu. We went as a field trip with the Commission, which means it was the 6 of us, Bettina, our organizer, and Gisela, our professor. It was all for a class we finished a while back about the indigenous populations in Argentina, their rights, and their relationship with the environment. Iguazu is pretty much the perfect place to study this. Puerto Iguazu is the very northern tip of the province of Misiones, in the northeast corner of the country. Because of its location between Paraguay and Brasil, there's a sizable Guarani population. (The Guarani are a native pueblo - what we'd call a tribe back home.) Their influence in Paraguay is large enough that eighty percent of the population is bilingual. Apparently their known for being among the more friendly and welcoming pueblos, as versus the Mapuche in Patagonia.
Anyway, so we're lucky enough to have some very good connections in the area, so we get to attend a talk with a local big-wig, Angela (no idea what her last name is). Because she's Paraguaya, she speaks Guarani, and has a strong belief in the rights of the communities. The UN has published a series of indigenous rights, one of which is the availability of bilingual schools (as versus education solely in the imperialistic language, in this case Spanish). Because there's a lack of teachers, bilingual schools are fairly rare. Angela set about righting this in the Puerto Iguazu area, and about 12 years ago created the first. At first, the people were wary of yet another white person trying to 'help,' but eventually accepted Angela. The day after we met with Angela, we headed out to see the school and visit the community. The kids were putting on their bicentennial ceremony, so we watched a few dances. (May 25 celebrated Argentina's 200th anniversary.)
After the school production, we headed a few minutes away to the village, all crammed in the back of some pick up trucks with a bunch on the kids. Once we got there, we watched some guys just kicking around the football, waiting for lunch. After a while, we started a game ourselves. The women have a set team, but they lent us two of their players to make the numbers even. We failed. 3-0. Oh well. The field used to be grass, but has long since turned into dirt, and because it had rained pretty hard a few days ago, it was a fantastic mud pie. Finally! I could run through the mud barefoot again! (La Plata does not lend itself to going barefoot.) I learned later that I gained a good deal of respect for playing barefoot, the Guarani way. I also garnered a fan club of the younger guys. When I got the ball, they'd start chanting 'Emily, Emily, es la chica para mi.' (Emily's the girl for me.) While I enjoyed the barefoot time, I'm not used to it, and my feet presented me with 4 wonderful quarter-sized blood blisters that made walking around that night and the next day not so fun.
We had a fantastic time, and all got a little jealous of Michelle, who has a job lined up for January, in a similar place in Guatemala. While we greatly enjoyed the huge privilege of visiting the Guarani, it was not completely carefree. We talked with a few of the village voices about the problems their community faces, many of which come from their contact with the nearby white populations.
So I dunno if there are any pics of the girls playing soccer, but here's what I can find:

Ex-Centros

The Provincial Commission for the Memory is our host institution here, where we take most of our classes, and the organizer of our various trips. It's a human rights organization that manages an archive, an art museum, a youth education program, and an anti-torture committee, all dedicated to cataloging, denouncing, and preventing injustices against humanity. La Plata is the capital of the province of Buenos Aires, and the Commission is a collection of the history of the entire province. There are many such organizations in Argentina, each with its own unique spin on things, but they almost exclusively arose after the right-wing dictatorship of 1976-83. As part of our course in the recent history of Argentina, we've visited several Ex-Centros Clandestinos. These sites were the concentration camps of the dictadura. The tens of thousands of desaparecidos were imprisoned in these locations. Some are neighborhood buildings, some are little more than shacks in the woods.
El Ex-ESMA is the most famous. It's a military compound in Buenos Aires, open today to visitors. Walking through, it looks almost like a college campus - buildings with matching architecture dot a compound of calm paths, green grass, and old trees. Many of these buildings have now been turned into visitor centers, archives, photo galleries, and bathrooms. The headquarters, however, has been maintained as it was. The first and second floor of this building housed offices and bunks for soldiers. (How they could possibly have lived in the same building as the people they tortured, I have no idea.) The basement provided a torture chamber and the attic the squalid 'cells.' The basement was remodeled many times as the ex-Centro became a larger deal, but is now simply a concrete room. At various times it also contained rooms where prisoners were forced to print pro-dictadura propoganda, offices, and cells. The attic is merely a cramped space of angles and metal rafters. Here prisoners were hooded and faced toward the wall, The were forbidden to talk or move. Food was barely enough to survive, and they were granted one 'bathroom' visit a day. There was a separate room for the women who were pregnant - until they gave birth, at which point their child was given to dictadura supporters, and the new mom rejoined the rest of the prisoners. They were tortured weekly, as a matter of habit. Some prisoners lived like this for years. Many died.
Ex-Olympo is another ex-Centro Clandestino in Buenos Aires. Again, conditions were squalid, cramped, and inhumane. This time, prisoners had separate rooms, if you can call them that. Spaces just large enough to hold a bunk bed, with ceilings barely tall enough to lie on the top bunk, into which were crammed four or five prisoners. Again, the detenidos were forced to do all the manual work: cooking, cleaning (of the officers' areas), and construction.
We also visited Tandil, a smaller city inland in the province of Buenos Aires. Here, with students from the Commission's youth education program, we visited two ex-Centros, one barely consisted of two shacks in an overgrown area of an old military base. The other was this once-splendid mansion that used to belonged to some of the European aristocracy that arrived in Argentina and became wealthy landowners. Here again, the building was overgrown, but the decrepit nature was almost harder to see, since this had once been a beautiful home. It reminded me of how the Union troops turned Robert E. Lee's estate into a hospital and cemetery. Only worse, because instead of life, the work of this house was death. The ex-Centros in Tandil were much harder to see than those in Bs As, in part because the history was rawer. There were no professional plaques with facts. The first seemed forgotten in the middle of the woods, and the second stood there next to football fields and tennis courts. And the biggest factors were the guides. In Tandil, we toured these ex-Centros with ex-desaparecido-detenidos. These people had been imprisoned here for years, tortured, and in some cases, raped.

Argentina has a very raw history, but somehow manages to hold on to hope. After seeing these atrocities, we went as a group for coffee and discussion. These people who had survived the horrors of the dictadura laughed and joked with us. They told us stories of their children - how they died, and somehow still managed to smile. That I had such peace.

Semana santa!

The Andes are gorgeous. Like unbelievably, jaw-droppingly, speechlessly, piss-in-my-pants gorgeous. That being said, there are also a lot of very different stretches of the Andes. The mountain ranges I'm accustomed to will vary slightly depending on latitude, but tend to retain the same defining characteristics. Not so here. In the far south, there's an inhospitable, snow-covered land of extremes. Head north to Bariloche, and you're greeted by evergreen forests, craggy mountaintops, and lakes that give royal blue a run for its money. Around Mendoza, the lack of rainfall makes for other-worldly paisajes. entire stretches of ridges exist without vegetation. Around Salta, in the north, the dry climate continues, but rather than bitter chills, the weather tends toward the dry heat. Still further north, the Andes change into the uber-green setting for Machu Picchu.
Semana santa reminds me of our Thanksgiving break. School and businesses take off from Wednesday until Easter Sunday as the main break of the fall. The difference however, would be that this is when people travel. And I can understand why. Because Argentina is such a long country, the countryside boasts attractions from tropical rain-forests to the jumping point for Antarctica. Not to mention the bus system is reliable, comfortable, and fairly cheap.
After stressing and deciding last minute to go to Bariloche for the long weekend, the four girls of the group bought tickets through a travel agency. The tickets themselves, expensive for the delay, two group tours of the area, 3 nights in a hotel - breakfast and dinner included, and the agency fees ended up costing 930 pesos. Today's exchange rate would make that about U$D 240.
So we took a local bus to Buenos Aires, and stood in the mess of claustrophobia and humanity that was the Omnibus terminal, and finally found the right executive-class double decker. 20 hours of free food and wine, remarkably comfortable seats, and poorly subtitled movies later, we arrived in Bariloche. The trip itself was unbelievable. Hours after hours after hours of the Pampas - dry, flat, tumbleweed-strewn landscapes - led to the agricultural areas which led to the start of mountains. Sunrise was incredible.
As far as 20 and 21-year-olds traveling, we were definitely in the minority staying in a hotel as versus a hostel, but the towels and the free food were worth it. It also meant that we had a chance to relax. We didn't salir while we were there, and as a result left well-rested and re-energized. (Salir technically means 'to leave,' but it's a convenient one-word way to say going out, whether just to drink at a bar, or to dance until 7 am at a club.)
The group excursions were nice, affording beautiful views with little effort, but not really my cup of tea. In the morning, we rode a ski lift up to a lookout to take pictures and in the afternoon headed to Cerro Catedral, the premier ski resort in Bariloche. There wasn't any snow as it was still early fall, but there was the typical ski-paraphernalia and restaurant village.
I took the next day off from the others to hike up Cerro Lopez. And am so glad I did. The views are worth so much more when they're raw and afford a sense of achievement. A few notes on Argentine trails:
- Switchbacks are for sissies. I'm not used to feeling out of shape, but after 45 minutes of 45+ degree slopes, I knew my calves were going to get their revenge.
- Well-marked trails are a luxury.
- Running shoes do not provide enough traction.
- Being afraid of heights makes for some anxious minutes.
The mountain itself reaches 2075 meters, but the top part of that is too high for the evergreen forest that covers the rest, so, there's a rock-scrambling trail marked into the side. After reaching the outpost - a kind of ranger station, hostel, check-in point - I climbed up a couple of hundred meters and realized the height and wind weren't going to let me finish without a panic attack. So I sat myself into a little crag and took out my sketchbook. After about a half-hour, I started to head back down. Slowly. On my ass for a good part of it. Even the wooded part of the trail includes some gravelly slopes that freaked me out a little when I could see where it was I would be falling. In total, the climb and descent (and a little nap in the sun in a clearing) took me 6 or 7 hours. After getting fussed at by a local for hiking alone as a girl, I walked the 10 kilometers back to the bus station. (This mini-lecture was exactly what my brand of feminism hates: someone assuming that because of my sex, I'm incapable of something.)
Back with the girls, we shopped through a few of the artisan fairs, bought a few knit hats, and took some very touristy pictures with St. Bernards named 'Che.' The final night we enjoyed some good wine and food out before headed back to basic life in La Plata.

The question Brad said he used to ask Starbucks customers, "If you were a mountain range, what mountain range would you be?" comes to mind. I've found myself, in mountain form.

(I don't have a good photo of Cerro Lopez or the Refugio, so they came from http://www.welcomeargentina.com/bariloche/imagenes/lopez-59_i.html and http://images.travelpod.com/users/ole.dolven/sor_amerika_-_2.1168982700.p1150292.jpg, respectively.)

Marzo

Gaaaaahhhhhh! It's been forever since I've updated... I guess I just got caught up in the goings on here, then forgot about my blog... Sorry! So hopefully, this'll be the first of a string of entries to get up to date.

Ok, starting with the rest of March. The 24th of March is the anniversary of the last golpe del estado, so there was a huge celebration in Buenos Aires to commemorate the victims and to basically celebrate as a nation. (Also, can't spell anymore... I keep trying to replace -tion with -ción. We're calling that linguistic purgatory - far from fluent Spanish, and losing our grip on English daily.) When I say the celebrations in Bs As were huge, I mean HUGE. There were at least three marches that lasted for miles, all culminating in the Plaza de Mayo. We went as a group with Bettina, one of our coordinators and a member of Herman@s - an organization of people with siblings that disappeared. She took part in one of the marches and Alex, Katherine, and Phil followed her. Meanwhile, Michelle had brought her nice camera and really wanted some pictures of the goings on. We ended up walking along the sides of the road, but short statures and claustrophobia forced to rethink that idea. Then we say it: a few guys were climbing down a lamppost from the top of a newspaper kiosk. Perfect. I climbed up first and Michelle handed me the camera because she was hesitant of the lamppost, and Kathleen was wearing a skirt. 5 minutes later, however, they were back and threw caution to the wind for the experience. We later decided that nothing could've been worth it more. We watched the parade, waved at activists, snapped pictures, and marveled in the spirit of the day for several hours. A few of the best pictures are above: we took HUNDREDS. All of us gushed about the hopeful spirit that day - a holiday meant to remember a tragedy has managed to do so by honoring the dead and missing, while still celebrating the identity of the country. There's hope for a present and a future within the memory of the past.
After we climbed down from the kiosk, we headed to the Plaza de Mayo. Which turned out to be much more difficult that we figured. We were maybe five blocks away, but trying to get through the crowds took at least 45 minutes. Once we got there, Mich snapped a few pictures with the Casa Rosada in the background, then we headed back to the bus - this time taking the sidestreets.

I don't think I can say anything else fantastically important happened in March. I got my eyebrow pierced while Kathleen got her cartilage re-punctured. We spent the weekends dancing and drinking some wonderful wine, we explored various restaurants, we went to class, we improved on our Spanish, and we hung out with kids studying abroad with very few responsibilities. It was wonderful.