April 2008

April is a journal filled with memories now. Things are happening here, inside me and the barrio. Energy that moves and produces scenes of whirling creativity and beauty. A start to the tale of April could be my birthday where I spent my 21st amongst sixty screaming children and surrounded by the people I have come to love so genuinely here. It was a quick celebration as sixty children in a small room with cake and soda is always a difficult force to contain, but the letters written by the friends I’ve made here will be carried with me as such powerful symbols of love and acceptance.
Shared poetry and music.
We send an entire day organizing a concert of a band we produce that day. La Paz we call ourselves. As the tale spins from 10 in the morning until the eventual concert at 4, the children create signs and banners displaying our name. As I learn anew everyday, the preparation of something is often more important than the event itself. We are presented shyly by a 14 year old who takes his role of announcer as seriously as possible. Oscar is his name. I on the guitar and vocals, giving ridiculous explanations of songs I clearly didn’t create. Victor, a 15 year old, laying down a rhythm on a drum set he created from scrap everything and anything. Alfredo, a ten year old, faking the best he can a bass beat on a nylon string guitar with the truest smile I have ever witnessed. It is the most rewarding concert of my life.
Sharing a meal made for 3, with 14 children, and it being enough. My greedy mind is always surprised by such happenings and demonstrations of selflessness.
A group and I go around the barrio drawing anything in nature that we find beautiful, in hopes of using the drawings for a future mural. Trees, plants, and animals are brilliantly represented using the simple medium of markers in that, one line can represent the world, style that children instinctually have.
An afternoon spent playing camp games in an international day of peace.
More shared poetry.
I spend a day planning a puppet show with a group of 6 year olds. A donkey, horse, and Minnie and Mickey, teach the other children watching, about the importance of telling your family where you are going when leaving the house. 100% produced by the children. It is a simple display of the creativity the mind of the young contain.
Leaf piles and walking the rest of the day with hair filled with little leaf memories of the joy that I have been a part of.
Teaching English to two little girls using the donkey puppet for no real reason at all, and listening to them respond in such funny accents as they pronounce their first English words.
Colonia, Uruguay becomes in my mind the land of Santo Lindo, an old Brazilian musician who teaches me the real soul of the blues, a top his improvised garbage can drum. He tells me of the power that music has, above skin color, creed, and race, as we drive down the narrow cobble stone streets in his 47 ford. The beauty of the fall back to earth, as we are launched into the air going over speed bumps, waiting for the next in the hope to hear that deep wild belly laugh of his. The word wonderful will forever be dedicated to you Santo Lindo.
Moments, beautiful moments in every corner of my life. Moments on beaches, in grass, in dirt, on porches. Feelings of floating with arms wrapped around pure sorrow searching for words I still haven’t found. My memories become color as friends here bring up the past which I am now a part of. I am surrounded by such positive energy here in my life and the gospel becomes action with that presence near by. I am fascinated with the idea of being able to improve one’s actions in this life. That I am wholly who I am, but that I have a power in what I am in the lives of other, positive or negative, and that we can use our time to improve the lives of others. I am influenced.
james

March 2008

“The poor are poor because they do not want to work and are lazy, what you are doing here is good and all, but it is sort of well, useless”. I hear this phrase said with all the certainty in the world, a fact in the mind of a upper middle class woman I speak with here. I remain quiet the rest of my time with her trying to think of a response to a phrase that speaks against everything I hold true. I dissect the phrase and find story upon story to try to change this woman’s incredibly distorted view.
I think of a mother breaking down in tears telling me how ugly a life it is without an education. Her parents never cared enough or were too busy to encourage her to study, so she never did. She tells me the only jobs she can get, are cleaning the floors and toilets of the rich. She has dedicated her life now to stop that cycle from consuming her children’s life. She is studying now along side her children in order to be able to help and push them to study. She does this on top of working two jobs a day, volunteering in the comedor passing out milk and bread, and having a six, nine, ten, and twelve year old to bring to and from school, do laundry for, cook and being a wife. How could this be called lazy?
I think of my supervisor Ofelia spending all day working with a boy to write the story of his life. After learning to use a computer and typing the story up, he brought it to his parents who didn’t give him the light of day, not a word of encouragement. What is that boy’s motivation to continue with school if no one ever tells him that what he is doing is good?
A pair of brothers has just started school again because of the positive influence that Ofelia has on their lives. They could only start participating in the workshops if they started up with school again. After a month of reminding them everyday to enroll, and telling them they were too smart to waste there time without going to school, they themselves started up again. The incredibly influential power a positive force has in someone’s life. Where I work is a positive force in the barrio. It is a place where children feel loved and special, where they are encouraged to dream the big dreams and where they are challenged to treat others with respect. It is a place where we focus on matching our words with our conduct. Our lips speak the world love while we show it with our actions.
It is a frustrating reality because small change in individual lives is not noticeable by a passerby, or someone who lives a kilometer away from the barrio. Instead of seeing a woman who works every minute of her life struggling to be able to provide her children with a better future than the one she inherited, they will see a tipped over dumpster in the middle of the street with men along side dogs picking through the waste. Instead of seeing a child that just dedicated his day to help clean and fix the inside of a church they will be bothered by that same child asking them for change on the street at night. It is a frustrating but necessary struggle to work toward change that affects people one by one. It is the gospel. The son of the creator of the universe wandered around and listened to people’s problems and ate in people’s homes to talk about them. While Jesus was the savior of all of creation he still healed people one by one.
The poor are not poor because they are lazy. There is poverty because we have forgotten that every man, woman, and child on this earth, we are to love as our family. We can not talk about poverty as if it is a separate entity from the world of the rich and privileged. There is exists incredible wealth in the world because there exists systems of oppression and injustice that provide wealth for a select few while dealing out pain, hunger and disease to the majority of the globe. The gospel defies this reality. It teaches us to love and to care, and struggle one with one for a tomorrow that is better and more just than today.
-james

February 2008

An afternoon somewhere in the past my supervisor and I sat down to do an evaluation of my time here so far, and my supervisor being the wonderful wise woman that she is, suggested we try and do some sort of artist demonstration to sum up everything we had talked about in the day. The program I am doing here has this wonderfully slow feel to it, where every step you take is so analyzed that every action in your life becomes so important and valued. There is something so beautiful about being aware of your life and your actions. I began to think about what this year has meant to me so far and what I would like the year to come to look like and I came to this conclusion. I don’t believe I ever before appreciated the interconnectedness of life; how every action affects the next, how every decision is really a decision for the next decision, with it never ending the time we have here.
To represent my life I drew my head with all this chaos behind it, not an ugly chaos, but a chaos of confusion and uncertainly. Everything in my life that I had learned and experienced everywhere, in every action I did, but never consciously guiding my actions. In front of me I drew what I hope to be the future, as I already feel is near in my recent present, colors focused, all of the chaos of my past and present, still complete, in that every color and line still existed, but centered. A sort of prism that sucks in light and spits out a rainbow. I have been thinking about this quite a bit lately as I read and find out more about poverty and underdevelopment in the world.
I had the opportunity to read “Open veins of Latin America” by Eduardo Galeano during the month of February, and have been fascinated by it ever since. It talks about the real and factual history and current exploitation in Latin America, which leads up to the current situation of some of the riches countries in the world in terms of natural resources having people dying of hunger. The prism in my mind is starting to put into focus my reality here, as I see hundreds of people living inside shacks of cardboard and scrap metal. The forces that drive thousands of hungry families from the farms and country to cities such as Resistencia, to make a living collecting bottles and cardboard in horse draw carriages at night. Poverty is not television program or commercial, it is a little girl I know coming up to us as we eat at a restaurant and confessing she is on the street every night until 6 in the morning selling Valentines Day cards, her sisters and her supporting the family on change. And as I understand more of the realities of the world we live in, I discover this remarkable web that covers our existence here.
It is scary to think that our actions affect so much more than ourselves. Every product we buy and use, every leader that we elect, every natural resource we decide to consume affects people on the other side of the world. This world is so injust, and for centuries this interconnectedness has been used for oppression and hurt, but we have the power to change that. Look at the interconnectedness of the church. I live in a city where over 80% of the population identifies themselves as a Christian, and I would bet another 10% identifies themselves with other religions. What a rallying point that is in itself; if we could only start living the beautiful messages religion around the world teaches us, how couldn’t we change this world?
My skewed vision that I saw the world with for so many years is being altered but as I become more and more critical of my own ways and the ways of my people I also find so much hope. I find hope in knowing so many movements of change have already been started and work. We cannot wait though for someone to place into our laps a handbook on how to live for change. It comes to the point where we can no longer wait to be informed of the problems of this world, we have to search and long for knowledge. That is where transformation and hope for a new tomorrow will come from. As I am connected to all of you, so now are you connected to every person and story I know, and I to your story. Through this stringing together of human lives we will span all humanity and carry each other towards a new understanding of what love and life can be. Steps over stumbling step we will walk together, uncertain and scared, but together.
Over the “less than half year remaining” hump, and so nervous and excited by that
-James

January 2008

A month away from my adopted reality here. January was spent covering Argentina with distinct purposes but all so rewarding. My first stop was to the province of Missiones in the northeast. Missiones is a very different atmosphere than mine here in El Chaco. Missiones is a lush mountain paradise, verging on rainforest, but not quite there. I’ve always been so curious about how the terrain here changes from arid flatland to banana trees, but my transition always occurs during the night on a bus so it may forever remain my mystery. My first voyage to Missiones was to translate for a group from Pennsylvania who came for a mission trip. My favorite experience, or better said, the experience that brought on the most change in my mental process, was a talk that I had with another volunteer and the pastor of the Pennsylvania church. We got onto the subject of former mission trips and the pastor got to talking of a trip member, a youth, if I remember correctly. The youth after hearing that an argentine church only needed 11,000 US dollars to be able to build and maintain a brand new building, returned to his congregation and rallied support for the project. The youth rallied so much support that the church in Pennsylvania was able to give the argentine church 100% of the funds needed to build the building, with some left over for maintenance in the following years. The story sounded like a dream come true to me, a new church, friendships over-seas formed, but then my friend, who is infinitely wiser than I, began telling the side of the story that she had heard. You see, less than a year after the new church was built, the membership had almost completely died in the sparkling new building. This puts a very different dimension of the giver-recipient model that we are taught and witness to in so many aspects of our lives in the United States. The church in Argentina was surviving and growing on the challenge and struggle of building a church without walls first, and then working to put a roof over their heads. If one person had a brick, they would bring it, another with the ability to lay it, and soon you have a wall. In the struggle relationships are built, and a church becomes a church, in a much deeper sense than a building with a sign hung. When the church was just given to the people the struggle was gone, and so was the integral formation of the church. They had a perfectly laid cement foundation to stand on, but with no real foundation to the membership. We get so sucked into the power of money in the United States, with it you can solve and help any problem it seems. Real power though, comes from loving and stepping into the problem with the people. I am stuck many times in my thinking because there are so many dimensions to every problem and solution. I offer no answers here; I only offer experiences that I’ve seen.
A return to Resistencia to wash clothing and rest for a day and then back to Missiones, this time with our youth group from my church. What a wonderful time of relaxation and play to develop relationships with the youth. Brilliant talks in a colossal circle discussing the eternal questions of the human condition. Real faith vs. being gullible. I pondered all of this while floating down the river, Brazil on the left, Argentina on my right, learning from the silence and power of water.
My vacation started on my return from Missiones, and I left for Buenos Aires to pick up my friend that came to visit me the following day. A 26 hour bus ride later and we were in Patagonia, the south of Argentina. I spent my days traveling place to place with all my life in a backpack, and when I had become comfortable with that, our backpacks were stolen and I was left with less. It made walking easier, and we eventually acquired new ones to facilitate the trip. I have never felt freer as I did as I sat on top a mountain staring off for miles at perfect lakes and tree covered islands. Life stopped in those moments. I learned to cook over a fire and live so much more simply. It seems I am always placed next to people that offer so much to my thoughts on life, and this trip was no different, with my friend always offering beautiful new thoughts on a life I constantly feel I have figured out.
I am safe and home now in Resistencia, but not for long. In the coming month I have a kids camp and then I am back again in Buenos Aires for a retreat with the other volunteers. Embracing being lost -james

December 2007

December was spent for the most part absorbed in the wonderfully fulfilling planning and painting of my first mural here. So many things happened from my first brush stroke to the last (still pending) that I am still trying to digest and figure out. Ofelia, my supervisor who is the greatest person I have ever known, and I decided to break up the mural into sections and spread it out over the course of about a week which was eventually stretched into about two weeks through unplanned events. The painting started normal enough, ups and downs, frustrations over the kids painting everything and everyone. The third day in I had brought my camera, as I had normally done, and spent the morning alternating in between painting and trying to document the progress and joy of the mural. Around noon I noticed my camera wasn’t in the place where I had set it and immediately Ofelia organized a search party going door to door with the kids that were painting and talking to parents. It came out through one child or another that the same girl that had stolen the camera of the prior volunteer here, also had stolen mine and had been planning to do so for a while. For all the joy that comes along with having a camera, getting one stolen for me at least was maybe more rewarding. What a reality shock on poverty and what it can turn people into if they allow it to. It was hard for me to know that a girl that I had been teaching guitar to for the last 3 months would steal and throw our friendship aside, but it was ever harder on Ofelia. Ofelia has a hard time in the barrio because she is so loving. She allows kids that normally are not given a chance, a chance to participate and learn, but when things like the aforementioned happen many “I told you so” are thrown in her face. It inspired so many wonderful discussions between Ofelia and I about the realities of the barrio and how loving and encouraging ,while they are the hardest to do at times, are and always will be the best actions to take.
Day 6 of the mural brought on the worst fever I have had in my life. The heat and stress finally got to me and I was in bed for 3 days hallucinating my life away. Being sick away from home is never fun, but Irma, my adopted mother here, took it as her personal responsibility to cure me. Special soups and teas, my cup always have ice in it, made whatever I had leave without doing any permanent damage. Friends from the barrio came to visit me and give me every suggestion that has ever existed on how to break a fever. Ofelia won with ice under the armpits and on my neck. I returned to paint much more slowly and with more consciousness of what my body was telling me. We are at about 99% done with the mural at the moment and we are planning on finishing it in February. End of year activities slowly took over the mural time and we decided it would be best to finish it calmly after vacation.
Christmas in Argentina was certainly distinct and beautiful. Gifts weren’t all that important to the holiday in the houses where I spent my 25th of December. It was much more important that everyone was gathered and ate the fruit salad, than who gave who what. In fact the grandest present that I saw given was an umbrella. I think the dynamic of the holiday was summed up well when I asked a little boy in the barrio if he enjoyed Christmas. Instead of listing off the cds, game systems and toys that he received, he smiled and said that it was wonderful because he threw more firecrackers this year than the last. Midnight on Christmas Eve I passed with a glass of sparkling apple cider in my hand and kissing everyone that I have ever met in the barrio on both cheeks. Love and energy in the air.
I will leave you all with a quote that I have been pondering quite a bit lately as seemingly bad things occur to me and around me, it makes them seem more valuable and beautiful.

“Our whole business therefore in this life is to restore to health the eye of the
heart whereby God may be seen”-Saint Augustine.

-james

November 2007

“Do you like life?” I was asked tonight by my friend as we sat and drank mate at her house. When I started my normal speech of the things I enjoy doing and dreams I have, she stopped me, and clarified by saying the question again. “Do you like life? Not your life James, who wouldn’t like your life, you’ve been all over, you are talented, no, Do you like life, sickness, hatred, hunger, and everything that is involved in the human condition” I walked around the barrio after that question in a sort of stunned state. I looked at my surroundings and saw the dirt roads after rain the night before that are impassable now. I thought of the shack homes of pieces of wood and scrap metal that I see as I take the bus to and from the barrio, without water or electricity. I thought about the Toba Indians that are dying of hunger every day here in the Chaco, and I pondered this question. I am almost embarrassed sometimes to talk about how easy my life has been. It is hard to demonstrate to someone that you understand that life is hard, when they tell you that they were hit everyday as a child, and when they ask you about your life you can only answer that your parents love you move than anything in the world. It is hard to show you understand when a 26 year old woman tells you about the three jobs she works to provide for her mother, grandmother, and aunt on top of studying in college. The money I’ve made from working has gone towards vacations, clothes, and coffee shops.
There is so much joy here though, as much as I have seen in anyplace I have been. Kids still laugh at every opportunity. People love to dance, ohh how they love to dance. People help each other, and we talk about how fun falling in love is. In the horrible oppression that this world offers up, most from other humans and their actions, people always find opportunities to laugh and to love. Dancing all night on a dirt patio, watching kids draw and color for hours, drinking mate and talking for hours, being shown a drum set that is made from scrap metal and wood, people sharing food with me, Sunday dinners where they stay and talk for the rest of the day talking after the meal. These are all things that I have seen in the midst of poverty, that make me think that I do like life.
We are going to be painting the mural this week finally. After 2 months of planning and designing I finally feel so horribly unprepared that it could only be the right time to start. We are planning on having the kids do most of the painting with the adults just supervising and helping out in tough situations. It will be a test to see if I have learned the virtues of my supervisor Ofelia as I attempt to trust forty 4-15 year olds with buckets of paint and brushes. I think it will be a real rallying point of the barrio, as I still hear stories of the past mural that was painted 6 years ago. I’m really excited for the first day of going to the barrio after it is finished, turning the corner, and seeing the explosion of color on the wall. Wow that will feel good.
I help set the table now. It is a wonderful thing being the guest in a house, but after about 6 months of always being the guest in places I am very content assuming the role of member of the meal instead of the reason for the meal. I normally bring some sort of food to the lunches and dinners now, and I love knowing where the dishes are, so I can set the table before they can ask me. As I begin to miss home, new homes are opening up to me, and treating me like family. It is a very exciting time in the life of a traveler as I prepare for Christmas and the New Year, filled with odd traditions and even odder food. Case in point, I consumed cow intestine and wanted to cry a little bit. With that I will leave you all. Feliz navidad, enjoy the snow, which I really miss as I type this sweating, enjoy family, enjoy life.

October 2007

I realized the other day that I’m beginning to feel something more for this city and these people when someone mentioned I had 10 months left and I thought “ohh no, only 10 months left”. Month two has been a different and wonderful month. The first month that I was here in Resistencia was a lot of James not really understanding anything.
My principle job here is to give workshops. Currently I am teaching guitar twice a week, helping out with two women who give a workshop for 2-5 year olds, and planning a mural with the kids of the barrio. As I saw it in the beginning I was doing nothing more than teaching some chords and trying to make the barrio a little more pretty with a mural. Then Ofelia, my supervisor who is infinitely wise for her 37 years of age, put what the mission where I work, into perspective. The barrio I work in is very “humble” as my friend Estela puts it. What that means is that there are dirt roads that flood with a foot of water when it rains, streets filled with trash that horses and dogs eat to stay alive only to die of malnutrition, kids with no shoes, and where every person within our church has been robbed at least once within the last year. It’s a life that is far different from any that I’ve ever lived. What I’ve had in my life and taken for granted, I realize as I look around a room of 20 people and see only my hand raised at the question “does anyone have an email address” or as I talk about my travels around the United States, the world, and Argentina to find out the person with whom I speak has never left the city. My existence is far different from the existence of my friends in el barrio Juan Bautista Alberdi. The mission where I work is a place of empowerment. It is a place where painting a mural isn’t about putting color on a wall, it is about showing kids that they have capacity to organize and design, and make where they live more beautiful. Working together isn’t really a skill that has been emphasized in the 4-14 year olds that I work with, and this is a space for them to learn about that. It is frustrating, but Ofelia is just about the most patient person I have ever met, and that calmness has rubbed off on me to some extent. Social rules like not punching to get what you want, or not throwing rocks at a building, aren’t enforced in normal barrio life, and the mission is a place where kids can learn and practiced those. Teaching guitar here isn’t about chords, it’s about giving a child or adult, that would normally answer the question “what do you do for fun?” with an “I don’t know”, a hobby to be proud of.
I love being in the barrio, and I miss it when I’m not there. This past month has been a time for me to actually make connections with people and show people who I am. I have people to visit now when I am bored, and am invited to things when I mention a free day or night. People ask me about my family and things that are going on in my life, instead of asking how old I am now. It is a deeper level in the relationships that I have. I have been called friend and told that I’m like a member of the family, and those moments are just about the greatest things that I could ask for.
Spanish is still so frustrating and a good majority of what I say is wrong or stumbled over, but I don’t let it get to me too much and mistakes are still funny. I asked a woman the other day if she had relations with another woman instead of asking if they were related. I told a girl to give me her eyes instead of a piece of paper, and talked about the plane flu for about 15 minutes instead of the bird flew. The list goes on and on, but I love speaking and learning, and it amazes me to think I have real friends that know about my life and that I care about, that I’ve never shared an English sentence with. I don’t expect to ever be wonderful at speaking Spanish, but a couple correct sentences once in a while would be nice.
I am surrounded by people here that just amaze me and challenge the way that I live. I am learning more of who I am, and when you are removed from everything you know, you learn quickly what your strengths are, and your weaknesses become blaringly obvious. I am happy here in Argentina. 10 months are going to go by very fast.
-james