Bienvenidos a Argentina!

We made it!! We arrived in La Plata around 2 am this morning, one day late and working the unwashed look. It was only after an unexpectedly long haul that we ended up crawling into our blissfully smoke-free hostel beds by 2:30 or so. Ironic how the team with only ONE connection to make in Washington D.C. (India and Uganda teams both had multiple layovers) experienced the most technical difficulty.

Here’s the whole story. Our flight was delayed from 9:52 pm on Saturday until 1:15 pm on Sunday. Well, not so much delayed as it was cancelled and rescheduled. United put us up in a Hilton hotel close to Dulles (wait before you envy us for our good fortune) and gave us food vouchers to use for breakfast the next morning. If we hadn’t waited long enough in line for the vouchers, we waited for another hour for our shuttle to the hotel and got there around 11:30. We then rejoiced in yet another line before we got our room keys. Turns out that they ran out of rooms because we weren’t the only flight cancelled that night, so they put our 12 person co-ed group into 4 rooms with one king bed each, two of which rooms were designated smoking and smelled strongly. Not that I’m complaining—staying in the Hilton was far from roughing it! One of the perks was the free TV. The next morning we watched a news show that featured this Bangladeshi woman who was against microfinance. Gasp! She argued that micro loans created a cycle of debt since most recipients would require more than one loan to make a profit off their new enterprise. She pointed to the short repayment schedule—often starting within a few weeks of the loan’s initiation—as the reason for this debt cycle. In many cases, the recipients would take a second/third/fourth loan to repay the debt incurred by the first loan, while creating even more debt. Another point she made (and I can’t remember her name, sorry) was that microfinance divides the community. Part of the beauty of the system is that the community enforces repayment, replacing the need for valuable collateral. However, this enforcement strategy pits community members against anyone who can’t repay their loans: instead of being supported by their community, those debtors are forced into taking on more loans and creating more debt for themselves. It was a very thought-provoking interview, and I look forward to hearing what those microfinance interns have to say about those points.

But I digress. However hard to believe, there was even more fun to be had before we got to Buenos Aires. The flight itself wasn’t particularly memorable until they informed us that we were required to wear face masks as we exited the plane. Turns out that the Argentine government is more worried about H1N1 (“Gripe A”, aka the Swine) than they put on in the media. But apparently they were not worried enough to make us wear the masks after we had made it through customs—I’m not exactly sure what purpose it served beyond making us breathe in our own bad plane breath. Eww. Here’s a picture of us after we were almost about to venture onto Argentine soil. So fierce!


Anne from the Foundation for Sustainable Development graciously received us in the lobby of the airport despite the late hour. We each got one kiss on the right cheek—a custom I will have to get used to, since it is the expected greeting between any new or old acquaintances. We piled into a large van and made the 1+ hour drive back to La Plata while listening to a mix of poppy American music and Spanish hip hop. Interesting note: midterm elections were held on Sunday, so I noticed all kinds of billboards advertising candidates (particularly Kirchner and Scioli) along the highways. I should give a little background. The current president is Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner is married to former president, yesterday’s congressional candidate, Nestor Kirchner of the Peronist party. Not only did Nestor Kirchner lose his bid in Congress, but the Kirchners’ party lost the majority in both houses and even lost their home province. Things are not looking good for the golden couple. I have yet to initiate a political conversation with an Argentine in my effort to be noncombative on my first day, so I can fill in the blanks once I learn more.

Today, we were allowed to sleep in a bit and got to the FSD office around 10:45. We then “got orientated” to some safety concerns and rules in the Castellano dialect. Fabian, Nancy, and Anne will be supporting us during our stay here. (Shout out to the Cheadles: I’ll have to tell Fabian that he should have been named Allen, because then we would have hit the trifecta!) It’s been great so far to get to know everyone, but I’m chafing a little at the handholding. So far, most of our guides will translate any encounter with Argentines into English for us—and our guides are with us constantly. I’m looking forward to starting work with our host organization and moving into homestays so we will have more uninhibited contact with the community. Tomorrow will give us many more opportunities to do just that—we have been invited to make lunch with Horacio at Biosfera!!—so I imagine I’ll have a very different outlook on my experience then. Hasta luego!

A New Beginning

People keep asking me if I’m excited to leave for Argentina in the morning, but the mix of emotions that I am feeling is hard to describe in a single adjective.  Excited?  Claro que si (of course)!  At the same time, I can’t help feeling that something special just came to an end.  The past ten days have equipped me with community organizing skills that I could not conceive of two weeks ago; two weeks ago, I had over 50 fewer friends than I do now; two weeks ago, I had not delighted in the magical combination of cheese and caramel popcorn that is native to Chicago (thanks for the tip, Diamond!).  All of these revelations occurred in 10 days, so I can only imagine what I’ll have to describe after 7 weeks in Argentina.  Nevertheless, I am more than a little excited about embarking tomorrow.  Once we arrive in La Plata on Sunday morning, we have three days of orientation with the Foundation for Sustainable Development.  This phase will focus more on getting to know the city and getting introduced to Castellano, the dialect of Spanish that is spoken in Argentina.  For the Spanish buffs out there, the main differences are the pronunciation of the “ll” and “y” sounds (it turns into something between “sh” and “zh”), and the replacement of “tu” with “vos.”  On Wednesday, I will be placed in my host family and will begin work at Biosfera, the environmental non-profit that has agreed to supervise us.  Biosfera does have a website—www.biosfera.org—that is a little slow, but it’s worth checking out for the amazing breadth of environmental issues they work to address with a staff of three.  We talked to Horacio, the star of the whole show, over Skype and he sounds like an incredibly knowledgeable and passionate man.  He spent most of the call telling us how excited he was to meet us, and how he wanted to work with us to design a project we could all be excited about.  I can’t wait to meet him!

Before I go any further, I should give credit to the staff at GESI for organizing an amazing summit that raised us all to an equal playing field.  One of the most important things we gained were the procedural skills to allow our team work efficiently: things like the conflict management, decisionmaking processes, and meta-communication that are necessary to non-hierarchical collaboration.  I realize I may not have mentioned this critical component of our project: no single person is appointed the “leader,” and any leadership position is rotated on a weekly basis.  A natural leader may emerge, but if I may brag a little about my team, El Equipo (our team name, aka The Team) is choc full of leaders.  Lack of leadership won’t be our problem.  Brett just graduated from UC-Davis and previously volunteered in Peru installing more efficient and properly ventilated wood-burning stoves in rural homes. Brett’s the oldest at 28 and, as they say, has more “real world” experience.  Emily also just graduated from the University of Illinois, and she is our resident language consultant because she studied abroad in Buenos Aires for an extended semester.  Liana is a rising senior at Colorado College and spent last fall in Copenhagen examining sociological issues around Migration and Identity.  (Which, by the way, is the exact same program I will be matriculating in myself this fall, woohoo!) I’m the baby, but I don’t think it’s that obvious.  I got skills, yo. ;)

Last night was really the final night of the orientation because it was the last night everyone was together.  After dinner, several of us took advantage of free admission at the Art Institute and got a glimpse of the brand new modern art wing.  I got front and center with a Salvador Dali painting that took my breath away.  There was also a fair share of art that was so modern it was incomprehensible—like the “Clown Torture” exhibit that consisted of several TVs showing three different clowns in varying stages of distress.  For example, one was sitting on a toilet and reading a magazine.  Another was rolling and screaming on the floor.  After leaving the Art Institute, we wandered into Millennium Park and checked out the huge and mirror-bright bean that can reflect the entire Chicago skyline on its curved surface (Pictured above).  When we finally returned to the hostel (there was Dairy Queen run in there somewhere too), we took over a TV dedicated to Michael Jackson tributes and watched a Bollywood movie titled “Jodhaa Akbar,” an epic romance.  And I do mean epic in the sense that it was 3.5 hours long. Most of the India team present fell asleep long before the end—they’re going to be there soon enough!

The India and Uganda teams left this morning amid many hugs and some tears, but the Argentina team’s send-off in the morning won’t be nearly as nostalgic.  The one emotion I think we all share at the moment is impatience to get this adventure started.  We’re ready! Vamos!

Time Is On Our Side

One side effect of an intense summit like this is that it sparks a lot of intense thinking.  How arduous!  The field trip and free time that we had this weekend gave me a chance to ponder what we've been learning about community development, and I think I've come up with more questions than I have answers.  Bear with me while I try to reason through them here, and feel free to comment with your own thoughts.

I mentioned in my last post that ABCD (asset-based community development) is all about building upon existing strengths instead of aiming to come up with a fix to the community's worst problems.  My immediate reaction was, well, the problems (like high crime rates, dropout rates, etc) will still be a problem no matter how many block parties you have, so don't you have to focus on the problem at some point?  ABCD seemed a little too happy-go-lucky to work on the ground.  But, after our visits to the highly successful community development projects on the West Side of Chicago (Bethel New Life, pictured below, and The Resurrection Project), it became clear that although both groups focus their efforts in community strengths instead of resources, both projects are far from naive about their community's problems.  The ABCD approach emphasizes process instead of quick-fixes: it uses thorough assessments of a community to discover the residents' highest priorities, from which the development organization picks areas of focus based on available tools [assets].  ABCD does not ignore problems; instead, it lets the community voice its own perspective on what needs to be done instead of an "outsider organization" (we talk a lot about being outsiders) prescribing solutions to statistics-based problems.  

This approach, I am realizing more and more, makes a lot of sense.  It takes patience.  Most importantly, it requires being an insider or knowing how to locate the insiders.  And it produces a lot of amazing stories.  Mary from Bethel New Life talked about one of her innovations to make her neighborhood safer.  One day, she and her friends set up a lemonade stand on a corner where drug deals were known to take place.  There was so much traffic on that one corner that, in a single day, their stand raised over $300 in profits.  If you consider that each cup of lemonade cost 25 cents, over 1200 cups of lemonade were consumed--how many of those people were coming to buy or sell drugs?  Before you set out to do the same thing in your neighborhood, you have to wonder: do you know where drug deals take place in your town?  How long would you have to live in a community to know that fact?  I've lived in Moscow, Idaho nearly my whole life, I'm among an age group that stereotypically uses a lot of drugs, and even I don't know where to buy drugs (cue my parent's sighs of relief).  But I know who I could ask, and I can probably anticipate their answer: the dealers in Moscow don't work on street corners, they work out of apartments or college dorms or their basements.  So the lemonade stand idea wouldn't work in my community.  This tells me a couple of things: first, there's no cookie-cutter solution to any problem, so you have to know your community well to make a real difference; second, no one person is an expert, so you have to access a network of community members to get the whole picture.

You can now imagine my trepidation about our seven week time limit in each of our communities.  In such a short amount of time, is it possible to insert myself in a new language, a new culture, a new community, and become expert enough to pinpoint a single opportunity for the most change?  However, the lovely folks at GESI have anticipated my worry and come up with an answer: think of Time as an asset, not as a barrier.  We have Time to make a difference, and that's a blessing in itself.

Realistically, though, the best we can probably do is plant a seed for future development and hope that our new partners in La Plata will see it through.  When I think of doing similar work at a college where we have, at most, four years to do the same work, I realize that we should focus more on planting seeds than we should at checking off something of our list of "things to fix about Wellesley before we leave." (Wellesley readers, you know what I'm talking about)  I have to stop worrying about my personal legacy and start thinking about long-term change. We have to trust that students after us will have the capacity to sustain our projects--if not, either the there was something wrong with the project idea or we didn't put enough legwork into capacity-building.  If I want to stay connected to a project, I would have to make the commitment to stick around.  Bethel New Life took ten years to build a home for seniors.  The Resurrection Project took 15 years to see their homicide rate decrease significantly.  A project may take time you and I don't have, but some passionate person has that time--so make sure to reach out to those people!

I wrote that last sentence more as a reminder to myself, but maybe you will find it helpful in your quest for sustainable solutions.  Most of the tools that we now have under our belts are applicable to every occupation imaginable.  Ha ha! to all those people who scoff at community organizing as some left-wing conspiracy to take over (we prefer the word "save") the world.

Tonight, I am lucky enough to have some Time left to finish the copious amount of reading required for tomorrow.  See how optimistic this ABCD approach is making me?!  I do have some stories to share about my adventures around Chicago this weekend--pictures included--but you will have to wait until a later post.  Patience, I have come to accept, is one of our greatest Assets.

Day Two: Meeting Jody and Paul

Today, most memorably, was exhausting!  We arrived by bus at Wieboldt Hall to begin at 10 am sharp.  Orientation was followed by an enlightening introduction to Asset-Based Community Development (the ABCDs for college students) by John Kretzmann.  For those of you unfamiliar with Jody, he's a pioneer of this ABCD approach and trained the likes of Barack Obama to become community organizers.  Barack Who, you say?  Indeed, no small potatoes allowed to teach us GESI kids.  Jody wants us to refocus our attention on the positive attributes of each of our communities and to avoid focusing on the problems.  For example, instead of being inspired by illiteracy as the reason for charity, we need to identify the "success stories" and use those to inspire local residents to invest in their own educational future.  My mind was a little blown when "service" was juxtaposed as the negative counterpart to "empowerment," though I think I was more surprised by the language than I was by the sentiment.  Our second professor in the afternoon was Paul Arntson, another well-respected professor of Communications at Northwestern.  His lesson was focused around the language of communities, and learning how to ferret out the places and people that are central to each of our host communities.  Two guest speakers spoke after dinner about Ugandan politics, which was interesting though not directly related to my impending service in Argentina.  My jet-lagged brain can't recall much more than that at the moment--no fear, I have thorough notes I can refer to once I'm more rested.

What I'm not mentioning is that once we arrived on the fourth floor of Wieboldt Hall at 10 am, we didn't leave until after 8 pm.  All our meals, classes, and breakout sessions were confined to that one floor.  I have a feeling we will be harboring less-than-friendly emotions towards that floor once we've spent eight days treading its paisley carpet and inhabiting its excessively air conditioned rooms.

My hour walk back to the Hostel International-Chicago was the only glimpse into Chicago life I have gotten so far, but I am already intrigued.  The walk happened to include the Michigan Mile where we got to experience its famous window shopping and cultural relics.  More exploring beyond this one stretch of road (thank goodness) is in the cards for this weekend, when we venture with Jody to the West Side for a real taste of the history of community organizing here.  Some time is alloted on Sunday to explore other cultural landmarks--sadly, no Cubs game in my future!  The only thing I can foresee right now is the large pile of reading to be completed by the morning.  Signing off!

Day One and the Deers

(Note: this post was written on 6/16/09 but posted a day later due to internet difficulties at the hostel)

Dad and I dragged ourselves out of bed at a god awful hour I am reluctant to even repeat (hours before sunrise) to get me to the Spokane airport for my early flight to Chicago.  I admit I was feeling a little gloomy to leave behind my family and my pets after a wonderful three weeks at home.  Everyone seemed to feel equally sad about my departure--even Pepper, my deaf and blind Shih Tzu, summoned a congealed tear--everyone, that is, except the two deer that provided a rather rude awakening.

Granted, any predawn driving warrants some extra caution to avoid deer traffic.  However, these deer went out of their way to loiter on the road while Dad and I approached them in the car.  Both slowed to a near stroll as they crossed the major highway (major for Washington standards . . . meaning it was a wide two-laner), and one even had the guts to jump two highway barriers just to intersect our car!  I suppose I could take this as a friendly Palouse farewell, but it was the decidedly unfriendly tail shaking in my general direction that convinced me otherwise.  Someone (two someones) were clearly scorning my decision to leave.  

I can't say I have real evidence yet to prove that my departure was worth leaving behind such amiable company; such evidence I will make an effort to provide over the next two months.  All I can say is that I'm here, I've met some very cool and exciting people, and everyone is excited to start class bright and early tomorrow!