Here we go:
So the ISP was BY FAR the best part of the whole study abroad program and MAYBE (probably not) made up for all the other deficiencies in the earlier part of the semester.
The first week of the ISP, I travelled down to Puerto Madryn, a 20 hour bus ride down to the northern part of the Patagonia coast in Chubut province. I met with a grad student, Ana Mariel Wienstock, who’s working on her thesis that has to do with the Mapuche territorial conflict. So she was my first step into making contacts. I met a Mapuche “vocero” or spokesman for the community living in the city of Puerto Madryn and he said he hoped to be able to organize a trip up into the mountains where the majority of the Mapuche communities are for me to meet and interview people where the conflict is actually taking place. Well, he couldn’t get it organized, so there I was at the end of the second week far away from the Mapuches without any contacts and Ana Mariel had to travel to Buenos Aires where she wouldn’t be able to help.
Worrying all week and unable to organize anything or get any work done without contacts, I explored Puerto Madryn a lot. I was staying in an apartment that Ana Mariel owned and I could walk to the beach, just 5 blocks away. A couple times, I walked waaaay around the edge of the ocean following tall white cliffs for miles down the coast. I found a couple old shipwrecks that you could walk down to at low tide and there was endless amounts of sea glass.
One day, I rented a car to go to the Valdes Penensula, a HUGE national park. The region is definitely desert, but unfortunately (maybe?) the one day I decided to spend money on an entire day outside, the weather decided to turn rainy. Fortunately though, that meant I had the entire park to myself. I saw 3 cars the entire day! The peninsula has a big 150 mile loop of dirt roads the go around, so I spent the day driving and stopping whenever I felt like it to eat or hike a bit. I saw SO many animals! Check out my photos. There were huge cliffs leading down to the water or desolate, long black sandy beaches. I saw all kinds of birds (no penguins, sadly… I guess they all went to Brazil), sea lions, and elephant seals. You could come way up close and they never minded. Up away from the water, the peninsula had endless grassy plains or scrubby trees and salt flats every now and then. I saw a fox that let me come really close to photograph it (check out the page I posted last entry), rheas (mini-ostriches… look ‘em up), guanacos (kind of like llamas), wild horses, and zillions of cool birds. It was a fun day. Absolutely BEAUTIFUL landscapes. At the end on the way home, I even got to see a GREAT sunset as the rainstorm blew out.
Finally, at the end of the second weekend of the ISP, Ana Mariel managed to contact Mauro Millan, another Mapuche “vocero” who lives in El Maiten, a little town a few hours south of Bariloche. Mauro told me that he’d be glad to host me and help organize a trip into a community and that I should hop on a bus right away. So, I got on the first overnight bus up into the mountains and got off in Esquel, a ski town south still of El Maiten. I waited a few hours that rainy morning in the bus station before I got a bus to El Maiten where Mauro met me.
Mauro was amazing. He absolutely saved my ISP. I would have had NOTHING without him, not to mention that his hospitality was astounding. That first afternoon, he took me into his house and we started talking right away and strategically planning my few days in the area. Right then, everything finally started falling together. He helped me find a place to stay with a family who had a room to spare (only $8 a night!). That evening, I went to his wife’s english classes in town and helped some. I was the first native English speaker the kids there had ever met! Afterwards, though I insisted I could cook something or go to a cafe, Mauro had me eat dinner with his family… it turned out that he did that for every meal I was in El Maiten for.
The next morning bright and early, I met him for his show on the Mapuche communal radio, Petü Mogeleiñ. On air, he asked who I was and what I was doing there and we discussed my ISP some, then he asked me a bunch about the US — how Obama is, if I voted for him, if there was really hope for improvement now, whether I was proud to be from the US or not, if there were land issues like theirs in the US too, what issues indigenous groups in the US had, and what themes were important to US agriculture (we talked about the similarities between the problems resulting in the US midwest and Argentina from soy monocultures and big-business agriculture). He also asked over the radio if there was anyone who would be willing to have me visit out in the communities.
It turns out that the radio station is one of their key tools for connecting and communicating because many of the Mapuche communities don’t have electricity or phones. Anyway, he got a cell call later that day from Gabino Huiliano, a health worker in Vuelta del Rio saying he’d like me to come. Just after our radio show, I went back into the lobby of the radio and there was a man waiting to talk to me… he had heard me on the radio and wanted to meet me. I was famous in El Maiten, Argentina!!
This guy was a firefighter for the El Maiten Volunteer Fire Department and he had heard me talking about how I worked for the Fire Department in Gambier. He said he was just curious to meet me to discuss and compare what our department and his were like. Well, I always thought we had problems with money, but these guys had 4 trucks, every one was older than me, and only one worked. He said they had 3 hoses. THREE HOSES! What do they do with that? They get about $6,700 a year from the government, but he said they spend that by Feb. or March and so that leaves them, the volunteers, picking up the slack. I couldn’t believe it. The volunteers end up paying for the very service they provide! Incredible. Sad!
That afternoon, Gabino came by Mauros and picked me up. We drove maybe 45 minutes south to the little health clinic he staffed in Vuelta del Rio, but we were basically cooped up in the house all afternoon since it was so rainy. During a little break, we made a run for his mom’s house across the river, an hour walk away. She was my very first official interview of the trip. We talked maybe 45 minutes over mate and “torta frita”, the Mapuche equivalent of a hole-less donut. I think they must have invented donuts… After we finished, we made a run for it back to the clinic in the pouring rain. We started his generator for the lights and stoked the wood stoves, then cooked dinner — potatoes, sausage, chicken, lamb, and a little salad. Healthy!
The next morning, we were going to go back across the river into the community to do more interviews, but during the night the river had come up and there was no way even to get to the bridge to cross. Instead, we spent the morning walking around our side to houses dropping off pills for de-parasiting dogs as a part of a government funded program. I got to talk to a couple other families. After lunch, a young guy who’s family we had talked to came by the clinic and I had a GREAT interview with him… we talked almost two hours. Later, after Gabino had finished his hours at the clinic, we drove back to El Maiten for a mate at Mauro’s house before Gabino headed home.
Mauro and I had an epic evening… two guys about my age came by his house to visit and I got to talk to them for a while too — they had traveled with Mauro to Italy during the Benetton case to protest. We tried to drive them home, but got a flat tire and spent hours and hours in the cold and rain trying to find somewhere to get it fixed since we had no spare that fit the car. It was SO cold. Luckily when we found a tire place open still, they were friendly enough to share a hot mate with us.
Lets take an intermission. Let me tell you about mate. I love it. Maybe you don’t know what it is, but it’s amazing. It’s a traditional drink in Argentina and Uruguay. It’s like a strong, strong tea made out of “yerba mate”. You put the yerba into your “mate” which is a little gourd or wooden cup and then you pour hot (NOT boiling) water in and suck through a “bombilla” or metal filtered straw to drink the mate. I hated it at first. I though it tasted like drinking liquid hay, but now I LOVE it. More than anything for the process and the whole social aspect to it. It’s a time in the day to sit down and relax or talk with someone and share some time and your mate with them. On top of that, the feeling mate give you is like drinking coffee but without the jitters or a crash after. On top of that, a nice hot mate is PERFECT on a cold night when you’re completely soaked to the bone after trying to fix a flat tire.
Anyway, after we finally got the tire fixed, we grabbed ingredients for dinner. Guess what it was… meat and potatoes. I think I had meat and potatoes for every single meal in El Maiten. We sat down for dinner that last night in El Maiten and mostly everything was just small talk, but just before I left, Mauro invited me to come later this month for the Mapuche new years ceremony on the equinox. Mom and I are going to go… I’m really excited! I don’t kno what to expect, but it will surely be interesting. It’s not the kind of thing they normally invite many people to. Before he dropped me off at the hospedaje, Mauro explained to me the best way to get back to Buenos Aires from there. If only it had been that easy…
The next morning, I got up bright and early for a 7:30 colectivo out of El Maiten to the town of El Bolson where I hopped into a taxi (in the still POURING rain — at least ankle deep water in all the streets) and got a ticket for a 9:45 bus to Bariloche. I got on the bus and headed for Bariloche, but an hour into the ride, we got to a line of cars and a police officer came onto the bus saying that the road had been closed due to an avalanche. We waited another hour hoping it would open, but when the police came back saying that there was no chance the road would open soon, we went back and I waited ALL DAY LONG in the bus station. They kept saying, oh, maybe at noon a bus will leave, no maybe 2pm, 4pm, until around 5 I gave up and found a hostel for the night. The next morning I got up bright and early again and went by the bus station. Still no way to Bariloche AND on top of that, the water in the river rose during the night and undercut a bridge. They wouldn’t let buses out of El Bolson at all. To the south, roads were too icy (and maybe there were more landslides), so there was no way out to the coast either. I was 100% stranded AND I had none of my books I needed to start writing the 40 page ISP. Normally, it would have been fun to be stuck in El Bolson and it probably would have only meant a few extra days. No biggie. But I had the most extensive project I’ve ever done due in only a week. So I wasn’t okay being stranded. Even so, I made good use of my time. That region is famous for its chocolate (so I got some), and there’s a good microbrewery with 20-something kinds of beers. That’s a rare find in Argentina, the land of boring light beers, and there’s a lot of unique food that comes from the surrounding mountains. I had trout with wild mushrooms… delish!
Anyway, that afternoon, I teamed up with a British guy, a German guy, and an American girl when we overheard the police talking to the bus company. They said that MAYBE they’d be able to let a few vehicles past later that day. Right away, we ran to the remise taxi office betting that maybe the big heavy buses wouldn’t make it through and split a hired car 4 ways. We had the MOST proactive driver ever. I felt a little bad even, but I HAD to get back to BA. When we got to the checkpoint, he cut a bunch of cars in the line and said that we all URGENTLY had to get to the airport to make flights (not true), but after a few hours waiting, we had managed to sneak up to the front and finally did make it through when the police opened the road. We saw what the problem had been… huge chunks of road had fallen off into a lake at one point and there were maybe 5 places where floods had brought avalanches of rock, dirt, and trees across the road. In three places, there was still a lot of water flowing over. Well phew. We made it to Bariloche, but unfortunately I missed the last bus out by 30 minutes, so I had to spend one night in town before catching and early bus back to BA. 20 hours later, I was walking out of the bus terminal into my taxi for home. Finally!!
I spent the next week writing and in meetings with my Spanish tutor and ISP advisor. No exciting news. I based the paper off two ideas. First was the idea of the Mapuches fighting for something defined by the state as “property” when the Mapuches in their very communalistic culture don’t have a word or hardly any concept of “property”. The second was that the conflict has absolutely no possible fair resolution now because of a judicial pluralism, which is to say that the Mapuches don’t identify themselves as Argentines, but rather, they identify themselves as the Mapuche Nation which has existed since long before Argentina. As such, they have their own judicial system which has always resolved conflicts fairly, so clearly the Argentine system wouldn’t be applicable or fair in any way particularly in international conflicts.
I have never felt so personally invested or even so interested in any academic endeavor. At the end, my adviser invited me to participate in her research team of grad students and professors with the Institute of Superior Social Studies in BA, saying that the work I was doing was very original and highly relevant right now. I feel like I could write a whole book about it now… I’m even slightly considering trying to go for a Fulbright. We’ll see.
Anyway, the last week of SIT was a blur. Finished writing, got printed and bound copies of the ISP, did my presentation, had a closing day at an estancia outside of Buenos Aires, had a closing dinner with all the families, and on Monday we had a closing lunch with all the students and the SIT staff. In Argentina, any time there’s a big event or celebration, they eat asado (barbecue). I can’t tell you how much asado we ate that week. Luckily I love it…
Monday afteroon, I left with a few of the other SIT kids for Colonia, Uruguay where we spent a day before coming to Montevideo. Colonia was a nice change from BA. Its a tiny, relaxed town filled with old colonial architecture and bougainvilleas spilling ofter the walls. It’s right up along the Rio de la Plata. It felt really Mediterranean actually…
Since Tuesday afternoon, we’ve been in Montevideo. I love it here as well. It’s much smaller and more relaxed than BA and the people are all SO friendly. So far, it seems like our trip has mostly been based off food. It’s pretty good I don’t live in this city or I’d probably gain 500 pounds. In both Colonia and Montevideo, we ordered chivito, Uruguay’s typical sandwich/ pile of food (search for that on Google Images, you’ll see what I mean). Yesterday afternoon, we went to the Mercado del Puerto and had the biggest pile of delicious asado I’ve ever seen accompanied with big cold beers and medio-medio, an Uruguayan drink — half white wine, half sparkling wine. We spent the afternoon waddling around the sea wall, digesting our asado. Today has been pretty relaxed, took the bus to another part of town and explored, then came back to the area near our hostel and had lunch in a little art gallery/ cafe. Tomorrow in the early afternoon, we catch the bus to Colonia where we’ll hop back on the ferry to BA. I’ll be back home by dinner time and then mom comes eaaaarly Sat. morning. We have a pretty epic trip planned.
Here’s the outline:
Sat-Sun: BA
Mon-Wed: Iguazu — both the Argentine and Brazilian sides
Wed night in BA
Thurs: Bus overnight to Bariloche,
Fri: rent a car in Bariloche, find somewhere to spend the night. The next couple days aren’t planned fully yet, but there’s tons of hiking, skiing, snowshoeing, glaciers, etc, etc, etc.
The next Tues-Wed. we’ll be in El Maiten for the Mapuche New Years — should be interesting!
Thurs afternoon or maybe Friday morning, we’ll get a Bus back to BA and we’ll hopefully make it up to Tigre Sat. morning before mom leaves.
After that, I have 2 unplanned weeks before Chile. Not sure where I’m going yet… We’ll see!
