It was a day, just like any other day...

So, last Wednesday was a nice, full, rather eventful day at La Obra...and I conveniently remembered to bring my camera!


1. The morning went mostly like this - fairly calm studying in the Centro de Estudios with Claudio and Virginia.
2. Then...LUNCH, prepared by the culinarily-skilled, but camera-shy, Ana.
3. The kids for the afternoon program showed up shortly thereafter...and amazingly, this was NOT how somehow ended up going to the hospital for X-rays.
4. Fabiana and I worked together for the day; as you can tell, she´s a great hit with the kids of all ages....and, ok, with the adults, too. If she´s talking, there´s a good chance she´s joking.
5. During the mid-afternoon break, and sometimes before or after it on the sly, the boys have taken to playing marbles...which sometimes become so distracting that we have to take them up. I had a pocket full of them for half the day, which made the teaching-the-kids-how-to-play-basketball work that much harder. That, and my lack of basketball skills...but I at least made sure everyone knew that Manu Ginoboli plays for MY team - Go Spurs!
6. While the boys play marbles, the girls get out the jump ropes, taking turns between turning the rope and jumping.
7. This is Anita, one of the new students this year. She just started school in March, and is one of the sweetest, most well-behaved 6 year olds I´ve met. Her older siblings - Yeferson and Romina - also come to La Obra in the afternoon. Note in the background Natalia and Fabiana drinking mate while some of the girls hang out with them for girl talk...or to wait for the ambulance. Carolina fell during basketball and hurt her wrist; it was serious enough that she had to go have X-rays taken.
8. After break, we lined up the younger kids (Escuelita 1) for game time. It went fairly well, but eventually got a little out of hand, so we called it a day and moved inside for homework-and-reading.
9. Aldo, Jonathan, and Alejandro...oh my. Three very good kids, but ones fully capable of being handfuls. Aldo I´ve talked about before; Jonathan is new and I´m just getting to know him; Alejandro has decided that my friend and fellow volunteer, Kristina (in La Plata), must be my girlfriend since she came to visit us in Montevideo...that was in February, and he´s still making jokes about it.
10. Leticia and Anita decided to share a book - Anita doesn´t know how to read yet, so Leticia was helping her out a little bit. I´d also read a story to her and another girl who hasn´t learned to read yet, and also read with some students who can read, but need a little help now and then with bigger words.
11. Robert is one of the big kids in Escuelita 1 this year. He seems to have grown up a lot, in about every way, since I got here in September...but still gets a little TOO competitive at game time. Of course, so did everyone I went to high school with, including me.
12. Emilia, a new girl whose name is escaping me (bah!) , and Juanita. Their facial expressions tell you a LOT about their personalities. A lot.
13. Juanita is new this year, and like Anita, just starting primary school. She´s a very sweet, very emotional kid.
14. To wrap up the day, the kids get to have a snack - last Wednesday, it was cake and licuado (like a smoothie, but no cream). Obviously, they get pretty excited by this.

So, that´s a day at La Obra Ecumenica Barrio Borro...a long day, but a good one filled with some of the neatest kids and co-workers I can imagine.

April Newsletter Entry

This month´s newsletter will, like February´s, be a departure from the Franklin´s Choice formula, albeit for a different reason this time around; namely, that Franklin hasn´t sent us a prompt and it´s almost the end of the month. Today´s topic: Time.

It has been almost 8 months since my arrival in South America. Two-thirds of a year have gone by. When I left the United States, John McCain was all but being encouraged to drop out of the presidential race, Barack Obama wasn´t a household name, and gas still cost less than $3.00 a gallon in southeast Texas. No news organizations had put up hyperlinks to a New York call girl´s MySpace page yet, no senators had been accused of lewd acts in airport bathrooms, and an ounce of rice did not yet have the same approximate value of an ounce of pure gold. The Patriots hadn´t had a perfect season (yet still lost the Super Bowl), the Rockets hadn´t won twenty games in a row, and nobody thought that an Olympic torch relay could become political. There was no “Soulja Boy” on the radio, the screenwriter´s guild hadn´t gone on strike yet, and movies that came out about the time I left are now being released on DVD.

I feel, in some ways, a little bit like a cultural Rip Van Winkle. I remember when I came back to the U.S. after a half-year in Africa and Europe. People would whine about how overplayed certain songs were, only to get a puzzled look from me…half the time, I hadn´t even heard the song in question! I had no idea what was playing at the movie theatre, and I definitely couldn´t tell you what was on T.V.

However, I´m not in a vacuum. My eight months in Uruguay have been filled with other changes. When I arrived, the peso was 24 to the dollar; now, it´s 20 to one. Bus fare was 15.50 pesos; now, it´s 13.50. Argentina still had a male president, and the Partido Colorado hadn´t lost an election for decades in Paraguay. Patito Feo is at least not QUITE as omnipresent, and we all know who ended up with who at the end of “Son de Fierro.” When I arrived, Agarrate Catalina hadn´t swept the Carnaval competition, no shroud of smoke had prompted Uruguayans to dare Argentina to say the word “papermill” again, and it was potatoes and tomatoes, not rice, that were prohibitively expensive.

More personally, I couldn´t read a novel in Spanish (and DEFINITELY could not read Jorge Luis Borges, like I´m doing at the moment), or remember how to say “I´m excited” rather than “I´m exciting” en español. The members at Nuestro Salvador had never heard of enchiladas, tacos, or the Texas Longhorns, and the members included several people fewer than now. La Obra was physically about half as large as it is now, there were 35 rather than 54 kids enrolled in the afternoon program, Fabiana hadn´t had her baby yet, Natalia was out for a sprained wrist, and neither Roman nor Patricia had come, or gone, yet. I weighed 30 pounds more, had a moustache, and much shorter hair on September 5^th, and I´d never worked with kids for longer than a few hours every now and again.

I think of the people, too. José, one of the students who comes to La Obra for homework help, has a new, deeper voice compared to when we first got here. His older brother, Gustavo, and another participant from the first half of the year, Ximena, passed all the required exams to move on to the more specialized upper levels of secondary school. Santiago, one of the kids in Escuelita 1, is now no longer missing both of his two front teeth…suffice it to say his Dracula impression has now been ruined, as his canines don´t stand out nearly as much these days. Alejandra, the five year old daughter of two of Carlos and Carla at Nuestro Salvador, has started learning English at school and can count to 10...not always in the right order, but she knows all the words. The grupo de jóvenes at the Valdense church has changed some, as well – a few people have graduated and moved away from the city, and there are some new faces in the group, too. Dorothea is back in Germany, working hard at the university; I have to confess that I miss my talking-about-the-kids-and-making-fun-of-the-news partner.

And then there are the things that are coming full circle. The weather reminds me of October here – sunny and 22 C one day, cloudy and 15 C the next…or occasionally all in the same day. The days are getting short again. Activities that took summer breaks, like the choir at the Valdense church, are back in full swing like nothing ever happened. People come into Centro de Estudios half-panicked about tests, just like in November. Life goes on; the more things change, the more things stay the same.

Pictures, capítulo dos

Here´s the rest of that promised photo update...these ones span from Santiago to my arrival back in Montevideo. Tomorrow will be picture-taking day at La Obra, so with any luck, I´ll be able to get some shots of my more daily existence up before too long!


1. El Palacio de la Moneda, the old presidential palace of Chile. On Sept. 11, 1973, a U.S.-backed military coup overthrew Chile´s democratically-elected president, Salvador Allende. Allende, a doctor, barricaded himself in the palace and fought to the last.
2. The Central Post Office; it was the home of the governor prior to independence, hence its rather ornate-for-a-post-office appearance.
3. Old and new - Santiago´s cathedral and a shiny new office tower make for a look at Chile´s past and present on the Plaza de Armas.
4. A strikingly red church a few blocks from the Plaza de Armas.
5. Cerro Santa Lucia, a hill on the south edge of downtown that was turned into a park around the turn of the last century.
6. On the other side of the river from downtown is another hill, Cerro Cristobal. It´s quite tall, and to get up it, people generally take a series of cable cars, or else ride the funicular - as you can see, the funicular goes up a VERY steep slope.
7. The view is worth it, though - downtown Santiago, smog and all, as seen from Cerro Cristobal.
8. Parque Uruguay!
9-10. A Tale of Two Sculptures - the first is an enormous, early 20th century piece in the riverside park dedicated to the memory of Chile´s heroes of the war for independence. The second is of another life lost in the struggle for Chilean independence, albeit in a different way - the aforementioned Salvador Allende; it´s located opposite the Palacio de la Moneda.
11. Back to wine country - in the 16th century, Mendoza´s first winepresses were not stone, but rather were full-sized leather cowhides...people would press the grapes by jumping up and down on this, and the juice would come out through what had been the tail.
12. One of the vineyards at Bodega La Rural.
13. Wine casks at Viña El Cerno.
14. An Argentine country house outside of San Rafael, Mendoza province.
15. Home sweet home...the view of Montevideo on the way into the city is striking; this picture does not do it justice.

Pictures: Because I´m still working on the thousand words...part one

So, since I have not been able to pull together a satisfactory text entry for the day, or a newsletter entry for the month, here are some shots taken from mid-March through my trip to Santiago and Mendoza a few weeks ago...enjoy!
1. Claudio showing the new kids how to use Microsoft Word.
2. Walking with friends in the Uruguayan countryside near Minas.
3. Dorothea and Juliocesar (better know as Tiví) had a bit of a hammock war...
4. Old cars and old buildings in Colonia on St. Patrick´s Day.
5. The riverside in Colonia facing the ferry port - those boats have taken me to Buenos Aires and back on multiple occasions.
6. A street in the colonial-era Ciudad Vieja in Colonia.
7. Plaza de Mayo and the Casa Rosada, Buenos Aires. Plaza de Mayo is ground zero for social protest, and with a tax hike on soy farmers in the works, there´s been a LOT of that going on lately on the other side of the river.
8. A green, pleasant spot at Plaza San Martín, Buenos Aires.
9. This could be the stock newspaper shot of the Argentine flag...
10. Parque O´Higgins, Mendoza. Even though this is in a park, the rest of the city is just as green and shady.
11. A lake in the foothills of the Andean cordillera between Mendoza and Santiago.
12-14. Scenery along the highway through the mountains; it follows the Mendoza River for much of the time.
15. ACONCAGUA, the tallest mountain outside of the Himalayas. Or another really tall mountain near it; I´m still not sure.
16. The valley that surrounds Santiago de Chile is great farm-and-ranch land, AND even has a nice view of the mountains that surround it.

Part 2 is coming in the next day or two - photos from Santiago and more from Mendoza. I´m taking the camera to work on Wednesday, too, so I will soon hopefully have some good shots of work and daily life here to share!

COMIDA. YES.

So, to keep on rolling with our look at day-to-day aspects of my seven months, and counting, here in Uruguay, it´s time to talk turkey. Except not literally; I haven´t had turkey since I don´t know when...they don´t do turkey down here.

What they DO know how to eat, though, is beef. Uruguay and Argentina make Texas look like a wimp when it comes to beef consumption and, as much as it pains me to say it, the beef here is better than any I´ve had back home. Why? Because they don´t fatten up the cows with nasty feeds and pump them full of hormones and chemicals. They let their cows be cows - they eat grass out in the pasture, and apart from vaccination against anthrax, they don´t at all tamper with the cow´s biochemistry. This is beef the way God intended beef to taste, in other words. As for preparation, asado is prepared over wood coals, slow-cooked to delicious perfection. The cuts of meat here a bit different in the U.S., but similar. Generally speaking, if someone invites you over for an asado, you´ll be eating cuts like short ribs and brisket...basically what you´d get, in slightly different form, at a barbecue back in Texas. If you want a steak, you can get that, too - bife de lomo is basically a filet mignon, and bife de chorizo is a sirloin. It´s also unthinkable to have an asado without chorizos - sausages.

Of course, no asado is complete without getting into things that the average estadounidense probably would NOT eat - organ meats. There´s morcilla, which is blood sausage/black pudding; it tastes, kinda-sorta, like liverwurst, but a little sweeter...I use it to make dirty rice. Chinchulines are also popular - small intestine. I have eaten this once, and while the flavor isn´t bad at all, the consistency is iffy...the outside part is chewy enough to remind one of an inner tube. I´m not quite sure what´s on the inside of the chinchulín, and I may not want to know, but it´s alright - if you can get through the rubbery part. I have yet to eat riñones or hígado (kidneys and liver, respectively) at an asado, but they´re popular as well, and one of my friends has told me that riñon is his favorite cut at an asado.

As for non-asado Rioplatense foods, pizza and pasta dishes make extremely frequent appearances at the dinner table, as a very high number of Uruguayans and Argentines are of Italian descent...so, in other words, I have fit in QUITE well on that front. Fideos con tuco (pasta with red sauce) is eaten about as often as spaghetti with marinara sauce by the average family in the U.S., if not more so. Pasta dishes, on the whole, are pretty comparable; the pizza, however, tends to be different, and much closer to its Italian roots than U.S.-style pizzas. In Uruguay, pizza común typically comes without cheese - it´s the baked dough and sauce. The sauce, however, is so flavorful compared to the Norteamericano version of it that it doesn´t matter, and besides, this suddenly turns pizza into a pretty healthy meal without all the fatty cheese. Pizza with mozzarella, however, is still pretty common, and for people willing to spend the money, ham, veggies, etc. are normally available as well, plus some decidedly different toppings such as palm hearts and salsa golf (mayonnaise and ketchup mixed together). A decidedly Uruguayan part of the pizza dinner is a little something called fainá; it is a doughy concoction originally from Genoa (like many Uruguayans and Argentines) made from chickpea flour. I love the stuff personally, and am a big fan of pizza a caballo - eating a piece of pizza with a piece of fainá on top.

So, what´s for dessert, then? About ANYTHING with dulce de leche. This is a type of caramel made from putting together some milk and some sugar and then cooking it down to brown, sticky, gooey wonderfulness. Flan, that most Iberian of desserts, is pretty common (topped with dulce de leche), and sweet rice (arroz con leche) is quite popular, too. Cakes of all shapes and sizes, again very often involving dulce de leche, make frequent appearances. And then there´s the alfajor. This is basically the world´s best idea, ever. You take two cookies, normally soft sugar cookie-esque ones, put lots of dulce de leche in betweem them, stick them together, and then sprinkle shredded coconut on them. You can also dip them in chocolate, use different kinds of cookies, etc. And they´re all good. My personal favorite permutation comes from Minas, about 2 hours on the bus from Montevideo - they put cinnamon and nutmeg in the cookie dough (giving it that nice, autumny, pumpkin pie-like flavor), and instead of the coconut, they use a type of marzipan to create a sugary layer around the cookie.

Of course, no write-up of food around the Rio de la Plata would be complete without a mention of the empanada. Empanadas are bigger in Argentina than Uruguay, but we still eat them here. This is basically a turnover - you take your dough, put a filling in, close it up into a half-moon shaped pocket, and then bake it or fry it (I prefer them baked). There is a place not far from my house that supposedly has about 50 varieties of empanadas! The classic is ground beef with spices, chopped olive, chopped hard-boiled egg, and raisins, but ham and cheese, spinach, chicken, seafood, etc etc etc are easy enough to find, too.

Are you amazed yet that I have still somehow managed to lose over 20 pounds???

Más música es mejor música

So, this week´s mission at Mate Mondays: cultura popular. Music on the radio, food, T.V...all the daily things I´ve become so used to over the past seven-and-a-half months in Montevideo. Today´s topic: music.

I´ve talked quite a bit about murga, but not so much about the sort of stuff that gets radio play. One of the biggest bands in Uruguay right now is La Vela Puerca. They´re rock nacional (i.e. they´re Uruguayan), marked by catchy melodies and smarter-than-your-average-pop-song lyrics. My personal favorite is this one (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wyg2E3iMVvM), Zafar...we´ve sung it with the kids at La Obra. For the non-Spanish speakers reading this blog, the lyrics deal with life in the city, with all its pollution and problems, and the need to get away. Another well-known and liked song by La Vela Puerca (again, I know this one originally from music time at La Obra) is El Viejo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMmqBjFIUIQ&feature=related).

La Vuela Puerca is far from the only home-brewed act, however. El Cuarteto de Nos, another rock band, has gotten a lot of radio play for their song Yendo A La Casa de Damián (note the incredibly heavy usage of words derived from English in the song!) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKbcMsd7TsY); they even performed at the Latin Grammies this year, as did Jorge Drexler, another Uruguayan. Jorge Drexler´s style is rather more laid-back than El Cuarteto de Nos; if El Cuarteto de Nos is music I associate with a wild party, then Jorge Drexler is what I associate with something like hanging out in Parque Rodó, or a good chat with a friend...check out Todo Se Transforma (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCjpqx3cXs0) and Milonga de Moro Judío (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3lb7Vx2yVI&feature=related) for examples of a folkier, lighter sounding Uruguayan sound.

Also incredibly popular is a style of music with Colombian origins called...cumbia. It´s dominant feature is it´s very distinct rhythm - chick-a-chick, chick-a-chick, chick-a-chick, chick-a-chick. You may have heard it, or at least of it, if you´re from south Texas - cumbia is enormous in the whole of Latin America, it seems. It is truly omnipresent in South America...I have heard cumbia in three very different nations, in different regions of those countries, and being listened to by a mix of people. It tends to be associated, at least in Argentina and Uruguay, with the lower socioeconomic class, but I´ve seen plenty of middle-to-upper-class people listening to songs like El Bombón Asesino (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_f9Vduko1U). Increasingly popular is cumbia villera, which is cumbia blended with some hip-hop and rap influences and performed with more contemporary instruments; its origins are associated with the villas miserias (slums) outside of Buenos Aires. A particularly popular artist in this genre is El Polaco (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjd9472nf4g).

Of course, not all the music played here is local, or from Latin America. Eighties music is HUGE right now; I have lost count of how many times I´ve heard Come On Eileen, Eye of the Tiger, The Final Countdown, Like A Virgin, and many other classics of the decade on the bus. Plenty of contemporary rock/pop from the English-speaking world makes its way down here, too - I´ve heard Avril Lavigne, Green Day, and Gwen Stefani blaring from the radio of the 328 on the way to La Obra, too. Most classic rock gets plenty of radio play, and even some rap and hip-hop comes up from time to time.

Next pop culture corner: FOOD.

Vacation Reflections

Santiago de Chile is, in this urban appreciator´s opinion, one of the most thoroughly pleasant major cities in the world. It´s a city of 6 million, but if it weren´t for seeing how it sprawls from the vista on Cerro Cristobal, you´d never guess it. It´s compact enough to navigate the downtown area on foot, it´s got excellent representation of about every major school of architecture in the Americas from the colonial period on to the present, and it´s got one of the best public park layouts of any world city. The entire riverfront, from Puente Cal y Canto on up through Providencia, is public park, complete with trees in fall foliage, marble and bronze monuments to the heroes of Chile´s past, and (to remind you that this is South America) people making out. Across the river is the Parque Municipal, which winds its way up Cerro Cristobal - you have your choice of gardens and wooded areas to pop into, or you can take the funicular or the cable car system up to the top, which features a shrine devoted to the Immaculate Conception.

The city´s museums leave nothing to be desired, either; the Museo Chileno del Arte Precolombino is one of the finest museums I´ve been to - not too big, not too small, and extremely well put-together. It´s also the only museum I´ve been to on this continent where I´ve preferred reading the English entries on the museum pieces to the Spanish...typically, the English translations range from "comically bad" to "unreadable," and so I just stick to the Spanish.

As for getting around, the city´s metro is one of the world´s best - stations are perfectly distanced, and unlike a lot of cities (I think immediately of Rome), there are enough lines going in enough directions to make it possible to get anywhere in the city in just a short ride on the subway. I didn´t even need to try to the bus system; the metro was that good.

Santiagueno food? Amazing. Pastel de choclo (a super amazingly good casserole made with ground beef, olives, chicken, boiled egg, and corn), fresh grilled fish, seafood empanadas, barras lucas (basically, the closest thing to a Philly cheese steak you´ll find outside of Pennsylvania), and you can wash it all down with good Chileno beer.

But...there´s another Santiago that I walked through, north of the river between Avenida Independencia and the other side of Mercado Vega Central. This is the Chile of people walking into the church where you´re sitting in prayer and telling you, not asking you, to give them 100 pesos (about twenty cents U.S.). This is where the shade comes from run-down apartments and Asian-run thrift stores, not from meticulously maintained shade trees. This is where the streets smell like a mixture of stale piss and rotting vegetables outside the market, and where the average person on the street looks less like a European with a little bit of Indian blood and more like an Indian with a little bit of European blood. And, I wasn´t even in that bad of a neighborhood - Santiago, like most major cities in Latin America, has a pretty sizeable ring of slums and shanty towns on its outskirts.

I see that reality every day in Montevideo - I go from a major commercial avenue in the city center to a slum every day for work. But, in Montevideo, it´s less jarring - the city has plenty of nice neighborhoods, but even certain nicer parts of Montevideo feel old and tired because there´s just not money in the country to build and maintain things the way there is in Chile, or even Argentina. Accordingly, those beautiful tree-lined avenues between Avenida 18 de Julio and La Rambla just keep feeling a little bit older and older every year. Chile, however, is not Uruguay. It has an incredibly robust economy, and has pulled it´s way up to almost First World standards of living in the past decade. It has new subway cars, shiny office towers, brand new this-es and brand new thats.

But for whom? A huge segment of Chile´s population lives below the poverty line, and while that number is decreasing, the same sort of runaway class separation that free trade capitalism promotes looks to be taking place - "hey, you stay on your side of the river with your produce market and let us do the big-kid work of finances and trade, and maybe we´ll come visit you when we need some cheap squash...maybe." Two worlds, divided by a river; maybe someday that bridge at Cal y Canto will feel a little more bilateral.

A Worthwhile Link

There has been at least some interest among people back home in what it means to "live simply." This article does a good job of putting it into a domestic, U.S. framework: http://rss.cnn.com/~r/rss/cnn_latest/~3/263562873/index.html

Pedazo

This is a brief piece that I wrote for the American Waldensian Society´s newsletter this week...

There are things in life that you can never imagine, no matter how hard you try, until they actually happen. I think immediately to certain aspects of my work at La Obra Ecumenica Barrio Borro in Montevideo. I have, at various moments in time, found myself: teaching little kids The Name Game Song (“Sergio Sergio bo-bergio, banana nana fo-fergio, me-mi-mo-mergio, Sergio”) in an effort to learn new names as well as teach some basic music theory; tutoring high school chemistry in Spanish; putting slices of mozzarella on pizza fresh out of the oven at lunchtime, all the while making jokes with the cook; getting roped into dancing salsa and cumbia with multiple women old enough to be my mother.

The funny moments, though, aren´t the eye-opening ones. The kids who looked at me like a crazy person for singing a silly name song come from a single-mother households, low-income families, or living situations marked by violence. The students in Centro de Estudios face an uphill battle every day as they try to balance complicated home situations and economic pressure with the stresses of secondary school. The participants of Casa Jóven who wolfed down the pizza might have had their only meal of the day at La Obra, and the women who dragged me onto the dance floor have survived more economic struggles and domestic violence than I can imagine.

Life is two-sided; it´s funny, and it´s heartbreaking. At La Obra, both sides are seen, but with a twist. Instead of wallowing in sad moments and broken realities, the objective is to fix them – to empower, to edify, to help people hope, and work, for a new reality.