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 5th, 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.
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