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Posted in Argentina, family and friends
We had some fascinating conversations, Elvi and I. She’s 32-years-old though could pass for 18, and stands about 4’10” (we didn’t actually measure heights, but all of my kids have surpassed her since we’d last been together). She’d left Peru in 2000, looking for better employment opportunities than the dishwashing she was doing in Quito, where she’d gone when she left her hometown of Trujillo at age 14. At least three of her sisters have also come to Argentina to do childcare, housekeeping, or other domestic work. All of them send money each month back to their parents and extended family in Peru, since even the few pesos they makes here far surpass what they’d be making there. One sister now even works for a family in Italy; positions in western Europe and the US are the most highly coveted and difficult to obtain.
[This spring I’ve been co-teaching with a colleague from the Government dept at Redlands, a course on political economy in which we’d been mapping remittance flows amongst Latin American countries and the US. I’m living in one of my maps right now.]
It isn’t so often that one spends 9 days with one’s ex-housekeeper, when they’re on vacation and NOT working, and I was NOT on vacation and was working. It wasn’t hard to learn a lot about her life. Elvi’s one of those people who wakes up talking and talks all day and then talks some more until it’s time to go to bed at night. She works hard, has no home of her own, has no chance to save anything, and has few expectations for being able to significantly improve her lot. She’d like to be married and would love to be having her own children. A common sentiment for single women in their 30s. During one of our food-shopping walks around town she mentioned that sometimes she dares even think about having a baby on her own, and in my well-intentioned-but-remarkably-insensitive way I started telling her about a friend of mine who’d been debating the same thing and how it really could be possible, and Elvi turned to look at me like I was insane. Oh, right. My friend is from the States, has a steady job with benefits, makes over $50,000/yr, and has an extensive support network of nearby family and friends who can help out. Yet another thing that I’ve failed to think about much during my bourgeois and pampered life – how complicated the choice of motherhood could be to someone whose sole and small source of income requires constant physical labor and presence. For a while after that we walked in silence, which was a change.
Highlights of the week included Elvi sticking to the velcro wall at the birthday party, Elvi learning how to play Bubble Breaker (on my PDA) and Pokemon on Eric’s gameboy, numerous giggling sessions with all the children, and her showing me Trujillo on Google Earth. What a wild world this is, to sit in Argentina and have Elvi navigate around Peru with me.
Posted in family and friends, social sciences
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Posted in daily life
Seems we’re getting used to a daily routine here. I remember reading somewhere that most habits and routines (exercising, stopping nail biting, flossing, etc.) are more likely to “stick” after a period of 3 weeks. That is, if you can manage to do something for a steady 3 weeks, you reach some tipping point and you’re less likely to stop. Of course, there’s a world of 2-week quitters walking around out there…
So, we made it to through week 3 without leaving. At this point Julia’s the only one who complains, loudly and daily, about being here. She’ll be 10 on Friday and dearly wishes to be in California, or Vermont, with friends, to celebrate her birthday. She doesn’t like sharing a tiny room with her brother. She’s earned the unfortunate title of “Most Likely to be Bitten by Mosquitoes” and re-earns it daily. She’s increasingly frustrated at not being able to communicate – with any fluency – with her classmates. The names of objects and basic verbs are the first elements we learn in foreign languages, and these are inadequate when it comes to discussing nuanced, emotionally-laden, pre-adolescent topics on the playground. Chris and I joke about measuring these life experiences in “couch hours” (i.e., how many hours of psychotherapy on a couch will the person require later in life to recover from a given experience). Julia’s estimate? Immeasurable. Our estimate? I’m banking on zero, but ask us again in a few years.
Otherwise, activities of daily life continue. We don’t have a car here, so all outings require planning and time. We know our immediate neighborhood well. Eric and Julia even went solo on Sunday morning to get bread at the bakery (un kilo de pan, por favor). Fresh from the oven and pennies per serving. Within a 4-block radius we have the laundry place, the pharmacy, the fruit/vegetable store, the meat store, the chicken store (apart from big supermarkets, smaller shops specialize in either cow or chicken and never the twain shall meet), multiple bakeries and ice cream shops, and the cheese/cold cuts store. Cold cuts are fiambres in Spanish. Chris also learned recently that the word fiambre is slang for stiff, as in a cadaver. Yum. With a few more blocks, we can also get to the school supply store, the florist, the bookstore, the hardware store, the bank, the train and bus stations, and a dentist (a very nice woman whom Eric saw yesterday for a problem tooth).
It was dark when we walked home from the dentist, since the appointment had been for 6:30 pm. On the walk home we talked about why 6:30 pm is a totally normal time for Argentines to go to the dentist (the waiting room was packed when we left), the amount she charged us (70 pesos for an hour-long exam including a cleaning, a flouride treatment, a tiny x-ray, and a lesson on proper flossing techniques), why that still would be very expensive for Argentines, how much that would cost in US dollars (about $22), why that kind of appointment would have cost much more in the States, why we couldn’t afford to live here – in anything approaching the lifestyle to which we’ve become accustomed – if we weren’t paid in US dollars, and why if we got regular Argentine jobs here, we wouldn’t be paid in US dollars. It takes about 25 minutes to walk home from the dentist, long enough for meaningful conversations. Especially now that we know which houses have the really scary barking dogs that we have to avoid.
Posted in daily life
Posted in family and friends
The only hassle of any significance has been an inconvenient hick-up in the University of Redlands email system that freezes, with some consistency, when I try to “reply” to an email. It works fine when I initiate a new email to someone, but many of my messages are replies, and two times out of five when I hit the “send” button, I get only a “Forbidden” warning. Prohibido. Verboten. Interdit. What’s even more annoying is that once I’ve angered the man-behind-the-curtain-email-reply-wizard, he won’t let me access our Redlands email server – and all internet traffic is slow – for four or five minutes. So, imagine your productivity flow being ground to a halt for 4-5 minutes at least twice an hour. It’s enough to make an international telecommuter want to scream.
(Yes, I’ve already talked to IT support at Redlands about this, but they don’t know what’s going on and it’s confusing enough when I explain that no, I’m not on the UR network and I’m actually not able to stop by their offices and have them take a look at my laptop. And yes, Chris experiences the identical problem when he’s using his Redlands account too from work. And yes, it happens if we’re using webmail over Firefox too.)
Typically I use these short, limbo intervals to work offline or to answer Emily’s homework questions. But by late in the day, when my mind and writing both begin to wander, I’ve been known to grab my PDA and play 4-5 minutes of Bubble Breaker. You know the type of game, with columns/rows of colored balls and when you click on clusters of the same color they disappear, and the larger the cluster, the more points you get. Just a quick 4-5 minute fix of mind-refreshing entertainment. Then it’s back to my day job: making maps, designing classes, writing labs, organizing meetings, coordinating 6-figure proposals to government agencies, all in the name of spatial literacy.
One day last week, Mari (the woman who does some cleaning and cooking for us a few hours/day) was sweeping nearby and said something to me about the paro (the nation-wide agricultural strike that’s affecting the food supply). It was about 6:30 pm and I was in the midst of my 89th forbidden-email interval that day. With guilt I quickly put aside Bubble Breaker and we had a great and informative conversation that helped me finally understand what was happening on the street. She helped break my ignorance bubble.
What a complex structure this thing called work, and what she must wonder about my job. I type, I talk into a microphone, I type some more, I periodically grumble and walk around the house for 5-minute-stretches, then I type some more. Meanwhile, she completes tasks that are immediate and tangible. Clothes are folded, dirt is removed, dishes are washed, food is prepared. For this we pay Mari 15 pesos/hr (about $4.80/hr). For my typing and talking I earn considerably more – and a description of my work means very little to Mari, or Elvi for that matter. Yesterday I used Marratech to teach an hour-long workshop on Census data to a small group of colleagues back in California and Elvi watched in amazement and I set up my webcam and put on my microphone/headset. Then she turned her attention back to the Bubble Breaker game that I had just taught her to play on my PDA.
Posted in daily life, technology
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Posted in Argentina, family and friends
Posted in daily life
Posted in family and friends
Posted in food and drink
diana maps 