Tengo ganas de hacer anything but schoolwork

I’ve had quite an eventful week.  I started my internship, attended a peña with the folks from said internship, got invited to join another choir, went to a South African theatre festival, and made my first two Argentine Facebook Friends.

I have now worked two days at La Alameda.  If you’ve missed earlier posts, La Alameda is a community center that works mostly with Bolivian immigrants who have been working in sweatshops in BA.  The center also serves community meals, has sweat-free ceramics and clothing workshops, runs a small library, and offers classes for adults and children.  I am interning there eight hours per week with David, another IFSA student.  We will primarily be working on two projects: reorganizing the library and translating parts of the website and other materials into English.  So far we’ve only been working in the library.  We are completely reorganizing the books, both physically on the shelves, and in terms of updating their records system, including organizing them by subject and figuring out a numbering/tracking system.  This is quite a daunting task, although David seems to have a little more patience for it than I do.  I think it’s pretty boring, but I also know that it’s something that needs to be done and that it will make a big difference to La Alameda and to the people who use the library, so I’m happy to do it.  I really like the other people that work there, and I’ve made friends with Jorge, the center’s media guy (Argentine Facebook Friend #1).  He makes videos and slideshows and things like that.  He also gave me 2 gigs of Argentine music—that’s about 500 tracks.

La Alameda hosts and sponsors many events to raise funds or just to raise awareness and support for their causes.  Friday night they hosted a peña, or folkloric music concert, to raise awareness about child labor and the terrible working conditions under which some immigrants work (all you grammar nerds can correct the construction of that sentence).  A few artists played and the music was wonderful.  Then there was a video about child labor and a Bolivian man who had been working under pretty terrible conditions on a farm spoke.  I got to play with his children!  It was a good event. I'm starting to learn a lot about sweatshops and labor and, although sometimes it's so hard to hear these terrible stories, I think it's an important thing to know about and I'm interested in doing more work in this area.

Choir rehearsal on Saturday was exciting.  If you missed my last entry, I’m singing with a choir that needed more people to perform Carmina Burana in July—they rehearse their own music on Saturday mornings and then the rest of us join them in the afternoon to practice Carmina.  On Saturday the director invited me to join the small choir!  It turns out that I won’t actually be here for any of their concerts, but he told me that if I have “ganas de cantar,” I’m welcome to join them on Saturday mornings.

I would like to take a quick moment to explain the phrase “tener ganas de.”  It is one of my favorite phrases in Spanish and we really don’t have an English equivalent, so I find myself using it often in English conversation.  It essentially means to have a desire to do something, but it’s used pretty casually.  The word “gana” means a desire or an inclination.  It can also mean an appetite or a hunger.  It’s like saying you want to do something, but it implies a little more than just a casual inkling.  I’m not very good at explaining things like this, but it is a phrase I love, so I gave it my best shot.

To tie back into my story, Daniel, the director, told me that if I had ganas to sing, I was welcome to rehearse with the small group on Saturday mornings.  I am very excited (and a bit nervous), although getting there at ten in the morning is going to be a bear.  It takes me an hour to get there on the colectivo, and I have a hard time making it by noon.  In this city, getting up at 8:30 on a Saturday morning is practically unheard of.  I guess it means no more Friday night partying for me!  That’s alright, it’s worth it to sing.  Also, the guy who told me about the choir, Samuel, became Argentine Facebook Friend #2.

I actually haven’t been doing that much partying.  When I first got here I was going out a lot, mostly because it’s a good way to make friends.  But now that I have friends, I would actually rather do things like go to peñas or other cultural events.  Saturday night I went to a play that is part of a South African theatre festival.  The festival is called Proyecto 34˚S, and is “is a theatrical and artistic exchange...between Buenos Aires, Argentina and Cape Town, South Africa, both located on the 34°S line of latitude....   Its primary objective is to promote and facilitate the exchange of African and Latin American performing arts, culture, heritage and literature.”

The show I saw was called Every Year, Every Day, I am Walking.  It was a “physical theatre” production.  I don’t really know anything about physical theatre, but the story was told mostly through movement, although there was some dialogue in English, Afrikaans, Xhosa, and French.  From the website:

EVERY YEAR, EVERY DAY, I AM WALKING traces the story of a young refugee in Africa who loses family and home brutally and irrevocably and is forced to journey to a new place through many dangers and uncertainties. It is a piece about dislocation, about what home means, about Africa, about loss and about the first tentative steps towards healing and recovery.

The performers were two women who both played a few roles, but the main roles were the young refugee and her mother.  The piece was incredibly moving.  The show opens with the family’s house being ambushed and burned, and the girl’s sister is killed by the attackers.  The mother sees this happen, but manages to hide herself and her other daughter until the men leave.  They hide for a week and then wearily walk until they find someone to take the to Capetown.  There was a part where the mother was carrying the daughter on her back and the whole thing was heartbreaking.  There was also a scene that took place in a English school, which I found very interesting.  The girl, who was not from South Africa, is taking English courses and the teacher (who is white) tells the class they have a new student from Africa.  This struck me as odd because South Africa, of course, is in Africa.  I know very little about African history (or African present, for that matter), but I felt like this was telling of South African attitudes towards the rest of the continent, at least among white people in the country.  I hope some of you who have spent time in South African will offer some insight.

I have to say, I’ve been doing my best to pretend that I’m not actually in school down here.  I’ve been going to class, but I’m a little behind on schoolwork.  I’m not necessarily proud of this fact, but that’s how it’s going.  I’m not particularly inspired by any of my classes, and I am very inspired by my internship and the other activities I’ve been doing.  In the future, I know what I will remember is things like working at La Alameda and the South African theatre fest.  I have a hard time thinking schoolwork is more important than things like that, and that has always been my problem with school.  However, I also know that I need to pass my classes, so I need to get on top of things.  I have an exam on Tuesday that I am completely unprepared for, so I think tomorrow’s going to be a long day.  Wish me luck!

In other news, my birthday is two weeks from today.  I’m not sure I’m quite ready to turn 23 (I know, I know, I’m still young…whatever, it feels old to me), but that’s how it goes, I guess.