Danielle Tirjer The night before I left for Patagonia my computer gave me an ugly error message and shut itself down. I then electrocuted myself a little on the crazy outlet because I had lotion on my hands but I decided there was nothing I could do about my computer as I was leaving in the morning and I would just have to deal with it when I got back. SO. Coming back from vacation (even if you are coming back to another vacation) is always a little upsetting but in addition to having to come back to class I had to walk an hour in the rain to the Toshiba technician only find out they would keep my computer for 7 weeks and just erase the whole thing. So I decided to do what I could with it and maybe get in touch with someone who spoke English. I ended up being able to talk to a guy who I found out was in the Philippines but still my computer could not be fixed. I still had my external hard drive…except I plugged that into a computer at my study abroad center thinking I could access my pictures to upload my photos from Patagonia, but nope, I deleted everything on that too. I felt pretty stupid and for the first time, I just wanted to go home. The study abroad office warns us all about this part in our abroad experience but I didn’t really think it could hit at a worse time when I lost all of my papers, music and pictures.
The following weekend I went on a three day volunteer trip to build houses for families in an extremely poor town called Escobar. This was a great experience to have contact with Argentines and do something for positive change. Our family that we built the house for was made up of a mother, two teenage daughters, and their two sons who were just wonderful. They cooked us the food we brought for lunch and the two precious little boys ran around with mounds of energy as we worked away at building their home. The program was called Un Techo Para Mi PaÃs (an international volunteer program in South America) and there were 600 volunteers that were spit up into different neighborhoods where we slept in schools and enjoyed not showering for three and a half days. It was a great experience for me and I learned a lot about Argentines and myself from volunteering in a very different culture than my own. On the other hand, the language struggles and the difference between this program and other programs I have volunteered for made this one of the most frustrating experiences of my life. Its difficult to convey this over a blog but my patience was tested to the max and at the end of every day I was mentally exhausted. Its sounds stupid and insignificant but it was a true experience for me and the other international volunteers I spoke with. When the house was all finished and we handed the family their certificate of ownership in an emotional ceremony I felt so relieved and happy that this family would have a floor to sit on. What surprised me was that the house was not a great house and only consisted of one room and a tin roof, but the family was so thankful and the fact that they owned the house was life changing for them. I value this experience immensely as it tried my patience and made me think a lot about the things that I have and what I take for granted. This whole study abroad experience has made me reflect a lot about my life, my goals, and who I am. I learned that the ¨Argentine way¨ is a whole lot different than the ¨North American¨ way. The evening we were leaving all of the volunteers started cheering and jumping up and down singing made up songs about their groups and started a form of riot for themselves right there in the school court yard. I didn’t really know what to think I was so shocked that it was happening. They were absolutely crazy banging on pots and pans and mobs of people were being shoved all over the place. Each school had a mascot and so different groups were ¨kidnapping¨ each other’s mascots. It was CRAZY. It was fun to see everyone so excited. Afterwards I thought about what would happen if this had occurred in the US and I decided that the SWAT team would have been brought in and everyone would have been arrested. It was actually good that I went on the volunteer trip because I officially loved being back in Buenos Aires and my desires to go home passed. For the next weekend I was just looking forward to being at home in Buenos Aires. I also got the impression that there aren’t a lot of volunteer programs in Argentina because this one was all over the news and newspapers in Buenos Aires after we returned, interesting. There is so much room for volunteering in Argentina with poverty and hunger being such prominent issues.
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Source: Back from Patagonia
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