“Somos la Ciudad, Somos Rosario” Rosario Central Fútbol!

For some reason, I was under the impression that one of our planned excursions while in Argentina was to attend a fútbol (soccer) game. I’m not a huge soccer fan, but I was a little disappointed when I found out that we weren’t going to attend a game. Fortunately, Cain was a little more motivated than I was to make attending a fútbol game a reality. He looked into the schedules for the two soccer teams in Rosario, Newell’s Old Boys (NOB) and Rosario Central, and learned that our last weekend in Rosario was the start of Rosario Central’s season. I’ve been a little partial to NOB because their letters really speak to home, and I was hoping that we could make one of their games, but they weren’t playing this weekend. After figuring out who all wanted to attend the fútbol game and where to buy tickets, Cain and I set out for la cancha de Rosario Central (the stadium) on Friday afternoon. We were a little nervous that they wouldn’t let 2 of us buy 8 tickets, but the worst that could happen would be that everyone else would have to go on their own to see what tickets were left, so we took our chances.

La cancha de Rosario Central is on the far north side of town. As we took a taxi to la cancha, we could tell we were entering Central territory because all the graffiti along the sides of the road was blue and yellow. When the taxi driver dropped us off in front of the stadium, we were surprised that there were hardly any people around. Fortunately, there was one other person purchasing tickets at the same time, or we would have had no clue where to find the ticket office. The whole setup was very sketch. There was a sheet of paper in a plastic sleeve taped to the cinderblock wall listing the prices of tickets. A ticket cost 150 pesos for men and 125 pesos for women. We stepped up to the ticket window, which was a sheet of plywood with a few holes drilled in it, to talk to the voice coming from inside the office. Unable to see the man behind the window, we pooled 1050 pesos for 8 tickets and passed our stack of pesos under the plywood. After we received our tickets, Cain and I decided to walk around the stadium and its surrounding neighborhood. We discovered that Rosario Central is not just a fútbol team, but also an athletic club and community center. We also saw el Río Panara from a different view. There were a few beachy areas as well as tiki huts set up along the river, which seemed very out of place in the midst of a city. After walking around the neighborhood, we caught a taxi back to the site to distribute the tickets.

The other program was supposed to have their navegación on the river on Saturday afternoon, and since our trip was cancelled due to weather last weekend, we were invited to go this weekend. Unfortunately, there were thunderstorms in the forecast, even though it was sunny when we were supposed to go, and the navegación didn’t happen for the second weekend. We were supposed to meet at el Monumento de la Bandera when the boat tour was over, but since we were done an hour and a half before we were supposed to be, we ended up meeting at Plaza San Martin at 4pm for the 6:15pm game. We set out for la cancha, only get dropped off a few blocks away from the stadium because the police had blocked the street that runs in front of the stadium. While we waited for the students in the last taxi to arrive, we got to experience the fandom on the street. Everyone that walked past us was decked out in blue and yellow. Grills were set up on every corner, and Rosario Central clothing shops were set up along every block. City buses carrying fans were so crowded that people had climbed to the top of the bus and were dancing on the top like it was no big deal. What!?

Apparently, dancing on top of buses is totally normal.

The craziness only continued once we arrived at la cancha. We walked past a line of armed militants in order to get in. Once we arrived in our section, we found that our seat numbers were really only suggestions of where to sit, as our seats were occupied by boxes and boxes of paper shreds. As game time got closer, the drums from the fan section got louder and louder, mortars were shot off, and the stands filled with jumping, singing, flag-bearing blue-and-yellow clad fans. It was crazy. We were totally in the middle of it. Here’s a video (you will be in awe of my videoing skills):

The game itself was just as you’d expect any fútbol game to be. Fans cheered when Rosario Central did something well, and booed and shouted insults when the team messed up or the refs made a call they didn’t like. One section of fans, what I would compare to a student section, sang and beat drums through literally the entire match. I told Mary that I would convert to a Rosario Central fan if they won, but if they lost, my allegiance would stay with Newell’s. My allegiance didn’t change as Rosario Central lost 0-1. As the team walked off the field looking defeated, the fans in the stands around me all started shouting. At first, I thought they were showing their loyalty to their team, but then I realized they were shouting insults at the team for losing! I couldn’t believe it.

We knew that we weren’t going to get a taxi right outside la cancha, so we started following the masses of people down the street. We tried walking along side streets parallel to the main road to see if any taxis were hiding down there, but there were none to be found. Thanks to my ability to remember directions, we walked back the way that Cain and I went home in the taxi on Friday afternoon. This road would take us past Alto Rosario Shopping, and we figured we might have more luck catching a taxi down there. Apparently a lot of other people had the same idea we did, so we just kept walking to try and find a less densely populated area to catch a taxi. One eventually passed us, so 4 people jumped in to go home. The rest of us ended up walking the entire way back to our neighborhood in Barrio Central. We had to have walked for at least an hour and a half, maybe closer to two hours, so we rewarded our hard work with ice cream.

Rosario Central fútbol was certainly a sporting experience unlike any I’ve been to in the United States. It would have been awesome if they had won, but just to feel the passion from the fans was incredible. It was also quite the experience walking through Rosario for hours trying to get home. I’m glad I spent my last night in Rosario at the fútbol match. As Cain and I were getting ready to leave the site on Friday to buy the tickets, one of the Spanish professors told us, “Fútbol no es un deporte. Es una religion!” (Soccer isn’t a sport. It’s a religion). After seeing the fans at the game on Saturday afternoon, I can definitely see why she’d say that.

Two School Visits in One Week

On Tuesday, August 7^th, we were scheduled to observe at Madre Teresa de Calcuta Comedor y Colegio. It was a rainy day, which I hadn’t realized when I woke up for class at 8am, so my flats were soaked by the time we arrived at the school across town. We were let into the building, and it reminded us strongly of a jail because of the narrow hallways and bars over all the windows, including the interior ones. We were shown into the directress’ office, where the secretary talked to us while the directress stood by. Carmen told us later that because the secretary was male, he technically held a higher rank than the directress, which is why he talked with us! Crazy! He told us about how the school is run basically as a charter school. Parents receive a salary to send their students to school there. On the surface, this sounds like a good way for low-income families to send their students to a private school, but Marcela (our Spanish teacher) had told us in class that parents often abuse this welfare system. Another thing that the secretary told us was that we could take pictures of the students for personal use, but we couldn’t post any pictures of the students online because many of them are in the school through the judicial system and we couldn’t risk revealing the students’ identities online.

When the secretary finished explaining everything in the office, he took us on a tour through each of the classrooms. The students mostly asked us the same questions over and over again, while other students just ignored that we were there. In one math classroom, a little girl named Guadalupe pointed at me across the room and waved me over to her. I wasn’t sure what she wanted, but I went over to her and knelt down by her desk. She said, “Tenés ojos lindos” (“You have beautiful eyes”) which was just so precious that she had even noticed from across the room. In the last room we visited as a group, which was second grade, I walked in first and headed toward the back of the room. As I was walking by, a little girl in the back row jumped out of her chair, blocking my path, and then jumped into my arms for a hug. Once she broke the ice, we were all flooded by hugs from the second graders. 

Dining Hall in Madre Teresa de Calcuta. One of the things that distinguishes this school from others in Argentina!

It was a cold, rainy day when we visited Madre Teresa de Calcuta.

After we stopped by all of the classrooms from 1^st through 7^th grade, the secretary asked which classes we wanted to visit again. Carmen pointed out that since I’m secondary ed, I should go to one of the older grades, even though I was perfectly content going back to one of the primary grades. Mary and I ended up back in a social studies classroom, where the students wanted very little to do with us. We tried to ask them questions about what they were studying (Cristobal Colón, or Christopher Columbus) but they weren’t very responsive. It was also very strange because they asked what our names were, and I told them Raquel because in all the other schools we’ve visited, when I say Rachel my name is usually corrected to Raquel, but these students just looked very confused. Later, we found out that they might have reacted negatively to my name because Raquel is not currently considered a name for young people. Ouch! Not a moment too soon, our visit was over, and I found myself walking home in the rain while the other students went to teach a lesson at another school. I could have gone to observe them, but I was tired, hungry, and figured I could work on my final Spanish presentation. Instead, I watched Whose Line is it Anyway episodes on YouTube. Good life choice.

Our final school visit was planned for Thursday afternoon. We had been hearing a lot about this visit for the last 3 weeks because Marcela teaches 13-year-olds at Maristas. When we walked to the school, I realized I had walked past it a few times when walking along Blvd Oroño. It’s a very pretty school, but the front of the building doesn’t do the school as a whole justice. It’s HUGE. The building is as long as an entire city block. After waiting in the lobby, we were escorted to the directress’ office. She served us soda and dulces and gave us some of the workbooks that the students were using to learn English. Soon after we arrived, she had to leave for another meeting, but she told us that we could go wherever we wanted to observe in the school. She asked what grade levels we wanted to observe, and I just assumed I would tag along with the others to observe the younger grades. Carmen pointed out that I was studying secondary ed (she seems to be really good at that), and the directress told me I would have to wait until 2:30 when the secondary school started. And just like that, I was left alone in the office with a bunch of teachers while the others from my program went to observe the primary grades.

This is Colegio Maristas from Oroño. The school expands behind this front office part!

After standing awkwardly in the office, the teacher I was supposed to go with asked if I first wanted to observe in Marcela’s classroom. I told her I would, especially since I wasn’t doing anything else, and she walked me to Marcela’s classroom. Marcela’s only been telling us in class how rowdy her students are, and I could definitely see that in class. Students were talking over Marcela, and I don’t think she ever had all of their attention at one time. A group of students presented on the Olympics in English, and even though I was sitting in the front row they were speaking so quietly and the other students in class were talking that I hardly heard any of their presentation. I felt bad, but there wasn’t really anything I could do. At 2:45, the first teacher came back to pick me up. As we walked to her classroom, she told me that she had 16-year-olds. She told me I could speak in English or Spanish to them, as they were really excited to practice their English with a native speaker.

There was a totally different feeling in this classroom than in Marcela’s. I sat in a circle with the students while they asked me questions about where I was from, if I liked Rosario, etc. It was really funny because I was explaining to them where Indiana is in the United States, and I started naming off the states around it. After I finished explaining, the teacher told me that they watch a lot of American films and that I speak just like the people in the movies! It made me laugh because I’ve never been told that before. She also asked me to speak in Spanish at one point, and when I was done the students all clapped for me. It was so presh! After we finished talking, the teacher asked me if I wanted to help her teach the lesson. I wasn’t really sure what she wanted, but I said “Why not?” and she opened her book so I could read it with her. The lesson was about writing articles for a school magazine or newspaper. As we read through the objectives for the lesson, the teacher said, “I have to use the toilet. Do you mind teaching the lesson until I get back?” And then she left me in charge of the classroom. I wasn’t really sure what to do, but I had two students read the article examples out loud. After reading, they gave me ideas of what things were good and what things were bad about each article, and I wrote their ideas on the board. Around that time, the teacher came back and added her own two cents about everything. She then announced that it was time for a break and time for me to leave, so I snapped a few pictures with the students before I left. Maristas was a very different school from those we’ve observed in previously. Although it wasn’t perfect and I didn’t get to see a lot of it, they were very excited to have us there and invited us to come back and teach next time we’re in Rosario. I’d be very interested in that opportunity!

These are the 16-year-olds that I taught! They were wonderful students :)

New Month, New Adventures in Argentina

I just looked back over my blog and the last time that I posted about my day to day activities in Rosario was almost a week ago. What!? So here's what I've been up to in the last week:

Wednesday, August 1st:

Apparently nothing happened this day, since I don't have anything written down in my agenda and I don't remember anything. Whoops.

Thursday, August 2nd:

This was the only day of the week that I didn't have morning class, and I had to wake up early to visit Colegio Soldados Argentinos. We've been on a little hiatus from visiting schools because they just had their 2 week winter break (it's strange: just like we get 2 weeks of a winter break around Christmas, they take a 2 week break in the middle of July). To top off having to wake up early, it was raining. This school was very different from the other public school that we visited. The directora offered us coffee and dulces in the office when we arrived, and we ended up having a good discussion about how standardized testing works in Argentina versus in the States and how this school was set up to have 3 different schools in 1 building. After talking with her, she escorted us to a English classroom, where we sat across from all the students and introduced ourselves. Then we broke up into groups to give all the students an opportunity to practice speaking in English. It was such a great experience to talk individually with these students, and we were glad that the teacher let us use the whole class period to interact with the students.

ESOL B and the students at Soldados Argentinos

Friday, August 3rd:

After class in the morning, we went on a walking tour of the city in the afternoon. I'll admit, I didn't pay very much attention to the tour. We walked all the way down Córdoba to the river, which is a long walk. We enjoyed the facade of the buildings and learned about how different types of architecture influenced the city over the years. Our tour ended at the Monumento de la Bandera. There is definitely a lot of symbolism in the Monumento that I wouldn't have realized without the guide. It definitely made me appreciate the Monumento that much more!

After our tour, the girls had to go back to class, and Cain and I went shopping. We were on a mission to find an alfajor shop that Cain had been told makes the best alfajores in Rosario. Alfajores are made by taking two cookies and placing some sort of filling in between, such as fruit jam or dulce de leche. Then, they are often dipped in a layer of chocolate, or sugar, or coconut (depending on what kind of alfajor you're getting). Alfajores are made differently in every region of Argentina, and the alfajores we tried at Havana were delicious! After we went home, I decided that I wanted to have a low-key evening to get caught up on some work I've been avoiding while abroad. I cleaned up my inbox and sent some Kappa Delta related emails. Then I went to bed at a decent hour. It was a great evening.

Saturday, August 4th:

We were scheduled to take a boat ride through el Río Paraná on Saturday afternoon at 2. The place where we were supposed to meet was all the way past the Monumento de la Bandera. It takes me about half an hour to get there if I'm keeping a good pace. I left my house 15 minutes before I was supposed to be there because I couldn't decide if I should wear my coat because I was trying to look like a hobo. I had to run a lot of the way there, but since I hadn't stretched or anything my shins hurt really badly. I'm pretty sure the time I made up while running was negated by how slowly I walked the rest of the time, because I thought my shins were about to burst (is that possible?). After I got all the way there, only 5-10 minutes late, I found out that we weren't going on the navegación because the wind had stirred up the river too much. Since we were all down by the Monumento, we decided that we would try and go to the top. After paying our 5 pesos each, we took the elevator to the top and saw the entire city from above. It was beautiful. When we came back down, we walked home along Córdoba, shopping and watching street performers.

I don't wish to talk about Saturday night. We were supposed to go to the boliche but no one listened to me and we didn't go. I did not particularly enjoy the evening.

Sunday, August 5th:

I did not sleep well once I finally got to bed Sunday morning, which only fueled the bad mood I was in most of the day. I felt like I had wasted my day because I was supposed to go shopping along the river with Jessie, but by the time I got up the willpower to shower and look presentable, I didn't have much daylight left. I headed out to the river anyway, thinking that maybe it would clear my mood.

I knew the artisans set up shop along the river on Sundays, but I had no idea that the park would be as packed as it was. There were crowds of people everywhere, and I wasn't sure how I felt about the crowdedness as a way to clear my head. Once I started browsing the stands, listening to live bands play, and watching a traditional dance, I was amazed at how much my mood lightened. Seeing the joy in the people enjoying the parks and sharing their handiwork, whether through an aural, visual, or material form, made me very appreciative of the day. I wish I had had more time to shop, but I had to make my way back into town for church. I was glad that Mary, Melissa, and Cain joined me this week, and we went out for ice cream after. It was some of the best ice cream I've had here, and we eat a lot of ice cream. When I got home, I was really tired, so I put my iTunes on shuffle and wrote in my journal, turning in for the night early.

Monday, August 6th:

Going to bed early had its benefits. I was able to get out of bed over an hour before I was supposed to leave, and I was surprisingly happy for being awake before 8am. After class, Mary, Cain and I went to lunch, and when Mary had to leave for class, Cain and I ran around the city for a photo shoot. After the other girls got out of their afternoon class, we headed over to Manuel Tienda Leon to buy our bus tickets to Buenos Aires for our flights home. It was sad. Have I mentioned that I don't want to leave? Since we walked across town, Mary and I decided that we wanted to try a crepería we had seen near Starbucks a few weeks before. I had a delicious dulce de leche crepe, and Mary finally the Nutella crepe she's been talking about since we found the crepería. I thought the dulce de leche crepe was much better than the Nutella crepe. After enjoying our crepes, we practiced bidet ballet to Canon in D. Video to come soon. Then we walked around the city, feeding the stray dogs with the dog food Mary was carrying in her backpack and enjoying each others company. And now I'm here writing, one of my other favorite activities, so really this day can't get much better.

Although I'm slaving away over my studies abroad, I'm finding time for some fun. One thing we've all really enjoyed is the presence of the bidet, pronounced "boo-day." Almost every bathroom has one, but apparently no one uses them. In the last few days, I've come across two nontraditional uses for them...

...shelf for a hairdryer...this looks safe.

...Bidet Ballet!

Part 2 of 2: Mid Program Thoughts

Here's the second part of the post I started the other day. I've been wanting to write a mid program reflection since ESOL A ended, but obviously we're a little past midway now (more like midway through the second half of the program!). This post has taken me a long time to write because I have so many ideas I'm trying to wade through, so I hope you'll stick with me as I try and unpack this experience!

I had the opportunity to sit down at an heladeria (ice cream shop) with Mary and Emily last week. It was great to talk with them (over café con leche and medialunas, of course) about education, how this trip has affected each of us individually, as well as how we've grown together as a group. I really enjoyed our conversation for many reasons, but mostly because of the passion that drove our conversation. Have you ever had a conversation with people who are as passionate about a subject as you are? If you haven't, you probably should. It's exhilarating. I love that I can talk about education with anyone from the ESOL group and we'd never run out of things to talk about. It's very different from what I'm used to at home, and I'm loving how much I'm learning about the differences between education systems in public and private schools, as well as between countries and even between states.

One thing that I talked about with Mary and Emily was how I really feel like myself here in Argentina. I think it took removing myself from my friends, family, home culture, and the pressures that each of those embody for me to be able to look honestly at myself and where I am in my life. One friend from home that has known me since the sixth grade told me that she can see a new confidence in me since I've been living in Argentina (thanks El). While I would agree that I feel confident in a new way here, I don't think that this confidence happened just because I left the United States. I think it's been inside me the whole time,  just been looking for the right experience to give it an outlet.

Mary said something about how our ESOL group seems to mesh so well because besides a passion for education, we all have one thing in common: we were willing to leave what is comfortable behind and place ourselves completely into the unknown that is Argentina. This idea really resonated with me as I thought about how I ended up in Rosario.

Committing to spend 6 weeks of my summer in Argentina did not come easily to me. I was excited about the prospect of studying abroad while filling out the initial paperwork. The glee that came from getting accepted to my program subsided once I started to doubt if I could get on a plane by myself and leave everything and everyone I knew in the United States behind. I cried a LOT at inopportune moments and waited for someone to give me an excuse for why I shouldn't study abroad. The biggest hurdle came when I found out I had the opportunity to go to one of my favorite places in the world (I'm not sure world is the right word since my definition of the world has widened but I can't think of any other word to use), Bethlehem Farm.  I absolutely love the Farm and the four cornerstones of prayer, simplicity, community, and service that it embodies. I hadn't been to the Farm since the summer after graduating from high school, and I had an opportunity come up that would pretty much guarantee I could spend a week at the Farm this summer. Suddenly, I felt rushed to make a decision about whether to study abroad or go to B Farm because I had to reserve my spot on the B Farm trip or basically commit to studying abroad. If I decided not to take the opportunity to go to B Farm and backed out of studying abroad, I would be faced with spending the summer in Noblesville, which was the opposite of the adventure I promised myself I would go on after my sophomore year of college.

One day, I visited my linguistics professor, Dr. Stallings, during her office hours to ask for help with a project. At the beginning of the semester, Dr. Stallings helped me evaluate the courses I wanted to take abroad to see if they could transfer back to Ball State for ESOL credit, and she asked how my decision to study abroad was coming along (I bet she didn't see what door that question would open). I grew visibly more upset as I told her about feeling rushed to make a decision between B Farm and Argentina. She told me the first thing I had to decide was whether I was really making a decision between going on the mission trip and studying abroad, or if fear was holding me back from making a firm decision. She didn't ask me to give her an answer, but I knew as soon as she asked that I was just looking for an excuse to push Argentina away because B Farm would be the more comfortable trip for me to take this summer. This isn't to say that a trip to B Farm would be easy: I've learned so many important things at B Farm about service work and spirituality, and those things certainly push me to grow in ways that aren't always comfortable. But if I had gone to the Farm, I would be surrounded by members of my youth group with whom I would do almost anything. Instead, I chose to leave them behind, with promises to pray for the success of their trip, and jet set to a different hemisphere to be the only student from Indiana among a group of students from Oregon. And look at where I am now that I'm here: the confidence that often gets hidden behind fears of wanting to fit in and not wanting to be awkward (which I fail at daily...oh well) has allowed me to explore a side of myself that probably would have stayed hidden if I had stayed at home this summer.

I can't believe that I only have 10 days left in Argentina. I keep joking (kind of) about how I want to stay until my visa expires in another 47 days. There are so many things I'm enjoying here and would love to experience with more time, but there are some things I can't wait for when I get home, like my moccasin slippers and a central heating system and peanut butter. This post was a lot harder for me to write than I thought it would be. It took a long time as I jumped between ideas, trying to write down the ideas in my head as they came to me. It also took a long time for me to edit my ideas into a form that I would feel comfortable publishing because writing about a lot of these thoughts makes me feel very vulnerable. I'm not sure that these thoughts are in their final form, as some of these thoughts are so dense that if I wrote down everything I wanted to say about them, you would give up reading my post based on its length. This experience isn't over yet, and I can already tell that I won't be able to sum it up neatly when I get home. If there's one thing I've learned from my class on Culture and Community as well as my everyday interactions with the people around me, it's that complexity has to be embraced before it can be questioned, which is difficult for me to do as I like to have the answers to everything. With those thoughts before me, here's to my final week in Rosario! Thanks for all your support through prayers and reading my blog!