Well, I should have seen it coming.
Life in Luján seemed so calm and even comforting. Returning from vacation with my parents at the beginning of April, I found myself looking forward to returning to Lujan, as I finally had a routine of sorts and people to call on the weekends. Although I was living in a slightly ill-equipped apartment in the back of the Habitat office, I was getting along well and even cooking meals for myself on the camp stove I bought expressly bought for this trip and intended to use for… you know, camping.
When I first returned to my room, I found that my things had been moved a little bit and the bathroom had been thoroughly cleaned. “How nice,” I foolishly thought,” they must have a cleaning service that comes every month or so.” At an office so cash-strapped that all of its computers are all running pirated copies of Windows, odds of this would fall somewhere between improbable and laughable. The next day, at work, my boss broke the bad news: I had to move out within a week or the property owner would threaten legal action.
I knew along this was coming, just not so suddenly. How did I come to be the victim of gross anti-volunteer injustices? Enter the landlady:
The landlady only wants the space to be used as an office even though it’s a house. Fair enough; it’s her property. Habitat Argentina wants to be able to provide housing for free in lieu of the stipend that most other Habitat international volunteers receive in most other countries. Fair enough; they’re broke. Here’s where we run into some problems.
Strike one: This was something both parties should have worked out when they signed the lease, not when the Luján office started to house volunteers there. Their employees of course can rest easy since they have no vested interest in ensuring the welfare of free labor who’s in the country on a tourist visa.
Strike two: The landlady is completely insane. She owns several properties on the block; the one where I lived happens to look directly across the lot, into the backyard of the one where she lives, separated by a wall. That wall apparently isn’t high enough. I knew in my gut that things weren’t going to turn out well when she called my boss weekly to report that she knew exactly what time I turned the lights off and went to bed every night. I have yet to see this woman in person, but I guess she’s seen me.
Strike three: I’m out. I moved out last week, and now I’m living in Colegio Nuestra Señora de Lujan de los Hermanos Maristas (Villa Maristas for short), which is a Catholic boarding school and conference center. In retrospect, titling one of my posts “Catholic by Osmosis?” doesn’t seem so funny anymore. It’s not so bad though: I have to walk thirty minutes to work and eat bad cafeteria food for breakfast and dinner, but I got a lot of exercise and don’t have to do dishes. I’m currently in the hunt for an apartment or something of that sort. While I’ve found some appealing and dirt-cheap alternatives already, this is not Washington, DC, where you can scan the listings on Craigslist, tell lies about yourself at a few open houses, cut a check for the first and last month’s rent, and move in. Most Argentine landlords want a 2-year lease and a garantía, where you sign over an entire other property as collateral- for an apartment lease. For most Argies, this will consist of one’s parents’ house, but this is not an option for me While this seems absurd at first blush, in a country where people still remember the peso devaluation of 2002 (where the government slashed the value of the peso, and thus everyone’s bank accounts, to dig out of a long recession), it sort of makes sense.
In other news: I did some traveling in March, and I should be putting up some of the pictures on Flickr tonight.
Global Village is a program that Habitat runs where groups of volunteers can stay for a week or two in another country and work on a construction site, sight-see, and learn a little bit about the local culture. This is is a group of Global Village regulars from Indiana who came along to build. I learned a lot about farming during my time with them.I was to spend a week and a half with the group, first as a trainee, then as a “House Leader,” a position that basically involves accompanying the group full-time and being the middleman between the volunteers and Habitat for anything that should arise. My experiences with the group ranged from the great and fulfilling (spending all day outdoors and getting my hands dirty, finally) to the comically bad (explaining to a group of Indiana farm folk that in Argentina, men greet each other with a kiss on the cheek).After that, I spent another fairly uneventful week in the national office, took a quick vacation to the beach (where it was cloudy 75% of the time), and finaly moved to Luján, the city I’m calling home for the next four months. Luján is a city of about 85,000 people and home to one of the regional offices of Habitat Argentina. I’ll write a bit more about my comical living situation here in the near future, but the most important thing to know about Luján is that it’s known as the “The Capital of Faith” here in Argentina. This is because it’s home to the country’s largest basilica, a monstrous set of granite stalagmites that can be seen from miles away in the flat pampas. What’s even more striking about the Basilica is the way that it figures into the country’s Catholic faith. For most of the year, the millions of tourists/pilgrims who come to Lujan treat the pilgrimage a bit like a Sunday football game: they show up for the main event (mass at the cathedral) but spend most of their time having cookouts and hanging out at the plaza in front of the basilica, where there are several dozen stands that sell exactly the same catholic knick-knacks. It’s quite a sight to behold, and you can smell the charcoal smoke and the burning beef for miles.
