Letters from Argentina
1 of 6
by Ben Meyer
The first semester of my senior year of high school was spent as an exchange student in Viedma, Argentina. Living with a host family in a far away land was an experience which has humbled, matured, and enlightened me in many ways I could never have imagined. It was an experience from which I learned not only about about a foreign culture and another language, but equally if not more about my own culture and about myself. About once a month I composed an e-mail to send out to friends and relatives to inform everyone how my new life was going down in the Southern hemisphere. This is the first of six letters that I wrote. As a postscript, it should be known that letters I wrote after a couple months experiences conveyed a much more positive, enthusiastic tone and dealt more with insightful observations and epic adventures. Letter number one, however, deals with the confusion, headaches, and homesickness that any successful exchange student experiences and overcomes. [All six letters, along with pictures taken by Ben while in Argentina, will be presented as a series by Frodo's Notebook over the course of the next six months.]
September 15, 2002
Hola a todos-
Every time I tilt my head up towards the sky there is a neatly shaped V of birds
tugging in the summer, they’re going South to Patagonia. I am jealous
of these birds as they migrate down to the end of the world, to where I very
much wanted to stay for my time here as a an exchange student. Perhaps they are
Arctic Terns, which migrate 11,000 miles each year from Patagonia to Alaska.
Perhaps these same birds have flown over my home back in Wasilla. I wish I knew
more about ornithology.
I chose Argentina for my host country because it was a Spanish speaking country
with a wide swath of mountains running up and down it’s Western longitude
that I had always dreamed of seeing one day, but apparently AFS (American Field
Service, the exchange oraganization I’m with) has done their best to send
me as far away as possible from those dramatic horizons here in Viedma, across
the continent from the nearest hill.
So I confess for the first week or so after I arrived here I could not have invented
a single comment about here that was even remotely positive. My plan had
been envisioned somewhat like a six month vacation somewhere further South of
here, someplace where everything would be unrecognizably distinct from back home
and ideally I wouldn’t have to go school because it would be my job to
stay home and tend the family llama herd.
However, do not let me give you the impression that I am totally distraught.
Although I am not exactly in the exotic picture of South America I imagined,
I am learning how to make the best of it, “aprovecho” (I make best
use of it). There is beauty in anything and everywhere. There is art waiting
to be realized in the piles of trash and heaps of pruned branches that people
dump at the edge of town. There is a romance to the wheat fields freshly ploughed
for spring and the ranches that fold forever in to the flat and featureless horizon.
There is an aura of timelessness that hangs above the river winding lazily through
town like fog on a cool morning. Additionally, there are many convenient aspects
of living closer to a city that I am learning to make use of. I enjoy
riding a bike to school, a badass “Beach Commander 2000” that looks
like a 1970’s concept of a mountain bike. And if I had hoped for a more
spectacular landscape here, perhaps my host family had hoped for a more exciting
person than myself. I swear I’m doing my best to be a lot more social
than I am normally. It sounds like my friends from school here are even going
to make me go to “El Boliche”, the dance club. Though you know I
would rather spend the evening sealed inside a cardboard box with a heap of glass
shards and fish entrails than in a dance club, I am going to try it. Another
thing I am looking forward to is to try out a kayak. Kayaking is a popular sport
here since you are never more than a five or ten minute walk away from the riverside.
Apparently Viedma has the most people per capita in all of Argentina who own
kayaks.
Try to imagine this, my first impression of where I shall live for the next half-year.
I
arrived in a zombie trance after a twelve hour bus ride in the dark from Buenos
Aires to Viedma. I awoke just as the bus was pulling in to the station and through
blurry eyes, waiting at the platform outside my window I spotted two very hopeful
looking people whom I had seen before in a picture that my host family had sent
to me- it turned out that they were my new parents. The striking, trim woman
with thigh- heighth leather high heels and a smart dress was Bella, my host mother,
and the tall man with dark hair in khaki slacks and a t-shirt and thick glasses
was Tony, my host father. They took me to my new home where I immediately fell
asleep.
When I awoke, I didn’t know whether I had slept for an hour or three days,
no idea where I was, why, how, etc. After lying in bed and racking my brain
for the next minute or so I remembered all the traveling I had done during the
last few days, and with a sickening wrench of my stomach, for the first time
I truly wondered what the hell I got myself in to and how I had ended up here.
Downstairs my six new family members were all having lunch. My new family members
include my parents Bella and Tony, my two younger sisters Pilar and Belen, and
two younger brothers Jose and Roberto. Two days later though we took the eldest
son, Jose, to the airport to leave for the U.S. to be an exchange student as
well. I guess I’m his replacement.
After a lot of confused albeit amicable conversation with my new family over
lunch, what appeared to be an unhappy marriage between an ancient Volkswagen
bug and a small truck full of excited looking people pulled up to the house honking
the horn emphatically gunning an ill-sounding engine. I followed Jose as he shuffled
out of the house and we piled in to this little creature with five other friends
of his to go cruise town. We went to go "dar vueltas", literally, to
go in circles. Everyone except myself had dark hair, dark skin, dark eyes, and
were dressed head to toe in denim clothes designed to appear as if they were
well-worn. They wore jeans with pre- faded material and pre-ripped holes from
the use years of use they never had, cigarettes hung casually out of their mouths
and they spoke rapidly in a tongue incomprehensible to my muddled ears. The
main road here goes adjacent to the Rio Negro (the river) through the middle
of town, a half-mile strip of pavement which we drove up and down no less than
twenty times accelerating over speed bumps as if they were jumps and slowing
down occasionally to whistle and yell at girls. Everyone kept chanting
something about "Chupe". (The verb "chupar" means "to
suck". Later I learned that “Chupe” was Jose’s
nickname which had evolved from Jose to Giseuppe to Chupe, which changed my idea
a lot about what I had imagined they had been talking about in the car.) The
little city sped by over and over as they all asked me if I like to drink, do
I have a girlfriend, do I like to party, and if not they told me we’ll
get busy with all that right this weekend.
We live in a big brick house in the city. Here the houses are constructed so
that usually two houses share the same wall. If I walk outside and look down
the street I can see about fifteen neighboring homes. Quite a change from the
seven acres of woods surrounding my home back in Alaska. The Rio Negro is maybe
four hundred meters from our house. It is an enormous body of water, maybe four
hundred meters from shore to shore. I greatly enjoy its presence. Just
to have a large body of water near the house is a thrill if you’re not
accustomed to it. They tell me in the summer everyone goes to the shoreline to
spend the day, to swim, nap in the shade, have a picnic.
If I were to sum up my first three weeks here so far in a word it would be: confusion.
It feels as if I’m never quite completely sure what’s going on or
what I’m supposed to do. From what I have seen so far it is pretty
much the exact opposite of Alaska, but all the people here have been incredibly
kind to me. My family here are all wonderful people, I have a lot less
responsibilities, and school only goes until noon. As far as the language, it
still feels like everyone here has collaborated to play a clever trick on me.
It is as if every time someone speaks, their words pass through some devious,
invisible filter that scrambles them in to a string of incomprehensible gibberish.
I had imagined that the four years of Spanish I studied in High School would
help out a lot with my efforts in mastering the language, but I have found that
I still have miles to go before I sleep and I can actually understand what in
the world all these people here are talking about all the time. I have found
that the easiest people to talk with are my youngest siblings, who have smaller
vocabularies and usually speak more slowly. It is already hard for me to write
this in English so I suppose I am going to learn the language whether I want
to or not.
I have been spending a great deal of time running, though it is tough to be so
self- motivated. I miss cross-country. Some days it feels like everything sneaks
up on me all at once and allI want to do is go home. There are days when I would
give anything just to see one pathetic little mountain, to have some thick woods
where I could go for a quiet walk, to have all my hammers and saws back in my
callused hands and to have some dirt back under my my fingernails, so these are
the times when I go for a run. I search for someplace I have not been yet, usually
as far away from the city as I can go. Running clears my head, it makes
everything seem more tolerable. I’m ready to give anything another chance
after I have run far enough. I run down lonesome dirt roads out in the country
and the cows look at me funny across the barbed wire as I run by, their gazes
follow me as I pass as if I were holding a string attached to each of their snouts.
I stir up flocks of prismatic parrots nesting in the scrub brush and they swarm
above me in hundreds screeching angrily at my presence. The animals
are all surprised to see something that passes on feet rather than wheels. Some
days when the clouds look just right I can pretend they are mountains, the tall
white pillars in the distance are something solid and tangible rather than just
suspended ice particles. The sky grows pink then red and finally purple
like a swelling bruise, like a fistfull of melted crayola, then ultimately healing
in to blackness. The stars appear and fill the sky in a completely different
pattern than back in Alaska. Everything is better.
I don’t want to hog the computer anymore. I think Pilar (fourteen year
old sister) has friends to chat with. Hope to hear from you.
Love, Ben
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