The “No-Plan” Plan Lives On

Up until this weekend, the past week was pretty uneventful (at least as uneventful as a week in a foreign city can be, that is). Here are some updates for ya:

-There are only five of us in the house now; us girls and three Argentinian students. It's pretty quiet, and we miss the rest of la familia like crazy. But we are trying to soak up the last few days of having our own room, a kitchen to use (however small and cockroach-filled it may be), and consistent internet.

-Renae and I both racked up over 30 volunteering hours this past week from all of our different gigs, of course gaining experience and falling more and more in love with the kids each day. We are still loving it all, and even though the seven or so work hours plus two more walking/bussing back and forth every day doesn't leave time for much else, we are dreading having our last days on Friday and having to say more hard goodbye's. Especially those kids... HOW we are going to drag ourselves away from them, I have no idea.

-Two more volunteers had their last days at the community center this week; Alice then Elcio (or Elfio, as the kids think his name is) both headed back to Brazil. That leaves just four of us. It is definitely an end-of-summer feel around here! Elcio did have a pretty fun going away party though- we got to have some of the classic Cordobese drink “fernet” with coke, learn some new card games, and attempt to improve on our Portuguese since everyone around here seems to be Brazilian.

-No one probably cares about this but I have to complain for one second: there is CONSTANT construction going on in the building attached to ours, starting at 8:30 every morning and going straight until 4:00 pm. It is SO insanely loud we can't hear anything, can't talk to each other, and don't even think about sleeping. Very annoying to all of us, especially to Joaquin when he tries to study. It's hard not to laugh at him because he freeeaks out every time he walks in the door and the drills start up.

-On Sunday we woke up and decided to head out to a nature reserve called Los Chorillos, where one of the researchers Renae knows is working on a project with reptiles. We had an email from the biologist, Nico, saying to catch a bus to Tanti and then another to Flor Serrana, from where we could find the nearby reserve. This was plan enough for us so off we went. We arrived just fine in Tanti, but then were told there was no bus to Flor Serrana. They told us to take a taxi, which if you have read our last couple blogs you know is NOT in the budget. So, we looked at the map, decided it didn't look too far, and took off walking. We made it maybe twenty minutes before having to ask if we were going the right way. We flagged down a truck to ask, which happened to be a family of five heading to the same place we were. “Hop up in back!” they said, and off we went for the bumpiest, most painful truck-bed ride EVER. But, we got there in I'm sure a fourth of the time it would have taken us to walk, and the family was super nice, stopping to show us an awesome little river spot on the way. No plan plan still functioning? Yes. We walked through the park a bit, and it was GORGEOUS. The trail leads up a big mountain, from which you can see all the surrounding little sierra towns. From there we met up with Nico, who told us to head to the waterfall while it was still nice, so we hiked another half hour or so to the most gorgeous sight we've seen in a while- a huge waterfall coming down from the mountains. We got to swim, sit on a rock in the sun, and it was amazing. Afterward we spent a couple hours helping Nico and his girlfriend make traps to capture the reptiles out of tarps, dirt, string, and sticks. We were busy working, and by the time we looked at the time, it was already 8 pm! The park was closed, there was no one to drive us back out, and it was starting to get

dark. So, Renae and I took off running (literally) back down the trail. Luckily we made it out before it got too dark, hopping over the gate at the entrance just in time. Unfortunately we were still faced with the problem of how to make it back to the city, without a bus back to Tanti. We stopped at a little family-run campground to buy much needed water and cookies, and asked the older woman running it how we could possibly make it back without the bus, phone service to call a taxi, or light in which to walk. Somehow it just so happened that her son had to drive to nearby Carlos Paz later on that night, from where we could catch a bus. As always, someone was looking out for us, and we had found our ticket out of there! We spent the next couple hours sitting at a little plastic table on the family's patio, under a roof made of vines with the most delicious grapes, talking about life, travel, and the BeeGee's with the woman and her son. So, needless to say that although we were worried about ourselves for a bit there, and wondered if we'd have to sleep under a tree without food or water, everything turned out for the best and instead of learning our lesson from our lack of planning it was further cemented in our heads that this is how the best adventures come to be.

Well, that's all I've got for now; it's time to go love up on the kids for one of the last times :(
Hope everyone's doing great back home in the cold, if it helps it's been raining pretty much every day here so unfortunately we're not soaking up 100 degree weather anymore either.

Wondering how two whole Cordobese months passed without me noticing,
Jenna Flynn

One half of a journey

Well, we made it to the half-way point. We're still living in the foreigner house in Cordoba, on a very small weekly budget, trying to save up money and energy for when we continue moving around every couple of days again. We were busy all last week filling up every possible time-slot with volunteering. I am still working with the Applied Zoology Center in the zoo during the weekday mornings. We started a part of the project to look at hormones in the egg-yolks of the Rhea, so I spent hours last week thawing frozen dinosaur-sized eggs and taking yolk samples. The I got to see some of the labs on the Universidad Nacional de Cordoba campus to complete some other steps of the experiment (all of which most of you do NOT want me to go into depth about, so I'll spare you). The university is starting to become full of students returning from summer vacation, and it makes me miss school like crazy! Who would've thought...


An Update from Jenna: I am still going to the Ronald McDonald sala every morning. The parents are starting to use the facilities, one by one, and I'm loving seeing the whole thing develop. I have gotten to know the parents, the other volunteers (including Juan, the 65 year old volunteer who gives me Spanish poetry lessons), and the cleaning guy Esteban. I even got to run the sala by myself for one whole day this week, which I am pretty proud of. So other than the morning I had to make the half hour trek to the hospital in the pouring rain, all is good.


For both of us, it has been an eye-opening experience to learn about some of the inner-workings of the hospital, the zoo, and science labs of this Argentine city. The standards of quality and cleanliness here, for example, are completely different from those in the states. To give you some examples: the entire zoo has only one veterinarian, there are stray dogs and homeless people roaming the children's hospital, as well as families posting up the halls with folding chairs, and, while we were running our experiments in the biochem lab on campus, the power kept cutting in and out forcing students and researchers to pause experiments and lose data. Some things you would never imagine being negotiable, we definitely take for granted in the U.S. Consider yourself VERY lucky.

During the evenings, we still do 5 hours with the community center kids, with whom, after weeks of tag, poster-making, games of ninja and lightning, we've become best friends. We only have 2 weeks left with them before we head south, and we're already dreading having to leave them. We'll also have to say goodbye to our pet bird in a few weeks, as we probably can't get away with taking an egret on the bus. She is growing like crazy though, and will hopefully be able to fly before we leave. I couldn't afford to fill her huge appetite with hamburgers anymore, so I switched to chicken entrails. I'm not sure what kind of a killer-bird I'm raising by feeding it other bird parts...

Mala Ala also learned how to jump out of her box. In this picture Jenna caught her hanging out in the closet with our packs.

Last Thursday, we decided to take advantage of another opportunity to help. A group called g.a.n.a.s. (I put the foundation details under our time-line tab in case your interested) meets every Tuesday and Thursday nights in a plaza near downtown to hand out food to the homeless in the streets of Cordoba. On Thursday we showed up, not exactly knowing what it would entail, but were immediately humbled by the long, patient line of men, women, and children, with all their belongings in duffle bags, backpacks, and plastic bags, waiting to be served a meal of rice and sausage out of big serving coolers. After feeding this bunch, we rolled the coolers around the streets downtown, looking for others who needed dinner that night. Many of them were regulars, and we could see that the g.a.n.a.s. volunteers had developed genuine friendships with them. Everyone receiving food, which was a small plastic tray filled with rice and a chunk of bread, was very gracious. Some of the people we served included families with small children. On Tuesday we went again, and this time hopped in a car with some volunteers to go to other parks and plazas further away. We met people living on mattresses in the streets, on benches in the park, and in cardboard boxes under bridges. With this opportunity to go up and actually get to know them, our hearts were blown wide open. These people were as nice as anyone else we've met along this journey: telling jokes, asking about our trip, and opening up about their stories. We woke up one man sleeping on a piece of foam in the middle of the park to ask him if he wanted to eat. As he was eating, the volunteer asked him, concerned, if the rain bothered him, as his foam and blanket were wet from the rain earlier that day. The man answered, “What rain?!” and then smiled and continued to eat his meal. The whole experience is one we will never forget. Just when we thought we had seen the worst of what life can deal, God put another realm of people in need in front of us. Experiences like that definitely make us look at life through a new lens by humbling our hearts and opening our eyes to other struggles. I am constantly realizing just how blessed I have been during this life, and I hope God can continue to show Jenna and I the ways we can give back. 


127 days, the half-way point of our journey, and still we're being surprised by the things put in our path, our expectations never failing to be surpassed. With everything we've already learned, all of the things we've experienced, and everyone we've met, I cannot believe were only half-way done. What else does God have to show us? What other crazy plans and people can we stumble across? Whatever it may be, bring it on. I don't think any plan, situation, or dream would be out of the question now. That being said, a huge part of our strength and courage to do all this comes from the love, support, and prayers we get from back home, and for that, at this half-way mark, I want to say thank you. I couldn't be more grateful. It has been a blessing in disguise to be so far away from everyone I love, showing me just how important they are in my life. And guess what... now there's only one half of the trip left until we're back to squeeze the life out of everyone we've been missing!! So watch out, the countdown has begun...


Love,
Nae



P.S. This week we had to watch some of our housemates pack up and head back to their countries. Kanya from Australia and Marcia and Renato from Brasil completed their 6 weeks of the volunteering program in what felt like the blink of an eye. We had an asado the night before their flights to top of the amazing adventure of living in this United Nations household. We all stumbled through our spanish goodbyes, and even though it is hard to say exactly what you want to say in another language, the message was clear: we had all come to learn from one another, and love one another. As Jenna said as we said our last goodbye, “Something very special happened in this house”. Cultures were shared, language barriers torn down, and, in only 6 weeks, we made close friendships with people from all across the world, and we will always remember our time in Cordoba for that especially.

More Birds....

So birds seem to have become a pattern in our lives right now, they just keep popping up! Like Renae said, she's been working on another bird project at the zoo. She and a couple university students have been busy taking care of 80 some baby dino-looking things, and she comes home every day with new stories as well as new cuts all over her knees from chasing the little guys around in the dirt. But yesterday she came home with something more: a baby snowy egret with a broken wing that had fallen from its nest in a tree up above the zoo. The zoo workers planned on leaving it to die and get eaten by a lizard, so obviously it is now living in a box in our room. It's only about a week old, and is still pretty ugly looking if you ask me, but what can you do. We didn't really expect it to make it through the night, but we got it to eat a bit of raw meat and sugar water last night, and when I peeked in her box before work this morning she was looking pretty chipper. Her wing is splinted, and the zoo workers said if we can keep her healthy for a month or so she'll be WAY bigger and ready to fly. So yeah, as of now it's looking like we have a new pet! Or maybe two.... last night walking home from the centro we discovered another bird in danger. A pigeon was having trouble flying, and was about to be stomped on by some punk little kids, so we scooped her up and brought her back home as well. She's recovering out in the yard, and will hopefully be able to fly again soon. Not exactly sure when we became bird whisperers, but it happened.

I've been spending my mornings working at the Ronald McDonald house, located next to the children's hospital. There are fourteen families currently living there, and I'm loving getting to know them a bit while hanging out and helping out with whatever needs doing. Most of my time, however, is spent in a new room for parents in the hospital. I was lucky enough to have my first day volunteering on the day the sala opened, so I've had the unique opportunity of helping them get it started. Basically it's a room to be used by the parents of children in intensive therapy while they wait for the kids to be done for the day. It has a tv, fridge, washing machine, couch, everything. Yet it's been open for a week and for some reason no one wants to use it, even though it is absolutely pristine and gorgeous compared to the rest of the scrappy hospital. Why? The rule is that only one family member at a time can use the sala, and it's the culture here that the WHOLE family comes along to therapy, even though there is only one visiting hour in the morning and one in the afternoon. Every morning, here come the moms, dads, grandmas, cousins, neighbors even. They bring lawn chairs and toys and mate to drink, and hang out in the dirty hallways all day long. This is something the hospital wants to change, since it is unnecessary and potentially dangerous for the sick kids, so they paired with the Ronald McDonald house to open up the sala. So, Andrea the psychologist and I spend the mornings getting everything in order, organizing and hanging up pictures. We talk with the parents when we can, and try to encourage them to start to utilize the space. The first day we had one mom come in for about 10 minutes, but today I talked with about 5 of them, and one even stayed for half an hour. So it's going to be a slow process changing everyone's views on the way a hospital should be, but Andrea says it was the same when the hospital in Buenos Aires opened up a sala and we just need to keep chipping away. So I'm excited to be there for the next month to see the story unfold, and in the meantime am enjoying getting an inside look on the Argentine culture.

Another part of the culture we got an unexpected and not necessarily wanted lesson on is the economy... We found out last Thursday that the Argentine Peso crashed, and that the people would have access to U.S. dollars starting on Monday. The economy here has been sketchy to say the least for the last few years, and dollars have been in high demand since everyone thinks they are more dependable but have been inaccessible at the banks. Finally last week, the deflation of the peso got so out of hand that the president gave up on prohibiting dollars, which meant that the amazing exchange rate we had been getting the whole time we've been here was about to drop out the bottom. So needless to say we freaked out for a minute (or maybe an hour) at being caught in the country at its craziest economic times; but after enlisting both of our dads for their advice and spending a few hours researching everything there was to read about it, we quickly figured out how much money we'd need for the rest of our time in Argentina and transferred it before the rate had time to drop. It was a bit scary and a loooong wait until Monday to be able to pick it up, but luckily everything worked out and we're back in the clear. Phew! PS- sorry for the boring informational paragraph, but believe it or not this is only 5% of what we now know. Again, not exactly sure when we became economists, but it happened.

Other than these few things I've gotta say life has felt strangely normal lately. We've been in the same place, in the same house, with the same people for a month now. We've got the neighborhood figured out, have ventured outside the city for trips to the river a few times, and are getting settled into our volunteer jobs. On top of the zoo and the Ronald McDonald house, we have both been going every afternoon to hang out with the kids in the community center on the edge of town with our roomies, Kanya and Marcia. So we spend our days working and our nights barbecuing and playing cards with friends, just like we would be doing back in the states. Our Spanish is good enough now that we can have comfortable friendships with people who don't speak any English, and I even somehow made it through an interview in Spanish last week. And yes, we still eat ice cream on the daily. Life is good.







Feeling like I fit in (even though I still don't look like it),
Jenna Flynn