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