Bajo Flores

Buenos Aires is a city that allows many of its inhabitants to lead a rather fabulous life, should they have the means for it. Whether its bar hopping in trendy Palmero SoHo or dining in the exclusive restaraunts in river side Puerto Madero, the city seems to offer an infinite number of options that suite my tastes just fine. With a hint of European class and a dash of latin passion, I never cease to find a good time, with a more than humble price tag.

But after living here for five months, I was more than acutely aware that the Buenos Aires I know and love, doesn't always translate. My daily reality couldn't be further from the truth for a sizeable segment of the population. I've written before about the extreme poverty that lies in South America (see Peru post). And today, I stepped into what I'd only seen from a distance - the other side of Buenos Aires.

My roommate Julia is working here on an internship to help teach the children who live in the villas (shanty towns). Each week she and her co-workers search for educational toys and snacks for the kids and then make the hour and a half trek to visit and teach them. Finally, with the semester having just ended, I was able to tag along and help out.

The long bus ride provided the beginning of my internal dialogue of observations. The further we rode away from our upper-middle class barrio, the change in the passengers' demographic became obvious. We boarded the bus, surrounded by the descendents of European immigrants. As we drove further, they got off one by one, and were replaced with indigenous immigrants from Peru, Bolivia and Northern Argentina. The bus stopped outside of a villa, which looked like a scene out of Ciudad de Dios (City of God, a movie about life in the villas of Rio de Jainero). We entered Bajo Flores, and were hit with a mixture of heat, dust and the scent of erroding sewer systems.

The houses in the villas are constructed by their residents out of brick, cement and any scraps found lying in the trash. Most roofs are a single sheet of metal, held up by thin wooden sticks. Each house had several common characteristics: a hole in the wall will serve as the family's window; a floor without a roof or wall becomes the house's balcony; and clothing lines filled with tattered garments blew in the breeze. I guess what surprised me most, is that each villa is literally its own barrio. The unpaved streets were lined with fruit stands, auto shops, faulty sewer systems, grocery stores and every other business imaginable. These villas function as their own towns, a world apart from Buenos Aires.

We walked into one of the red brick buildings which served as an educational center to expand upon what the children learned in school. Once a month, a meeting is held for the parents about how they can aid in their children's education, while the kids are given educational games to play. The parents, or rather the mothers, sat in a circle in the main room, which is lit by a single bulb dangling from the ceiling. Several electric wires are exposed around the room, and the dismal light shines on the dirt floor. There was no door and graffiti tainted one wall.

Out the back door and across the courtyard lies the building where the children play and learn. We sat with them and drew pictures throughout the meeting. The focus of this project was to learn colors. So each time a child picked up a new crayon we would ask them the name of the color and to explain what they were drawing. It broke my heart to hear kindergarten aged children misprnounce the color names, fail to identify the primary colors or fail to speak at all, because silence was the only language they could speak.

I sat with them, gave them cookies and drew with them, stopping only too often to teach them how to pronounce "rojo" or "rosa," syllable by syllable in their own native language. While half of them colored pictures of ninos, casitas and familias the others played in the courtyard, which was a dusty square shadded by a tree and filled with garbage. The kids ran around playing with trash, broken wires and empty bottles.

After the meeting was over, we cleaned up as a man walked in. He wanted to find out when the next meeting was so he could attend and bring his kids. The volunteers, all women, were estatic that a man wanted to come to a meeting. This reality of the absence of men and broken families struck a chord and reminded me of a similar problem in our own bad neighborhoods. It always seems to be the women who are the cornerstone of the family.

Walking through the dirt and trash ridden streets to find the bus stop, my mind reeled with thoughts of what I'd seen. Words cannot accurately describe the despair or the level of poverty I saw today. So I will skip trying to strike an emotional chord and just leave you with my observations, which hopefully paint a picture louder than words.