A letter home to my parents, March 1, 2013:
Dear Family,
For Taylor's birthday, we did our best to make a fuss, but it
wasn't quite what we are used to. No friends, just family. And it was in the middle of the day, since the kids' school
had it's Parent Night at 7pm on the night of his birthday. But he was
very happy and good-natured about the whole thing. All the boys on his
soccer team have these crazy bright cleats, so now he's in on that
action with his orange and green shoes! Not much else, as the tariffs on foreign goods here are crazy
(around 50%) so anything made overseas, even junk from China, is
outrageously expensive. All
in all, the shopping experience is not particularly tempting (probably a
good thing!).
In other news, we've been working hard to figure out
the school situation for the kids. We decided to send them to Escuela
Nueva. Although it's hard to reach (3 miles outside of town), it has a
very good reputation and an
extremely nice and welcoming new headmaster who speaks perfect English. The kids will have to take a taxi to get there in the mornings,
but one of Taylor's soccer friends' dads drives a taxi, so he'll take
them. But we are laughing over the fact that the
taxi rides will cost more than the tuition. At Parent Night (where we
tried to follow along, quickly realizing that Parent Nights are the same
all over the world), the headmaster introduced us. So afterwards, lots of people came up (all speaking English - THIS is where all the English-speakers in Trelew have been hiding!),
including one family who has two girls, each of whom are in Taylor's and
Abby's grades. Best of all, they have lived in Miami several times
over the past few years, so the kids are fluent in English. Abby spent
time at April's house yesterday (their 11-year old), and is feeling
much more confident about heading off to the first day of school next
week. We hope Taylor will also find someone in
his class who can help him. Fingers crossed!
The classes are really small - only 9 kids in
Taylor's class, 13 in Abby's. They have 2 hours of English per day,
though the school is not fully bi-lingual. However, the new headmaster
was hired to move the school towards a fully bi-lingual curriculum, so
at least we know Abby and Taylor's English will be welcomed. Abby
understands a lot of Spanish, but Taylor is going to have a rougher
time, as he just doesn't have the grammar down yet. The hardest thing is
that the school goes from 8 am - 4 pm, which is a LONG day to be
listening to Spanish! We will just try and support them as much as
possible.
The weather here has been really lousy of late. It rained so much that the Chubut River flooded the water
treatment plant, and the city of Trelew (over 120K people) was without
water for 2 whole days. Crazy! But many people have water tanks on the
top of their houses or buildings, and we had a cistern in our yard for
watering the lawn, so we survived (flushing the toilet with buckets) as
did others I guess. The people we know say, "welcome
to Argentina" and roll their eyes. With the rain has come much cooler
weather. It's so strange to find that fall has arrived when we are
still peeling our sunburns from the 95 degree weather a few weeks ago.
Who knows, maybe we'll get some more sun before it really gets cold.
Last weekend, Taylor was invited to a birthday party by one of the boys on his soccer team. What an adventure. When I offered to take him, Will told me that I would definitely be going to Heaven, but I actually wanted to go (social interaction - I was desperate!). We
hired a taxi to drive us to a place called a "chacra," which the
dictionary said meant "ranch." We had had a (rare) rainstorm the night
before, and the dirt roads leaving Trelew had turned to wide swaths of
mud and puddles. The drive was mysterious and nerve-wracking, as we
pictured being stranded in the middle of nowhere with the taxi stuck in
the mud. We finally made it to a mysterious gate with a number on it,
and drove up to a gated, run-down house. We could see a dirt (okay,
mud) soccer field and a rusty basketball court in the background. The
taxi driver honked and a man emerged from the house. There were no
other cars in sight. Taylor and I were totally confused. But the man
told the driver that the party had been moved to the kids' house in town
due to the rains and the condition of the roads. Oops! We hadn't
called ahead because of course I'm terrified of the phone, since it's
much harder to speak on the phone since you can't use hand signals :-).
Sooo...the driver took us back to town (through the mud - again, very
dicey) and to a neighborhood where we found the party. We then spent 6
hours - Taylor playing with about 15 kids (happily) and me speaking
hilariously broken Spanish with the family, their grandparents, and
aunts and uncles. Of course I was the only other parent there - the kid
party had actually be cancelled since the rented ranch was impassable -
so this was just a family party with some friends (rather than the 38
kids originally planned). So, basically we crashed their family party.
Ha! I loved it though - the kids had a ton of questions (and they
understood to speak slowly to me, unlike the adults) and I had fun with
my brain on Spanish overload. The family was incredibly friendly and
kind, and we made a plan for the father (a taxi driver) to take the kids
to school during their first week. So that was a good connection.
So what else do we do? I shop for food, we cook, the
kids half-heartedly work on school work. I work on my Spanish using an
online program (Rocket Spanish), and we all read tons of books on our
Nooks. One Nook broke, though, so we can't all read at the same time.
It's sort of funny until it's not. We also watch more TV than we ever have, which in
some cases is a nice diversion (there is a Harry Potter movie playing at
all times, it seems) and in some cases pays dividends (Abby and Taylor
like "Cupcake Wars" and yesterday Abby made us some cupcakes!).
Basically, the TV is a comfort when things get stressful. We all try to exercise because it helps mentally. We finally found
tennis, Taylor has soccer, Abby started basketball, and I've been
taking some spinning classes led by macho guys playing crazy Argentinian
club music. It's very funny.
What else? I'm realizing that living in a foreign
country, in an obscure town with no tourists (and no reason for tourists
to come) isn't too different from living in Durham. This is rather unexpected. Unless one is on vacation, there is still cooking, cleaning, supervising homework, messing around on the computer, reading, exercising. I pictured more exploration and adventure.
Traveling around with Emma was so fun - I went into a
funk for weeks afterwards, wishing we were off traveling instead of in Trelew. But just like at home, Will has to work (he heads
out into the field again next week), and the vagaries of setting up
meetings related to school or soccer or exchanging money or mailing a package all take time and effort to accomplish (did I mention that everything
closes between 1pm and 5:30pm?). And of course traveling costs money. Renting a car costs about $100/day, so we have to really need it. And while the buses are good, they don't make a lot of
sense when you have 4 people who all pay full fare. I hope we can take the kids out of school
every once in a while to travel. I guess the hardest thing is that
Trelew is literally 8 hours from anything, so you can't go on a weekend
trip. It's like living in the middle of Iowa and wanting to visit the
mountains or the coast.
Finally received the package from Kate with my orthotics...and a bunch of magazines, jelly beans, and dill (which I can't find here). We were so excited for something from home!
Thinking of all of you lots,
Love,
Malin
