Come What May: September 2009

Sunday, September 20, 2009

Travelogue: Pause

After 7 months in Latin America, I am back home in the States. I will be returning to Argentina at the end of October to continue working on organic farms in Patagonia and explore more of the continent, but the sojourn is at a temporary end. My trip back ended, fittingly, with one last adventure as I was sequestered at Miami immigration due to my appearance, which no longer matches any of my IDs I don't think I look that suspicious, but judge for yourself after the jump.

Travelogue: Hare Krishna

I spent the past several days at an ashram. Simply put, an ashram is a monastery. The one I visited is for devotees of the Hare Krishna movement and is also an organic farm that accepts volunteers. The movement is based on some pretty basic ideas about keeping life simple and healthy, and is all about yoga, mantras, and praising Krishna. It is also a little bit like laws and sausages, in that it might spoil your spiritual appetite to know that it was founded in New York City in the 1960s.

Life on the ashram is soothing. The community consists of gardens, temples, and dormitories on 9 hectares of land in the Pampas outside of Buenos Aires. Despite the proximity to the Grand Capital, the farm is quiet and the air fresh, with the majority of neighbors being lazy cows, horses, and pigs. A few families live in separate houses on the land, while devotees practicing the monastic lifestyle live in communal spaces at the center of the community. The devotees make offerings to their gods several times a day in a fantastic temple that looks like a space ship.

Despite the spiritual nature of life on the ashram, religious views were kept at arms length on a "take it or leave it" basis for guests. All were honest about the fact that this life is not for everyone and that you have to, after having gotten your ya-yas out in the material world, really want to dedicate yourself to finding an inner peace.

What follows is the schedule of a sample day for the volunteers who, it should be noted, paid a nominal fee and were treated more as guests than laborers:

7:30 AM: Wake groggily in your spartan, monastic, yet comfy room. Stumble to dining room for breakfast of chapati bread, banana marmalade, and custard.

8:30 AM: Head out to the construction site for the day's work. Work consisted of pounding posts into holes in the ground for a future floor. The girls did gardening with Maria.

10:30 AM: Sit in the sun to share a mate and discuss American imperialism, spiritual wanderings, and the invasion of Argentina by Monsanto and the Soy lobby with Ariel and Gustavo, our "supervisors." They are kinda mercenary eco-construction workers who recently moved to the ashram from an eco-village called Gaia and are not involved in the monastic lifestyle.

11:15 AM: Resume working.

1:00 PM: Finish work, go put on sandals and lie in the sun.

1:30 PM: Lunch, followed by siesta.

4:30 PM: Yoga and Meditation

5:30 PM: Tea and snack

8:30 PM: Dinner

9:00 PM: Read two pages, fall asleep in spartan, monastic, yet comfy room.

Every day was exactly the same, save for Sunday, during which we did not work and had an extra meditation session.

Sometimes DVDs were played in the dining room, and I feel obligated to note that I watched an anti-abortion video that had been crafted out of scenes from Kill Bill.

Ariel lived in this cozy little trailer.

One of our gourmet, lacto vegetarian lunch dishes.

There is pleasure to be had in the monotony of pounding rubble into a hole for hours at a time.

Typical afternoon activity.

This young lad claimed to be something of a Dr. Doolittle.

The gardens and the house under construction.

Pizza!

The great Argentina Pampas.

The temple, called a "truly," and another sacred building next to it where they keep the clothes of the gods.

Saturday, September 5, 2009

Fiesta Del Poncho

The Fiesta Del Poncho has been one of Argentina's grandest cultural festivals since its inception in 1967. Taking place in the capital city of the Northern province of Catamarca, "El Poncho," as it is generally referred to, is a 10 day extravaganza of song, dance, food, and art and takes its name from the hand-woven garments which are plentiful, and famously well-made, in the province.

I had the good fortune to be invited by my friend Pastor to participate in Poncho 2009. Artisans come from near and far to advertise and sell their handiwork, but also to just be part of the experience. Many of them know each other from other stops on the national crafts fair "circuit," so the atmosphere is one of a big reunion. Some stay in the back of vans, some in tents, some at hostels, some with family nearby. In between attending to customers, they just sit around and smoke, drink, eat, and shoot the shit. Some have big operations while others are rastafarians rolling out a mat of bracelets on the sidewalk. Most of the more established artisans seem to care little about how much they sell, being happy enough to have gotten away from home.

Due to a late night arrival and runaway confusion regarding his name, Pastor and I stayed for free in a room in the city cathedral complex. In this most unlikely of places I found my first high-powered super-hot shower in over four months. Despite the fact that I was no longer cold, I took full advantage.

We started "work" each day around 1pm and went until 11 or 12 pm depending on the day. The work consisted of hanging around the stand chatting and sellin' them chimes--our stand was a big hit. The weekends were busy and the chimes chimed continuously. We drank milkshakes and we drank beer and we drank wine in the middle of the day. We ate empanadas and hot dogs and sweets and stews and steaks.

A pudgy man with a limp and a nasally voice wandered around the hall selling coca leaves and muna muna, a plant rumored to augment male virility--"Muna muna, coca!....Muna muna, coca!" was his constant refrain. A white-haired Chilean selling Andean flutes played the same song once every five minutes for ten days and I started to hum it in my sleep.

I explained to no less than 500 people, confused by my accent and appearance, that "Yes you are right, I am not from Argentina, I am American but, for the time being, I live in Argentina....and I met this guy down South and I am learning about what he does and helping him in the workshop." They told me how great that is and that they have a cousin in Michigan. Many of them personally welcomed me to Argentina. Old men clasped my shoulders and called me "son" and old women kissed my cheek with smudgy lipstick. One group of teenage girls conducted an informal but thorough interview and later offered me some orange juice.

Every evening we went home wiped out. We ate dinner almost every night at the same place on the plaza because it was good, it was easy, it was cheap, and they knew us. We went to bed late and woke up late and had coffee in the morning and went back to sell them chimes.

my friend sebastiana is michelle obama's brazilian cousin