Villas

Hola, Well, yesterday I had a very different experience here in BA. My Argentine Solidarity Movements class took a field trip to the way southern outskirts of the city to see a "villa miseria" (town of misery). The villas here are the huge slums around the outside of the city that you drive over on the highways in and out of Buenos Aires. They are known as extremely dangerous areas and are full of people in extreme poverty. I had, as you might expect, had no contact with them whatsoever except for being absolutely stunned when I drove past one. We started learning about them in this class last week, and the trip was actually to go see a soup kitchen of sorts started by a woman from the neighborhood. Los Piletones is a small villa in the greater barrio of Villa Soldati (which is not in itself a villa, just the name of the district, which is confusing). It is one of the smallest and safest in the city. It was formed in 1985, near a lake and abandoned factory that made huge concrete water containers (piletones, if I understood the professor correctly). Today more than 4 thousand people live in 500 "houses." The sewer system is collapsed, and gas, running water, phone lines, and postal service are nonexistent. There are rerouted wires dangerously crisscrossed everywhere you look because everyone is stealing the electricity. The streets are full of stray dogs, trash, and dirty children. Some apartments are made of cobbled together bricks, others of cardboard and tin. Most don't have doors or windows, only cloth or makeshift wood. I have never seen such terrible living conditions in my life. It makes sleeping on the steps of a church in the middle of BA seem comfortable...not really homelessness like you'd usually think of it but almost worse.

The soup kitchen was started by a woman named Margarita and her husband, residents of the villa. They have 10 of their own kids and adopted 2 off of the street. He lost his arm in an industrial accident. The woman was just amazing, and from basically nothing grew this place into a huge compound serving 13,000 plates daily. They also have a library, small pharmacy, medical center with volunteer doctors, and afterschool center kind of place for all the kids. She's been interviewed by a lot of BA newspapers and is mentioned all over the internet as an inspiration for internal solutions to the villas' problems.

I tried to read up on the villa situation in general a bit more online, and it seems very complicated. The government has declared all kinds of sanitation risks and a state of housing emergency, but it is also the government that originally gave the land to poor people to inhabit. Mostly they began as temporary housing for immigrants coming into BA, but have turned into permanent residences. The villas have grown exponentially since the big crisis of 2001. Before that, during the military dictatorships, the government expelled thousands of people from their homes there in an effort to wipe out the villas. People buy and sell "houses" or rooms, but it's all just cash transactions, without any kind of deeds or legal rights. There are obviously no safety codes or fire inspections, and there are often 3 families living in one dirty concrete room. The streets are so narrow and debris/trash covered that it would be nearly impossible for a firetruck or ambulance to get into the villa. There is no government or police presence. Drugs and violence are very, very common. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, using grant money from the government, are currently building some tenements right next to the villa, to the strong opposition of all the residents. It is on what used to be a park, and blocks the entrance. Margarita told us she worries that once people move in there will be big conflicts between the two settlements.

On another note, I've started volunteering every Wednesday at this Jewish Salvation Army of sorts. It's in this garage thing in a grittier part of the city, and basically they collect and sort donations of clothes, books, furniture, etc. They throw away the really bad things, donate very used things, and sell nicer things at very low prices to the poor people of the neighborhood. The two times I've gone I've just sorted through bags of clothing, but all the volunteers there are super nice and I had some really interesting conversations. I also talk in passing to the people who come in to buy stuff, and all the customers and volunteers know each other and seem like one big family, bargaining and joking and drinking coffee. It's not quite the work I was originally hoping for, but it's a really good atmosphere and I feel like I'm actually doing something helpful.

I have spent the past hour working on this to avoid researching the Catholic Church's stance on divorce for my theology paper. Honestly, is there that much to say about it other than don't have one? Ha, well it's actually interesting to be in a college theology class reading all this stuff because I'm realizing that for all my years of Catholic education I really don't know a lot of doctrine and technical positions on issues. Well, off I go to the Vatican website, hasta pronto.