No Sleep til Brooklyn

I`m going to make this fast because I`m dead. The schedule I have puts me at La Juanita, which is about an hour and a half away, at 5am Mondays and Tuesdays, so my plan has been that I sleep there Sunday and Monday nights. This Sunday, I couldn`t get in touch with my person there, so I ended up sleeping at this other kid`s house who teaches me Spanish while I teach him English. We didn`t really sleep because the neighbors were having a party all night, so I decided to go in at 8 on Monday. Then I found out why I couldn`t get in touch with my person there-the coop got robbed! Some guys came in and just broke a bunch of stuff. It was a pretty big deal, and the event was meant as a political statement more than anything, because there are different factions in the neighborhood, some of which don`t like what La Juanita is doing.

Tiny bit of back story. LJ is a coop that provides job training, kindergarten, a bakery, textile production, and computer training and recycling (and they sell pieces of metal to China to make money) in a pretty impoverished community in the province of Buenos Aires. So they are working to improve the community, and they have support from a Senator, but aren`t really affiliated with a political ideology. They`re not political, they`re just fighting to improve. Then there are people in the area, according to people from LJ, who don`t want improvement, who don`t want to work, and are opposed to the Coop being there because of that. I would like to hear the other side of the story, because it can`t be that simple. It never is.

So anyway, we couldn`t work at the bakery in the morning because we had to help clean everything up and start fresh with some stuff. They decided it would be better, and provide more security, if the bakery did a night shift, so I went with the other bakery guys and took a nap in the afternoon, and we came back from 11pm and worked til 7am. I was so dead. But the girl that runs it didn`t sleep during the day because her baby was running around, and she was totally fine. I`m such a baby. I mean, I like to party and stay out all night and all that wild stuff, but Latin America takes ´late night´ to a new frontier. I`ve always loved watching the sunrise, and I think I`ve seen more sunrises since January than I have my entire life put together, and it`s not because I`ve been waking up early.

Anyway, yesterday a funny thing happened at La Juanita. I was doing something and the lady in charge, Silvia, came and asked me if I could fill in as the English teacher because the girls who were supposed to be doing it went on vacation. That`s pretty common, for people to go on vacation and not let anyone know, haha. Then when people just don`t show up, everyone is like, oh, they must be on vacation today. Really, when will they get back?  Oh, I dunno, they didn`t tell me anything, I`m just assuming. Basically like that. So I started with these 2 teenage girls who were all giggles and didn`t have books or anything, and they wouldn`t tell me what they already knew, then I would start with something and they already knew that. Females make me insane, especially adolescent ones. They were fun though. Then a guy came and asked if I could take a couple more chicos. Of course. These two little boys walked in and I stopped dead because the one looked like he could be my baby brother`s twin. He had the same chubby cheeks, the same hair that sits silly on his forehead, half in his eyes, the same saunter...then he said hello and his voice sounded so similar! It was cracking me up, and he knew a lot of English too. Oh yeah, and he was 11, just like Luke. We talked about random stuff, and he kept saying things and giggling, looking down, with a semi-closed smile, like he knew he was being a smartass... just like Luke also. It was so crazy to me, I was cracking up. He asked if I ever flew in a plane near the Bermuda Triangle or knew anything about the supposed magnetic field around there, and that`s when the similarities with my brother started to fade, because Luke`s worries are far from the Bermuda Triangle.. I wonder if he even knows where that is.

But yeah, that`s about it. My friend Kendra comes tomorrow, and then we have Semana Santa-Thursday and Friday before Easter are holidays here, so I get a super long weekend!