One Month Down, 8 More to Go

It has officially been one month since my feet left American soil and landed in Argentina. It has been a battle everyday since. From being bored the first two week, to placing in a class bellow where I had hoped, to being far more homesick than I had expected, to this previous weekend where things were a hot mess, to my electives where I don't understand most of whats going on, it has been a journey.

Thank you so much to everyone who has taken the time to write me notes and letters and send them to me. I've gotten at least one letter, some times three or four, every week since I've been here. They are so encouraging and have been a great help for me. I'm slowly gaining the courage to speak  more readily with the students here. While none of you would peg me for being shy, meeting new people (especially in a language I don't know) is extremely stressful for me. Unless I'm in class or talking to my roommates, I spend a lot of time just being quite and listening or tuning things out as opposed to engaging in conversation. Now that I'm getting more adjusted to being here I've decided that lunch time will be my meal where I try to sit with only Spanish speakers or more Spanish speakers than ACA students. That might not seem like a lot, but I don't eat breakfast and dinner I usually eat with my roommate and her boyfriend and they speak English to each other. So lunch is now my practice time. Also, all of my language classes are in the morning so it's an excellent opportunity to put into practice what I'm learning in class.

I don't remember if I mentioned this before, but instead of moving up into the Advanced 1 class, I've decided to stay in Intermediate but I have the grammar book for Advanced 1 and I'll be working on it as much as I can so next trimester I can be in that class. The class I'm struggling with the most right now is Ortografia. It's basically hooked on phonics for Spanish. Right now we are learning about syllables and accented syllables and where there needs to be tildes based on certain rules. I understand the concepts very easily, but I struggle to hear accented syllables in English let alone in Spanish. Hopefully I will be able to bring my grade up from the last two quizzes. I got a C on the first quiz and I'm pretty sure I did worse on this last quiz because the majority of the quiz required me to classify words based on where the accented syllable was, and since I can't hear the accented syllables, I kind of had to guess on all of them. I spoke with my professor after class and we're supposed to be meeting on Monday sometime for some extra help. I'm also going to be going to the tutoring session tomorrow to work on my Ortografia homework and to get some help on the Advanced 1 grammar work.

Next week is Week of Prayer hear. The following week is our trip to Buenos Aires. Tomorrow I'm sitting down with some friends to plan our Christmas vacation travels and will hopefully be booking buses/hostels tomorrow or the day after.

Thanks again for all your prayers and support. I will continue to need them and appreciate them as time goes on. 31 more weeks and I'll be home :) Chao for now!

La Sonrisa

Well, it was definitely the most "interesting" weekend I've had here thus far. My weekend actually started on Friday morning very early. I had decided over a week ago to participate in the La Sonrisa mission trip that happened this past weekend. We were supposed to go to a town about 4 hours away called Federacion and do some little mission projects in the town and on Sunday we were scheduled to go to the thermas (hot springs) in the town. Supposedly the hot springs are famous, I will get to why I'm not so sure they really are later.

I decided to stay up all night on Thursday night with Megan, another girl in the ACA program that was going, because we were leaving at 4am Friday morning. We went to go where we were to meet the buses, and there were no buses -__-
We didn't actually leave until around 6:30 am. The people on my bus sang almost the entire way there, so I didnt get to sleep much on the bus.

Once we arrived in Federacion, we unloaded our bags into random offices outside of the thermas where we would be staying for the weekend. We divided into our missionary groups, reloaded the buses, and set off for our different sites. My group was going to an escuela (elementary school) to sing with the kids and the paint the walls in the hallways. The songs we sang were both about God and about hygiene. The ACA students in my group had prepared a silent skit about brushing teeth and we had cute little props to go with our skit.

After we were done singing, around 12, the kids went home for the day and we had lunch. Then we were supposed to start painting the walls. We had about 2 hours after lunch for free time (siesta) and then there weren't enough paint brushes to go around in our group so I only ended up painting for about 5 minutes at the end and then we were done. I used that time to get on the WiFi internet at the school. It was faster than at the UAP.

After we finished at the school, we went back to the thermas and moved our stuff into the rooms where we were staying. The girls were split between three places: two large concrete rooms attached to the pump room for the thermas, and a room off from the women's bathroom and showers. I was in on of the giant concrete rooms. Concrete is very hard and cold to sleep on. I woke up with bruises on my hips and very cold Saturday morning.

Friday night we had dinner at the escuela I had worked at in the morning/afternoon. Then we had to walk to where the church was. We had maps of the town, but they were hard to read and the group of ACA students I was with weren't sure if we were walking in the right direction. The church, come to find out, was not actually a building, but was more of a blow-up-tent. You know those bouncy house things that have air being blown into them from a giant pump? That's how the "church" was too.


The showers didn't have hot water at all, so Friday night I took a freezing cold shower and then froze in my little fleece sleeping bag all night. It's more of a fleece blanket that zips up like a sleeping bag than an actual sleeping bag.

Sabbath morning we got up early, had breakfast at the school, walked to the church, and had Sabbath school and church. I was so tired from not sleeping well the night before that I didn't get much from the sermon. After church we were divided into groups and were sent to deliver pamphlets and info about the afternoon's health expo door to door in the town. I didnt know what to say to anyone, so the Spanish speaker I was paired with did all the talking.

Saturday evening we had the opportunity to go to the thermas, I chose to take a shower, hoping for hot water but it wasn't. I was really sarcastic about the weekend with some girls sleeping next to me on a nice air mattress. It was really funny. I was talking in my broken Spanish and they were dying laughing. They ended up having me sleep on the airmattress with them. I definitely didn't fight them on the invitation.

Sunday morning we got up, went to the school late for breakfast, and then came back to enjoy the thermas. Since I hadn't gone to the thermas the night before I wasn't sure what to expect. But since I couldn't smell sulfur and I was right on top of the hot springs basically, I wasn't expecting much. The thermas were more like pools with varying temperatures of water than a natural hot springs like what I was expecting. It was still relaxing but not what I expected.

I got all packed up and then had to wait for a long time for us to load our luggage into the buses, get our "sack" lunches, and then be allowed to load the bus myself. We were supposed to be out of the water at 12:30 and ready to leave by 2pm. We didn't end up leaving until after 4pm. My bus was once again filled with lots of singing all the way back. We stopped twice on the side of the rode, but I'm not sure why. We stopped at a gas station so people could pick up snacks, and we stopped again when another bus was stopped at a gas station-waited for them to pray-and then kept going. We didn't get back to campus until almost 930pm..we were supposed ot be back by 6. It was a mess. It wasn't the worst weekend ever, but I got sunburnt again on Saturday. My poor face is very irritated.

There are two weeks until our trip to Buenos Aires. It was supposed to be next week, but since next week is week of prayer on campus, the ACA Admin postponed the trip another week.

I'm still trying to get pictures to post. It looks like I'll have to either figure out how to get pictures to somebody in the States with faster internet or try and stay up till 2 or 3 am when the internet speeds up and try to post then. As soon as I figure out a system to get pictures up I will post them.

Until next time.