Days 51-52: The Beautiful Days

Yesterday's weather, in contrast to Sunday, was fantastic. The day itself was relatively uneventful, I had no after school plans, it felt great. I have a new classmate to introduce, his name is Frank and guess where he is from? Yes, Germany, you might have seen that one coming. It seems only the Germans are traveling right now. Frank is a dad, here in Buenos Aires with his latin wife (I think she is from Ecuador, but I am not positive) and his little daughter. He and his daughter are in classes for this week, but the daughter is naturally not in my classroom. He seems very nice, holds the same strong opinions that I saw in Andi and Dirk, and speaks quite good Spanish. He is a bit more slow and precise than I am, I tend to just go with the flow and learn and correct mistakes as they materialize. We are working hard on Libro 5, jumping from section to section with each class.

Today Marta bought me the Clarín newspaper so that I could read the little free book that is an optional additional purchase on Tuesdays. It is always an abridged version of some book that has each page in English and Spanish facing each other. This is a fun way to learn phrases and some vocabulary, for me, because the Spanish in the book is good. I did have to warn Marta that there were some errors on the English side. This week's book was H.G. Wells' The Time Machine or La máquina del tiempo. The first line of the book is the same as the original, but I am not sure how much more. Today was also exquisitely beautiful outside. The only sad part about the cool(er) weather is that I missed my daily sauna today. But that is the price I pay...

Momentary interlude: There is a siren outside and I have to express one of the more amusing aspects of city life here in Buenos Aires. For those of you who have not played Domino Trains this will not be quite as entertaining until you have a friend explain it, or you look it up online. The ambulance sirens here sound almost exactly like the tones from that game, without the one that has the sound of the wheels on the tracks, but it starts out with a whooping that warps in crescendos, then it changes to the alternating pitches followed by a horn... I looked around wildly when I first hear the sound, I could barely believe it. OK, back to the feature presentation:

We talked a lot today in our classes about current events in Argentina, with one in particular. During the dictatorship in Argentina that ended not so long ago, a large amount of people disappeared and died in concentration camps. Mainly enemies of the military, the governing force during the dictatorship, these people were taken from their families without a trace. They are now called the desaparecidos, essentially the 'disappeared ones.' There is a group of elderly women who have adopted the name of las madres (The Mothers) who have committed themselves to discovering the true identities of the hundreds of orphaned kids, many of whom were illegally "given" to military sympathetic couples. One hundred individuals, no longer children, but in their early 30s, have been found and identified.

The first two children identified were adopted by a couple who realized that their new children must have been the son and daughter of concentration camp victims and immediately went to last madres. The  children were identified and reconnected with their biological grandparents and maintained a loving relationship with their adopted parents as well. This is obviously the ideal situation, but there are many who were not/have not been told that they were adopted illegally, or that they were adopted at all.

The current news story concerns the adopted children of one of the richest and most influential women in Argentina. The owner of the newspaper Clarín has two children who las madres believe were adopted illegally. Las madres are requesting that the children, now adults, submit to a DNA test to confirm their biological genealogy. The two children, however, do not wish to know the truth for if they were adopted illegally they would not be inheritors of the family fortune, and their adopted mother would be revealed to be a very different person. The question debated now is if las madres can legally and morally collect a DNA sample with or without the consent of the children. Most if not all of las madres are grandmothers who do not know where their grandchildren are.

This topic is startlingly emotional, a far cry from the normal news stories of accidental death, murder, or robbery so commonly portrayed in the news. I find the work of las madres to be impressively dedicated to finding the truth and reuniting grieving families after a national tragedy. The key point is where to draw the line in pursuit of the truth.

Dovetailing to this topic is the holiday tomorrow. The 24th of March is a memorial day for 'truth and justice,' remembering and learning from the last military coup. There are no classes tomorrow (I will relish in the fantastic late morning wake up time I will have tomorrow) and there is a concert in the Plaza de Mayo (see previous blog post) in the early evening. This location is pertinent because las madres work inside the Casa Rosada located on the eastern side of the plaza.

Not quite as upbeat as most of my blogs, but I think that this theme is important enough to sacrifice my attempts at humor. I ask that you find a moment tomorrow to think of and remember my description of a part of a terrible ordeal that Argentina withstood.

Chao.