Dancing and the Sand

There are people who have friends that aren't really great friends. Some people are fortunate enough to have one friend. I mean somebody with whom one is and feels safe, with whom one can be silly, learn, love and play. The selection committees responsible for choosing the 15 Argentine Fulbrights somehow managed to choose 15 such people. Each of us is kind, creative, and an unstoppable, flexible force of imagination...

Thanks to Tim for making this map so that we can see where all of the Argentine Fulbright ETAs are located.

We English Teaching Assistants (ETAs) met just briefly at the beginning of our time in Argentina, and on June 12 we all met again in Buenos Aires at the Fulbright Commission. The Commission sat and listened as each of us told about our experiences: some of us talked about living with wealthy chain smokers, others about eating peanut butter and jelly with their students (that's me!).

As you can see from the pictures above, the Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship Enhancement Seminar (facilitated by the Commission for Educational Exchange between the United States and Brazil, Fulbright Commission Brazil) took place in a beautiful place. The first two pictures are from our day on a Brazilian island, and the third is from our visit to the US Consulate in São Paulo.

The Seminar was perfect. Fulbright ETAs from Brazil, Uruguay, Chile and Argentina met up to exchange stories, ideas, to network, and to generally be energized. We had a video conference with the State Department folks in D.C., and one of them even flew down to join us. He danced with us.

We did a lot of work, and it was a lot of fun. My presentation (we each presented) was entitled, Crema de Maní, or peanut butter, and was mostly about the extra-curricular activities that my students and I have created here in Resistencia, Argentina.

These next two pictures are from our trip to dinner in Buenos Aires before we all headed to Brazil.

I finally got to meet a friend's daughter, Anna Newman of Fayetteville, Arkansas, and she got to meet Krishna, you may remember him from my first blog entry. We ate at the second best restaurant in Buenos Aires: 26 pesos for a vegetarian buffet. What!

Here is a picture of our group reunited, telling the Fulbright Commission and each other about our experiences.

In the hotels in Brazil, we visited until we could visit no more.

This would be a great cover for our band's album, though we don't have a band or an album. This was on our walk to dinner. Notice the ever present and vivid graffiti. Brazil has the best graffiti of any place I've been.

Eric, Jenny, Hallock and I befriended the waiter at a restaurant just down the street from our hotel.

Here are Jenny and I getting ready to fly after dinner.

Here I am on the beautiful Brazilian island's beach. To get to the beach nearest our hotel required a dream-like journey. Paige and I made the journey running through the night. We had to sprint down an ever-narrowing dirt path until in nigh total darkness we were slowed to a walk between an aged stone wall 6 feet tall on either side. We could hear the ocean and then see it at the end of this veritable tunnel, and it looked as though we would step from the walled path and fall right in. Paige and I were the first ones to the ocean. Once there some of us danced to ourselves, some of us sang, some of us visited quietly about our most sacred places in the world.
That, our first night on the beach, will remain one of my favorite memories for a while. Walking along the moist sand the indentation of our footprints would sparkle as phosphorescent algae reacted to our steps. They sparkled like stars in the sand, and I walked along the beach turned like an owl watching the sand stars behind me. I haven't felt such like a child since... I was a child.

Paige, Jenny, Tim, me, and two Fulbrighters from the Chile contingent, Lucy and Brad. We ran, climbed, frisbeed, and some of us even played Red Rover. They are brilliant.
And fun!
And we danced so much (elsewhere, not on the island)... samba, capoeira, as well as dances without names.
That was my first time dancing capoeria. What a blast. It's like interactive yoga put to great music.
(from Wikipedia: Capoeira is an Afro-Brazilian art form that combines elements of martial arts, games, music, and dance. It was created in Brazil by slaves brought from Africa, especially from present day Angola some time after the 16th century.)

Matt has a great sense of humor and can sing like nobody's business. He's of the Chilean contingent. Among other great tunes, we sang Dispatch's "The General, Barefoot Truth's "Changes in the Weather," and in the Gospel vein, "Precious Lord, Take My Hand," "People Get Ready," "In the Garden," and "How Great Thou Art."

We sang quite a bit, actually. And Mary Ellen there brought her guitar. (She's lived in Fayetteville! It felt so good to talk street names!)

After a day at the beach and before presentations got started...

OK, from here on out the pictures have to do with a presentation my high school students put on for me. It included local food (they made sure none of it had any meat) and local dance. After I ate and they performed, they tried to teach the French teaching assistant and me a little about folklórico, folk dancing.

Tell you what, these are some talented English students.



The above video is from my first day with the Fulbrighter's on March 15, 2009. It's fairly obvious that I'm exhausted in this video, but it's obvious in a really funny way.

One final thing, a summation of my last four July 4ths.

July 4, 2006. Cuernavaca, Mexico. The other Americans studying abroad went out all night. Fortunately, my roommate Chris was 26 and had passed his partying stage and so we went out only to make an appearance. I had what might have been my second alcoholic drink of all time, a bluish liquid with fire on top, and returned extra talkative to Silvia, my Mexican (host) Mom.
July 4, 2007. The Woods, Northwest Arkansas. Josh Culwell, Lydia Michaels, Ryan Denham and I arrived at the Rainbow Gathering the night before and (unbeknownst to us and as we would later discover) pitched our tent in poison ivy. On the 4th itself the first half of the day is passed in silence, no one utters a word and even motions are used sparingly. Silence flows until sometime in the afternoon when everyone gathers in a thousand-person circle and chants “OM.”
July 4, 2008. 25 kilometers from Coimbatore, India. The night before, a great Indian musician and teacher played a British melody which also serves as one of our patriotic tunes in the States (can you name that tune?). After his performance, Swami Dayananda declared that the next day would be one of meditation and of silence until he returned from a trip to Chennai. We didn't utter a word and even motions were used sparingly.
July 4, 2009. Resistencia, Chaco, Argentina. I resolved not to talk this morning and actually scared myself when I accidently broke the silence with song! Ha! I took a practice LSAT and began my personal statement for law school applications. Then some twelve or so English professors and I got together and read poetry.

Thank ya'll for keeping in touch with me via the blog. As my Dad would say, "Write me a letter when you learn to write!"