Iguazú Falls and Friends

There is a waterfall under the Petit Jean River Bridge just before Corinth Road in Danville. It's probably a good 2 feet of waterfall, and a sunset at the riverside is hard to beat. Plus, it has a good story: it's named after a woman who disguised herself as a man to come along with her French explorer husband in a time when women weren't encouraged to go exploring. That's a cool story.

Another neat story is of me and Jennifer meeting up for this photo! She was walking the same trail that I was on the same island at the same time, and she's a Fulbright Scholar working in Uruguay. We met in Brazil a couple of weeks ago and were not planning to meet in Iguazú, but it worked out. Ha! This will be among my quintessential South America pictures; that's right, Dad, this one is going on the travel picture wall!

Iguazú also has a cool story behind it, a couple, actually. According to LonelyPlanet: Argentina, my guidebook, "According to Guaraní tradition the falls originated when an Indian warrior named Caroba incurred the wrath of a forest god by escaping downriver in a canoe with a young girl, Naipur, with whom the god was infatuated. Enraged, the god caused the riverbed to collapse in front of the lovers, producing a line of precipitous falls over which Naipur fell and, at their base, turned into a rock. Caroba survived as a tree overlooking it.

"Geologists have a more prosaic explanation. The Río Iguazú course takes it over a basaltic plateau that ends abruptly just short of the confluence with the Paraná [River]. Where the lava flow stopped, thousands of cubic meters of water per second now plunge down as much as 80m into sedimentary terrain below. Before reaching the falls, the river divides into many channels with hidden reefs, rocks and islands separating the many visually distinctive cascades that together form the famous cataratas (waterfalls). In total, the falls stretch around for more than 2km."

Steven Skattebo came to visit me! He is my second Fayetteville friend to come see me in Argentina. He was sitting relaxed in the coffee shop downtown when I spotted him. He had been eating meat in the countryside for a few days and was very excited to stay with me because ordinarily he's a vegetarian, or at least a "beady-eyed vegetarian," meaning he only eats birds and fish.

ha!

So he gave a couple of presentations at my university then we headed northeast to the falls! Wow!

The first day was completely nublado, it was so cloudy we could hardly see, and the spray from the falls meant it was best to keep the camera in its case. But day two was fantastic.

In lieu of an aerial shot, here is a photo of an Iguazú model. ¡Qué lindo, che! And the next three photos are of my friend Steven and a friend we made on the way to Iguazú from Spain Juan Cardiel.

In this last one we'd just hiked up the island in the middle of all the falls, Isla San Martín, and were standing just in front of a couple of big ol' falls!

And below are a couple of pictures from Steven's presentation at Instituto Terciario San Fernando Rey, the place where I'm a'workin'.

Here he's judging a game (also known as a "communicative activity," as I learned), wherein two competing students draw something while the rest look on and guess what it is.

A winner is declared.

This is the lovely Chabela and her family. Chabela is the head of the English department at San Fernando Rey, and she is awesome: kind, organized, intelligent, and she made sure that I had some vegetarian food at the table.

Iguazú was certainly one of the coolest things I've seen. It got me thinking about a world of peace and social justice, specifically about sacred, ultra beautiful places like Iguazú. 'Seems like we--humans--should only go a couple of months out of the year and leave it to the animals and people that have lived there for a few thousand years the rest of the time. That goes for a lot of places, me'sa thinks. But let's move along through this, another stream of consciousness blog entry...

Jacob and Angela left for home! That's right, my new friends and neighbors, wrapped up their 11-ish months in Resistencia. They are among my first Lutheran friends.

Raquel and the Britoses had us all over for lunch before Jacob and Angela left.

Here we are celebrating a birthday party at the Britos'. It was my Argentine mother's birthday: Raquel. She's the one in the middle.

Jacob can make some mean pancakes, and they even had maple syrup! What!

Jacob, Angela, and I shared the same landlord, Señora Cuesta. And her daughter took us to her weekend getaway last weekend where we walked, played frisbee, and they ate a lot of asado, barbecue. In the picture above, Jacob, Angela, and their pastor and pastor's wife are all walking away. I like to take pictures of people walking away.


The señora and I rode in the back of the pastor's van on the way.

Homero, the dog, had torn his sweater (in my experience in Argentina, all dogs with families have sweaters) and the señora protested this picture saying that I ought to wait until his new one arrived. I didn't want to tell her that I was taking a picture of his old sweater simply because its tearing was the most exciting thing that had happened all week. ha! I really am happy here.

OK, a little more about Iguazú and we'll be ready to wrap things up.

There is a couple from Fiji in the beginning of the video; I happened to start a conversation with them on my way to Iguazú the first time and as it turned out we shared breakfast together a couple of days later. They were passing through Resistencia (where I live) and so once we got here I helped them book their bus tickets to Salta. The person with whom I'm talking is the Fulbrighter who by chance was walking along the same trail at the same time on San Martín Island. ¡Qué casualidad, che! What a coincidence, che!

On a related note, here are a couple of people walking away, Indian spiritual teachers known as swaminis.

It was because of my time at this ashram, or retreat center, that I have a connection with the Britos family here in Resistencia. All thanks to my teacher, Swami Dayananda. Here is a picture of us!

Pujya Swami Dayanandaji sent me to the Swami Vivekananda Yoga University (http://www.svyasa.org/) where I studied yoga and met a friend whose brother lived with the Britoses three years ago. Swami Dayananda Saraswati, as he is also known, taught me one of the most important things yet. That is, "Life seems burdensome because we only know how to relax in between action and life is mostly action. The trick is to discover relaxation during action. Then one is really free..."

Here is the final picture for this entry. It is of the "Tea with Stephen" group.

We read poetry and hung out. What a great way to share Saturday afternoon! It was some dozen or so English professors and me, and we had a blast.

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!"