Shoe drop journal part 1

Here is the first half of the entries in my journal I kept during the Salta trip:

14/11

Woke up in Lime House hostel. Paid and left, spent the morning feverishly racing around Buenos Aires with all of my bags trying to get some things sorted out before I left. I printed off 150 pages of guitar lessons (as my phone has been stolen, I didn't have access to them any more). I bought a metronome and a strap for my guitar bag, and took a bus to this incredibly seedy looking clinic to get a free yellow fever jab. Waited five minutes and was grabbed by a harassed nurse who violently stabbed a needle into my arm then thrust a certificate in my face telling me I was apparently now vaccinated. At least the needle was clean... I tried to look for a spanish comic as well to help me learn, but the only good one I could find was TinTin and it cost $60AR which is far too expensive [actually Marion told me later that the Argentine comic is called Mafalda, so I will look for some of those].

Left for Salta at 3pm, kind of wondered if I'd made the right decision to commit to this for two weeks but a little late now. We stopped at a shitty motel and stayed there late overnight. Didn't practice much guitar, I have no good excuse.

15/11

Loooooong car ride all day. Pretty sure we got lost although Lily (incredible woman but a little kooky, runs LIFE charity) insisted she knew exactly where she was going. I'm not convinced, at one point we ended up on this potholed dirt road and I thought the car was going to shake itself apart. We also hit a donkey. Lily's driving is... interesting to say the least.

We arrived at a church/mission place at 2:30am and stayed there overnight. Very tired.

16/11

Woke up in a flat bed on the ground. Crazy, I just woke up in a freakin' catholic mission house in the middle of rural Argentina! Went outside to find out that someone had left bread, pastries and coffee on the outside table for us. Damn I love these catholics. We were expecting the shoes to arrive so we could start giving them out but standard Argentine organisation meant they were nowhere to be found. Instead I practiced guitar all morning. I am very excited to be learning from a proper structured course, I know I can become a musician if I just keep working at it! In the afternoon I wandered around the local town of St Ramon de Pallera Oran with Tom and Marion (they are the two other young people on the trip with me). It's an interesting place. Incredibly, it seems to be stuck in a timewarp. There is a sugar factory from 1920 still running and powering the economy of the town, pouring out thick black smoke. All I can find to eat is bread and empanadas, do the Argentines eat ANYTHING ELSE!? Eventually found a grocery store after an hour of searching and bought some fruit, then immediately found five more right next to it. Fucking typical. Most of the day I was surrounded by people speaking either french or spanish. Not having a firm grasp of either puts me in a curiously isolated little bubble. My spanish is improving hugely now, words are emerging from unintelligable chatter as if coming into focus. Not speaking the language gives a unique viewpoint on human behaviour - we are far more apelike than we care to admit sometimes, once the distraction of meaning is removed we can see some of human communication for what it really is. The key I think is to EMBRACE some of our more apelike tendencies, especially those of generosity and hospitality, because these are what make us truly human.

17/11

Today I practised two hours of guitar. Still no sign of any shoes. Today we go to Bolivia. This morning I had the unique privilege of playing and singing a couple of songs for a crowd of children at the school/mission where we stayed. They were playing and I spontaneously decided to do it, so glad I did. A young lad was kind enough to lend me his guitar.

"I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn to do it."

-Picasso

I am barely an amateur player at best, but I want to be a musician and you aren't a musician unless you play for others, so I try to take as many opportunities as I can to do so. It was truly a great gift to be able to share my music with these kids, and I think they liked it, clapping and whooping. Although I could only converse in a basic way with them, music communicated far more than words ever could. It truly is a universal language. All cultural barriers fall to music, I believe it holds at least part of the solution to reducing conflict everywhere. Conflict results from FRUSTRATED COMMUNICATION and music is communication in its purest form. I want to become a musician in order that I may say what cannot be said with words to all who want to listen. It is far to say I have been very deeply affected by this experience. By the way, the spanish way of saying "to play guitar" is "tocar la guitarra" - literally "to touch guitar". I think this has a very interesting meaning, a true player only needs to just touch the right notes at the right time in order to create music.

Anyway, after we left it turned out we couldn't enter Bolivia officially because the border post only granted visas that required you to stay at least 24 hours. However, 50 metres away was a river ford where the locals crossed (many with huge packs of smuggled goods) with impunity. What a crazy situation! The border officials were helpless to stop them, if they stopped them they would just move upstream and continue. Not to be phased by the problem with the officials, Tom, Lily, Marion and I took off our shoes and waded waist deep across the river into Bolivia. My first time as an illegal immigrant! We spent the day in a market town there, everything was much cheaper than in Argentina, curiously. I bought a pair of shorts. I spoke to some of the men carrying goods across the river. Some had very heavy packs, 40kg or more. Apparently they are paid a pitiful 8 pesos (less than 2USD) per crossing. I tried to lift one of the packs and really struggled, the men laughed uproariously at my efforts. I tried some coca tea before bed. This is tea made from the leaves of the cocaine plant. It didn't get me high but it was quite delicious.

18/11

Woke up at 6am. Disgusting. Immediately left for a remote village in the north of Argentina to give out shoes. We fitted maybe 2000 pairs on the first trip. The people who live out here are like zombies. Not just fiscally impoverished but educationally and culturally impoverished also. I feel ashamed to admit it but I am disgusted by them and their behaviour. To them, we are the sole source of everything they have and just machines for delivering to them free stuff. They lined up like dead people, shuffling forward to take their shoes and mill aimlessly around. Not a word of gratitude or please to be heard. These people have forgotten how to live. Their only source of value being free handouts since birth, and provided with no education, they have had no driving impetus to develop any kind of culture. All they do is eat, sleep and fuck. I saw so many babies and pregnant women it was ridiculous. I am repulsed by them. They represent a cultural void, a pure drain on society, a sink for resources. These people don't need shoes - they need some sort of halfway decent mental programming. Their situation closely mirrors that of the indigenous peoples in Western Australia. I don't know what the solution is. In this situation, giving free handouts is attacking the symptoms whilst cultivating the source of the problem, feeding the walls that imprison them. Either give NOTHING and allow their own culture to develop, or fully embrace and integrate them into our society. This halfway house of throwing the outcasts the scraps from our bloated table serves only to foster helpless, animalistic creatures dependent on outside help for everything.

I believe education and cultural programming represent the solution. People think they are helping with handouts. Ironically I think this giveaway quick fix may do more to insidiously destroy indigenous culture than the Spanish conquistadores ever did. We poison them with droppings from our consumer culture, causing them to become fat and lazy. Paradoxically, aggression and suppression would be MORE likely to cause a reaction and promote a lean, strong culture of solidarity and creativity. Case in point - look at the black slaves in 1800s America. Oppression was rife yet they developed an incredibly potent culture in response to it. Is oppression a solution? Of course not, that's not what I'm saying. But we certainly need to think more intelligently about how to help these people. I saw a man today with no shoes but a mobile phone in his pocket. WTF?!?! What can I do to help resolve this problem? 4000 shoes and not one thankyou. Talked to an older, more jaded volunteer in the back of a ute (pickup truck) travelling between drops. He was well aware of the problems.

Frankly these people need CONDOM handouts more than shoe handouts. It is ridiculous that most have cable TV but not enough to eat. This truly is the ugly, seething underbelly of our oh so shiny consumer society.

We only ate one meal today, greasy chicken and salad provided free of charge by a kind man called Julio. I have no idea where it was or why we went there. We returned exhausted at 10pm after 16 hours of work.

19/11

Got up early once again frustrated by the total lack of hurry about anything in Argentina. Waited from 8pm til 2pm for shoes, by the time the car arrived, everybody had decided it was lunch time so it took another hour before we could leave. It was grossly hot and sticky, but the people receiving shoes today were much more grateful and organised than yesterday. One of the sites saw the older women organising kids into lines and helping us to fit the shoes. The supply of kids was unceasing, these slums are huge and there is a massive proportion of expectant and breastfeeding mothers, talk about an overpopulation problem. We had to abandon ship when it started to rain (thankfully bringing with it a break in the oppressive humidity) but I left with a slightly more optimistic outlook than yesterday. Maybe there is hope for some of these people. We ate pizza and hungout with the other charity guys afterwards. Bear in mind this past week, all I have heard all day every day is spanish, almost no english. The strain of not speaking the language well is starting to take its toll a little, I am very tired a lot of the time and feel quite lonely and isolated, but I am optimistic and my understanding takes a new quantum leap every day. Remember, I spoke and understood NADA when I arrived just three weeks ago. Now I am expecting perfecton? Be realistic Sam! But if you aim for the stars, you might just hit the moon, and I'm sure patience and repeated exposure will yield results.

To be continued...