Living and working in Salta

Lin admiring Simpsons' influences

We are enjoying Salta’s warm spring days and cool nights. Everyone here tells us that Salta has a perfect climate and so far we cannot disagree. We have had no rain, so we mostly walk into town and round the city streets, which keeps us fit and allows us to learn more about the city.  There are lots of street-events in various public squares, with music, craft and food stalls, clowns and costumed characters, usually collecting money for some charity or NGO. There is a lot of individual enterprise, too, with people selling socks or jewelry, fruit from a cart, or woolen hats, gloves, scarves, sweaters and blankets.

Sandy admiring carved convent door

The bus system is extensive and inexpensive. You have to be ready to flag down the bus or the driver will drive right on past. The tickets work a bit like EZ-Pass in Pennsylvania. You wave your prepaid card at a little yellow box when you get on the bus, and a ticket magically appears. A ticket inspector may appear at any moment, too.

Crossing at the intersections involves taking your life in your hands and hoping you can get to the other side before you get hit. Apparently drivers give priority to the right, but the rule is mostly ignored when they approach an intersection, and only occasionally will a driver stop for a pedestrian. Surprisingly we have seen only a few accidents, but many near misses.

Salta's wedding cake cathedral at night

Our Work

With encouragement from the FSD office, we are beginning to put a project together, and rely on Google translation to help us express the ideas in Spanish. We have been reading books FSD recommends and lends us about aid and development in poor countries. 

Sandy is working on a plan for small community gardens at food-kitchens which provide children from poor areas with their only meal of the day. He is also developing a social web site for the more than 500 NGOs in the city, so that they can share information about who they are and what they are doing.

Sandy can walk to the municipal offices where his boss is based, but because of the disruptive upcoming elections he finds it easier to work on his laptop from home. His business meetings usually take place in a café over a breakfast consisting of juice, coffee, seltzer and mini-croissants.

Lin’s work is a long commute, with a twenty-minute walk and a thirty-five minute bus ride. She is helping with underprivileged children at a center which serves as a safe refuge for them to play and study in when they are not in school. The public schools are open for half days only, and many children drop out of school with poor literacy skills. The program helps to keep them in school and some get scholarships to high schools. They may also benefit from a sort of 4-H program and small vegetable garden for learning about nutrition and growing healthy foods. We’ll see what we have time for.

Food

The food in Argentina is largely protein and carbohydrates, though we have seen a wide variety of fruit and vegetables in stores and markets, and salads on restaurant menus. It is strawberry season and there are carts piled high on many corners with the most delicious dark red fruit – 20 pesos (3 dollars) for 2 kilos! Of course, they eat a lot of beef, and pizza is very popular. Salta is famous for its empanadas -- little semicircular pies filled with cheese, corn, chicken or ground beef, which are then grilled and served with a tomato and onion sauce. Argentinians drink a lot of Tang and soda, and all drinks (except the delicious local wines) are loaded with sugar – they even add extra sugar to their soda. They think we are rather weird to drink coffee or tea without sugar. 

Selling mates and bombillas

The local social drink is mate, which is served with great ceremony. The mate (a small wooden cup or gourd) is filled with yerba (the leaves and stems of a bitter herb related to holly) and some sugar. They then add boiling water, which you suck from the bottom of the cup with a metal straw called a bombilla. The same cup and straw are refilled many times and passed around among the guests. The drink is bitter, sweet and stimulating.

Breakfast is a token meal of tea or coffee with toast or crackers. Lunch is a big meal eaten at about 2:00 PM. You are then meant to wait until dinner which is usually eaten after – often well after – 9 PM. However, there is usually a light snack at around 6 PM to tide you over.

Living

Business students promoting their entrepreneurship

We are loving our new home-stay. The family is warm and welcoming. They are well-educated and enjoy talking to us in Spanish, which is helping us to become more fluent. They live in a large house they have been remodeling for the last couple of years. Like most houses in Argentina, it seems to be in a permanent state of construction  Sandy and I share a good sized room, with two single beds, a small table and two chairs. The floors and bathrooms are tiled, and there is a grass area in the back patio. They have two sons, of 19 and 13, living here, though they also have grown-up children in college and elsewhere. Their puppy is an adorable one-year old brown pit-bull who is very strong and friendly.

We have been here only two nights so far, having moved house after a week with a single working mother and her sixteen-year-old son, two dogs, a borrowed cat, and problems with keys, meals, and internet access…a distinctly forgettable experience. Our new host family provides a good Wi-Fi connection, and delicious meals, with fresh fruit and vegetables.

We are going to a classical music concert of the renowned Salta Orchestra in the municipal theater with the other FSD interns on Friday night. It starts at 9:30 PM and we have been warned to expect some audience participation that would be frowned upon in Verizon Hall in Philadelphia. We will probably take a bus ride outside the city over the weekend, as there are parks and canyons to visit not too far away.

This weekend Argentina is holding the first of three elections in the next two months. This one is for the provincial governments, and posters with photos of many more or less trustworthy-looking characters are plastered around the town. Voting is obligatory and citizens may be fined or suffer other sanctions if they do not vote.

Street happenings

More dancing in the street

Salta: First Impressions

We are now living with a family in Salta in Northwest Argentina, where we have completed our orientation for six weeks of volunteering under the auspices of the Foundation for Sustainable Development.

The City

Salta Main Square

Salta is a beautiful city…often called “Salta La Linda” (Salta the Beautiful) by Argentinians. It is in a wide, flat valley in the foothills of the Andes at about 4000 feet above sea level (Click for map). We are not far from some very high mountains, but we have not seen them yet. The population of the city and its suburbs is about 600,000, so it is quite small by US or South American standards. The first thing that strikes you is the straight streets and the low, colorfully painted colonial buildings. Salta was founded in 1582 and is full of reminders of its Spanish colonial past. It feels quite quiet and safe after the bustle of Cusco and the crazy chaos of Jodhpur – our two previous volunteering venues.

Salta: San Francisco Church

The Weather

We arrived in Salta on the first day of spring -- it was warm and dry, and the air clear and fresh. However, it is still early spring: the trees have no leaves, and spring bulbs and tree blossoms are just starting to emerge. The next two days brought a nasty shock: it became cool, breezy and cloudy with nighttime temperatures in the low 30s. We are glad we brought our thick socks, sweaters and windbreakers. However, today is already warmer and drier, and we expect it to continue to warm up as the summer approaches. The climate is classified as “subtropical highland” with a decent amount of rainfall, though there are areas quite close that are high desert like in southern Arizona.

Where we are staying

Our first night in Salta was in a charming and comfortable B&B opposite an ancient and still active convent, with equally ancient and still active nuns. Our next two nights were in a hostel on a noisier street, where we were put up courtesy of the FSD – we had about 40 years on the other guests, who were friendly and from all over the world. Although the word “hostel” conjures up Spartan conditions, we had a comfortable private room with a large bed and plentiful hot water. Finally, a few hours ago, we moved to the house where we will be staying for the next 6 weeks, with our host, Liliana, her son Santiago (age 16), 2 dogs and one cat. Like many Salta houses, it is small and all one story, and is about a half hour’s walk from the town center. Time will tell how this will work for us.

Eating out

This is Argentina, so dinner is very late, though not as late here as it was in Buenos Aires. Our first night, we went to a restaurant which turned out to be fantastically popular, with a line outside waiting to enjoy the excellent and very plentiful food. Argentinian food has many influences – especially Spanish and Italian, and of course the main ingredient is beef. They drink a lot of lager-type beer, and strongly flavored red wines like Malbec, which are grown in this region and to the south in Mendoza. The past two days, we have been eating in various restaurants courtesy of the FSD. Notable is the absence of vegetables and correspondingly large amounts of carbohydrates and protein. Yesterday, when we are all feeling cold and damp, we rapidly warmed up by sampling the famous winter soup of the region, called “locro” – beans, corn, sausage, and pieces of meat (with bones) all boiled together for hours, and eaten sprinkled with green onions and dried red peppers.

Argentina

General Guemes - Salta's hometown hero

Everyone we talk to seems to agree…Argentina’s politics and economy are in a mess. The government of Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, whom everyone refers to as “Cristina”, appears to arouse extremes of devotion or dislike. Inflation is 25% or 30% thought the government claims it is just 4% or 5%. In the center of Buenos Aires, gridlocked traffic is caused by street protests by one group or another every day. There are elections coming up soon, so every billboard is covered with posters for a variety of national and local candidates for office. Buenos Aires is noticeably more rundown and graffiti-covered than it was when we were here about eight years ago.

Money

Because Cristina has banned many imports and made others prohibitively expensive, in addition to restricting the ownership of dollars and other strong currencies, there is a huge black market. Everywhere in BA, and to a lesser extent here in Salta, there are touts on the street whispering that they want to buy dollars at 10 and 11 pesos to the dollar. The official rate is 5.5. The “blue dollar” exchange rate is so prevalent, that it is even listed on the front page of the main anti-Cristina newspapers along with the official rate. We wish we had brought more dollars in cash with us so that we could take advantage of the unofficial rates, but apparently you run the risk of being palmed off with counterfeit bills.

Work

The past two days, have been introduced to our new surroundings and briefed on the social and economic conditions in Salta, working with NGOs, living with a local family, getting round the city etc. The two FSD office staff here are extremely helpful and professional, and have done a lot to prepare us and help us feel at home. Our Spanish is getting a real work-out and will become even more important once we meet our host NGO organizations tomorrow. Actually, Sandy is not working directly with an NGO but an office in the Salta state government which deals with relations with NGOs. He is going to be giving presentations (in Spanish) to NGO leaders on using the internet, setting up web sites, social media etc. (Gulp). Lin is also meeting “her” NGO tomorrow. It focuses on educational outreach programs for children in an impoverished northern barrio.

Communication

Speaking of Spanish…in addition to trying hard to remember all our Spanish lessons, we need to understand the local accent and different word usage. A word like “pollo” sounds like “pojo”, a word like “rico” sounds like “zhico”. All the fruits and vegetables have different names and they use “vos” instead of “tu” when addressing people familiarly…and everyone is addressed familiarly. Finally, there is a lot of kissing when you meet and when you leave…one smacker near the right ear is obligatory.