This morning I woke up late because my first class was cancelled, and then found out that my second class was cancelled too due to a student protest against educational reforms. Somehow I managed to spend the entire day lounging around in the house! I think I need much more rest here, since I spend so much energy thinking in Spanish each day, and then once in a while I throw in days like these where I don't sleep until early the next morning.
Anyways, I went to work again at 6:30pm today. This time I went alone, which seemed like it might feel a little sketchy at night but ended up being fine. When I got to Nuestra Casa, I helped to prepare sandwiches, tea and hot chocolate, and then a large group of residents and volunteers headed out for La Vega to give them out to the people living on the street there.
Handing out the food and drinks was a really different experience. It allowed me to see a part of the city I would otherwise never venture to at night, and definitely broke down the barrier between me and the people I pass on the streets during the day. It was so against my instinct to knock on one of those cardboard boxes, or awaken someone sleeping under a blanket. It is so against the normal city culture to break into this hidden world, but that is what this night was all about. It felt so unreal.
La Vega is a very lively area during the day, full of vendors selling fruits and vegetables and clothing and every random supply one could want. At night it is dismal and echoing, full of smoke and burning trash and the occasional people calling out to each other in the haze. A group of guys was playing soccer, and some kids and dogs were playing in the street, but apart from that the streets were mostly quiet and deserted. All of the storefronts that look colorful and charmingly dilapidated in the day became foreboding and gloomy at night, their doors locked and barred. The group I was with consisted of men from the house, a couple volunteering adults, and several 16-18 year olds who had obviously volunteered here many times before, as they knew many of the people on the street well. I talked to them as we traveled between cardboard box dwellings and heaped blankets, handing out the sandwiches. I met a sweet little girl named Myriam who lives on the street with her mom and brothers, and we played with her for a while. So strange to think about the kind of life she has there.
The most bizarre moment of the night happened toward the beginning, when we approached a large cardboard construction and offered bread, and out jumped a man dressed as a gypsy woman. (S)he wore shining blue makeup and many enormous earrings, and had hair that stood on end as (s)he wildly ran about wielding and twirling a large stick like a baton and yelling "QUIEN FUE!?" ("Who was it?!") Finally, after a whole lot of stomping about and muttering, the gypsy returned to the house, and I breathed a large sigh of relief. My new volunteer friends told me that (s)he thinks that the house moves on a caravan and travels each day. All together, I think I would sum up this experience as very overwhelming, a little entertaining at times, and sad at others. I am both excited and apprehensive about my next trip there.
(Photos above are of La Vega in the daytime. The second one is very near where we were handing out bread.)
We left at 10pm, and two of the volunteer men took me back on the subway. I then met up with some friends to go to a club with Layla's visiting Chilean cousin, which was a very weird experience after the one that I had just had. They played a lot of reggae and rock. I was pretty mentally exhausted from the past few hours, so I ended up leaving a little early. What a day!
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