FABULOUS cultural night on the town

Last night, Tom, Jocelyn, and I along with 5 other people (a combination of Jocelyn’s Argentinean friends and my UNC friends here for other reasons) went to see The Phantom of the Opera at the Teatro Opera. It was INCREDIBLE!! Unbelievable! I was amazed and impressed by everything from the singing to the stage backdrops and pieces to the special effects. The Phantom of the Opera is one of my favorite pieces and I know all the music, so it was such an amazing experience. It was also really cool to hear it all performed in Spanish. I’m so impressed by the person who translated it to Spanish and still managed to get all the words to fit the rhythm of the music. Uhh, such an unbelievable experience! Soooo worth it! And it only cost the equivalent of $12. This is the life!

After the show, we went to a tango club, where we watched people tango, attempted to tango, and then watched a professional tango performance. Couldn’t have asked for a better end to the evening :D Tango is sooooo much harder than it looks. I am doubly impressed now by anyone who can tango well. It was an interesting experience to be doing a dance that didn’t automatically come naturally and easily to me. My partner literally taught me the same steps over and over again, and it was fun and I’ve got the steps down now, but I was SUCH a hot mess on the tango floor. And it REALLY doesn’t help that there are a bunch of other couples dancing on the same floor super close to you and everyone dances around in a circle, making bumping inevitable unless you’re good (which I’m not). Considering it was my first time tangoing in 4 years, I wasn’t bad. But considering I was expecting to just pick it up and be great, it came as a shock. I definitely would love to take actual lessons in the future. Currently, I prefer salsa to tango…yes, probably because it comes so much easier.

Argentinean Hospitality

I just find it all FASCINATING! I could go on and on. I met with Marina Lembo, who is an autonomous midwife and the country contact for the International Alliance of Midwives. I talked to her for 3 hours! She was the person I was looking forward to meeting the most this whole summer and she was so kind and helpful. She just got back from presenting at a conference in South Africa about midwifery and she was kind enough to give me a copy of her presentation. She’s put me in contact with past patients and other midwifes who work in the public and private sector, so she’s been an invaluable resource.

Another research contact here in B.A. named Hernan Chavez has also been so helpful and kind. He’s a medical student and his uncle is good friends with a Morehead alum, which is how we got his information. He talked to Tom and I about the healthcare system, gave us a tour of the University of Buenos Aires School of Medicine (he is in the Anatomy department, so our tour included seeing cadavers on the dissecting table), and set us up with a School of Medicine lecture we could attend the next day. Argentinean hospitality is incredible! After talking to us about stuff related to our research, he asked if we wanted to get lunch and then took us touring some around the city. And then at the end of that, he invited us biking with him Sunday afternoon because he had 3 bikes. SOOOO NICE!! So Sunday afternoon, Tom and I did a bike tour of the whole city. 4 hours of biking = sore legs the next day, but it was a blast!

Research Update

Regarding my research, it’s going well so far. I’m absolute positive that whatever I do in life I want it to involve maternity. There is no doubt about that. I’ve discovered some really interesting things about midwifery in Argentina and the healthcare system (at least I find them interesting :D if you don’t, feel free to skip this part):

For starters, the public healthcare system is free for both Argentineans and foreigners. You don’t have to be a citizen to get free treatment in a public hospital. WHOA! Crazy, right! There are so many foreigners who come to Argentina to get treated because of this. It’s just not fair though, for example, cause Chileans flood the Argentinean hospitals (paying nothing towards it of course), but Argentineans don’t get that same benefit or treatment when they’re in Chile. And healthcare is divided into different parts. There’s public healthcare, which is government paid. Everything is free and you’ll always get treated, but if you need a surgery for example, you go on a waitlist. Then there’s private healthcare, which is divided into obra social (paid for through your job) and prepaid, which you pay for individually. In both of those, you go to private clinics. Essentially, which type of healthcare you have is determined by how rich you are. Wealthy people don’t use the public hospitals even though they pay for it through taxes.

So that was healthcare system background. In regard to midwifery, there are several interesting paradigms and current phenomena:

1) Midwifery is based on the principles of more personalized maternity experience and natural delivery and birthing with no drugs, whereas obstetricians focus on induced labor, making the delivery as quick as possible, and they use drugs. However, in Argentina, the majority of midwives work in hospitals and in the hospitals you have to use drugs, so midwifery has lost the essential of what it is.

2) The government tried to eradicate midwifery in the 1950’s-70’s so that only the professions of doctor and nurse remained and they banned home births. Doctors used the fact that some out-of-work midwives started doing abortions (which was illegal) to discredit the profession and make people not respect them. Eradicating the profession failed so the government eventually brought back its midwifery programs, but ironically, nowadays doctors are the ones doing illegal abortions. Because of this attempt to eradicate, there are now some provinces in Argentina where midwifery is gone- those programs never reopened.

3) The less autonomous midwives are (which it’s not common to find autonomous ones here), the less they can do. Autonomous midwives can do anything: they practice continuous care, they deliver the baby in a home, and they determine their own schedule; however, if a pregnancy becomes complicated and she has to go to the hospital with her patient, the midwife loses all her powers and autonomy and becomes merely a doula. Midwives in the public and private hospitals have to work in conjunction with a doctor and don’t have the same abilities. Public hospital midwives don’t practice continuous care, they share the pressure with doctors during complicated pregnancies, and they work in shifts, doing also family planning and sex education. In private hospitals, midwives aren’t allowed to deliver babies and they function more like nurses. They do parent classes and inducements/drug injections.

4) There’s a phenomenon of increased student interest in the profession of midwifery. Education is not as good for medicine nowadays because there are sooooo many students interested in becoming a doctor. There are more doctors that needed doctors. Frustrated medical students are changing career paths to midwifery because it’s very similar, and nursing students are becoming midwives because they’ve finished the nursing track and want to do more.

My new mission :P

I’ve already accepted the fact that I will be eating my way through South America, starting of course with Argentina :D The food is sooooooo good!! Where to even start! Our first night here we went to dinner at Los Inmortales, which is supposedly the best pizza in Buenos Aires. Deliciosa!! It was that first night that I realized I’d be eating my way through the next 10 weeks. Even when I was full, I kept going because the food was so good and new. Probably not the healthiest thing, but it’s part of the cultural experience, right…if I’m going to learn as much about the culture as possible, then I gotta keep eating :D Since that night, we’ve hit up all the city’s best restaurants and cafes. And the best part is that it’s SOOOO cheap! En serio! You can have a super super nice meal and still not have spent more than $20-$25. Our meals have averaged $8 including tip (and that’s with all our food exploration). For those people who’ve been here or plan to come here: Los Cuartitos (another great pizza place; in my opinion, better than Los Inmortales); Cumana (out-of-this world empanadas, cazuelas, and calzones); Freddo (BEST ice cream); Café Tortoni (tartas to die for); Café Las Violetas (pastries galore); Torquato Tasso (UNBELIEVABLE steak and flan accompanied by really good tango and samba bands performing); the list just goes on and on.

I easily see myself coming back here again in the future. I could more than easily see myself living here for a year after college…the only possible impediment being the ‘ja’ speech thing. But I will say it grows on you. My mind is already going through all the possibilities for how I can come back and considering the possibilities. You know me and how my life plans are ever-changing and modifying. This could possibly fit perfectly in those 4 years between graduating and 25.

Buenos Aires, "la París de Sudamérica"

While in Buenos Aires, Tom and I are staying with Jocelyn in her family’s apartment, which is in a GREAT location! It’s super safe and near everything. It’s essentially the Upper East Side of B.A. Staying with her and hanging out together has been a fabulous experience. It’s really shaped in a favorable way how we’ve experienced the city. I know our experience would have been so different and not as cool or thorough as it is now had we been staying in some random hostel. Thanks to Jocelyn and her family’s friends here, there are a bunch of places we’ve gone and cool things we’ve done that we never otherwise would have known to do or experienced. And we’re going to be able to use some of her family’s connections in Peru to do more cool stuff there, so everything is just working out really well.

B.A. is such an urban city that it’s easy to forget that you’re in a third-world country. When we go out at night, especially, I really feel like we’re in NYC. There’s a part that looks a lot like Times Square, an area similar to Broadway, we take black-and-yellow taxis everywhere, there are big billboards everywhere and electronic ads…other than the people or families begging for money or the homeless people sleeping in parks (which any city has), there’s not any reminder within the city center or nearby areas that we are in fact in a developing country. Driving into the city from the airport (seeing the outskirts) it was visible, but since then, no. We are going to tour La Boca, the B.A. neighborhood most people know because it’s super colorful and was the home of tango, so I expect that’ll be more of a reminder of where we are because it has a lot of poverty.

ESTOY IN BUENOS AIRES :D

BLOG TIME AGAIN!! I've yet to succeed at keeping a blog for an entire experience, but maybe this summer will be the charm. I'm following Che Guevara's Motorcycle Diaries path, so if I'm going to be inspired to write, this ought to be the summer. He kept a diary, so I should too. So here's to recording my adventure through South America as I follow Che and research the role of midwifery in South American society. Hope you enjoy the ride! :D

STOP #1: Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires (called B.A. by everyone) is AMAZING! I love the city! It really reminds me of NYC at times. There is so much to see and so much to do, both during the day and at night. And it really is a city that never sleeps! Great transition from Spain because the lifestyle is so similar :D While the lifestyle hasn’t taken much adapting to, the Spanish definitely has. It is so…different (I shouldn’t say bizarre just because I don’t like it). It took a lot of adjusting to. I’ve gone from one extreme of Spanish to another. In Spain they cut off the final ‘s’ sound of words, spoke with a lisp, and pronounced all their v’s as b’s. Here in Argentina, they don’t really open their mouth when speaking (MAJOR lack of enunciating) and they pronounce all their ‘l’ and ‘y’ sounds as ‘ja.’

How ridiculously confusing this can be is best exemplified by a woman I was talking to who was saying “I already called her.” In Spanish: Yo ya llamo ella. When she spoke, all I heard was ja-jibberish: Jo ja jjamo eja. Umm, come again! I know I understand Spanish- I left Spain confident in my understanding abilities, but when I first got here I had to think so hard. There’s a friend from UNC who’s also here and her family is Colombian. She’s spoken Spanish and been around it all her life and she even said that her first week here she had major difficulties. Glad to know I’m not the only one! Slowly but surely, though, it’s gotten better. I’ve adjusted to the vocabularly differences (such as the use aca instead of aqui, etc) and I’m finally at the point where the ‘ja’ doesn’t completely throw me off. I expect it now, woot woot!