Day Three-March 12

This is the day when fatigue started hitting everyone. Did it matter to any of us? Of course not!

We headed out after our usual bland breakfast of Orange Tang and Medialunas to the Mark Chagall Day School to finish working on our different projects: the gym, the second floor mural, and the playground mural(which i was assigned to).
Work was fun, the paint fumes must have contributed to this overall feeling, because it was definitely not easy work.
Outside, our Hebrew alphabet started taking shape, and those assigned to the project knew it would come out awesome.
Lunch included this brick of a cheese sandwich, which probably would have weighed in at about a pound.



At 4:00 pm(1600 army time) we left Mark Chagall and headed to a JDC welfare center.We received an explanation about the function of the 62 JDC supported welfare centers, I must say this was the moment you could really tell people were really tired. When the briefing was done, we split into 3 groups, each group would meet with a different welfare case, my group met with Avram.

Avram was a senior citizen who spoke good English, I felt this really helped my group understand the severity of his case since we were listening to it first hand rather than through a translator. Avram told us how he had dreamt of a better retirement and future, for himself, and for Argentina, however, over the years the different regimes and events slowly started removing the hope he had, his breaking point was the economic crisis in 2001.
Avram's life savings, accumulated over 50 years, were frozen and he never got to see a dime of it. Instead of living on 5000 pesos a month, Avram is forced to sustain himself with 1000 pesos only, his budget has to include not only rent and food, but also medications. Leaving the session with Avram I had a lot of food for thought: trying to understand how these people must feel, and what could be done to help not only them, but Argentina in general.

Our group meetings were followed by everyone's favorite, group reflection. The conversation we came up with was quite interesting, and it led to some idealogical and political questions.
Would a different system of government prevent future crisis? Why is there no public outcry?

We returned to the hotel to shower, and headed out to the tango show, dinner was ok, then we all headed out to watch a play/recollection of life in la Boca in the late 19th century, it was quite cheesy, but entertaining.
The tango show itself was great, long, but great, the dancers were very good.
I was most impressed by the leader of the band, even though he must have played this show every night for us turistas, he still managed to be excited and was cheering the dancers and singers the entire show.

There you have it, day 3 of our trip, stay tuned for day 4....