Argentina

I got here this morning at around eight, Buenos Aires time, four, Kansas City time.  Luis asked me to bring a suitcase for him that weighed around eight thousand pounds.

Okay, it was forty-eight pounds, but it was still a heavy fucker.

I had easy chat with the car driver as we arrived at the hostel.  He asked me if I voted for Obama.

I reached the hostel and had a hell of a time getting my shit together, passport, money, where did I put that paper...

Finally got it all together and moved into my humid broom closet which will serve as my home for the next ten days.  There's no air conditioner, which I now curse myself for not looking for in a hostel, but other than that it's rather lovely.  It's an old mansion that now houses several rooms and there's a large terrace where you can see quite far on the landscape.

I've never stayed in this part of town before, so I decided that some adventure was needed.  I took off walking, going straight, taking a left on one street, a right on the other.  All was fine, I bought toothpaste, shampoo, contact solution and soap at Farmacity.  I continued walking, swinging my bag and feeling the sweat run down my ass.  Then I started to get worried.  Somehow, the street that I had been walking on turned into another one, which is infuriatingly common in Argentina.  In two minutes I had become lost.  Really lost.  I walked everywhere and asked two different policemen, but I was still lost.  I found a subte station and took it to where I could walk to another subte to take to Calle Medrano, where I am staying.  As I got off the subte at Puerreydon I was so exhausted from walking for five hours with nothing to eat I actually prayed for God to get me back to the hostel.

"Please," I thought, "Please guide me to where I need to go."

 I realized that Puerreydon had turned into Jujuy magically.  "Goddamnit," I thought.  "I think this is the wrong way."  I continued walking anyway and then there it was.  A large, hand-painted sign that said "Cooperativa 18 de diciembre, ltda. Brukman" and I stopped dead in my tracks across the street.  There it was, the factory that I have been obsessed with for a year and a half.  The factory I wrote about in my thesis, the factory whose workers' faces I have memorized.  It was like Aztlan.  

I fought back tears, feeling my throat close over.

There it was.

It wasn't just a dream, a hope, a wish.  It was real.  I ran across the street dodging cars and smashed my face against the window.  There were the suits!  There were the photos of the workers!  There was my wildest imagination, splayed out before me!  I was on the street where three hundred policemen fought against five thousand protestors.  These were the streets that had been tear-gassed, smoke-bombed and lead-bulleted against fifty middle aged women who were being treated like capital criminals because they wanted to sew.

I had asked God to guide me to where I needed to go, and suddenly I found myself in front of Brukman.

I am going there tomorrow to arrange interviews with the workers.  I can only hope that I can only hold my shit together because a sobbing interviewer is lame.

Tomorrow is the day that I conquer my biggest fears and talk to my heroes.  Tomorrow is the day that I advance my life in ways that I never thought possible.

I just hope that tomorrow I don't wake up in my own bed with this having all been a dream.