L.I.F.E. Argentina

We´ve had our first assignment for L.I.F.E Argentina.

L.I.F.E. is an acronym that stands for: Luchemos para un Infancia Feliz con Esperanza
(We are working for a happy childhood with hope).
Every week LIFE organizes different activities that they carry out in different slums in the suburbs of BsAs.

Monday we went to Ejercito Celestial about 30min. outside BsAs.

We had been told that the ambulance refuses do drive into this slum, and that if someone is shot the body needs to be taken to the boarder between the slum and the city to be picked up by medical personell.This all sounds very scary, but I can happily rapport that it did not feel unsafe at all while we were there, and that there has practically never been any problems for the LIFE volunteers in these neighbourhoods.

We were driven there in a minibus, and we brought some games, papers, pencils, jumping rope, a basketball, and cereals with milk. The project of the day was "Toy Workshop" because it´s summer vacation here, and therefore there are no homeworks to work on (which is what is normally done during our visits).

The contrast between the slum and BsAs was extreme. These are people who have very little of anything and everything, and they are living in sheds, some with water, some without. The children are dirty, hungry, and very behind educationally speaking compared to other children, and.....they are LOVELY.


They are craving attention from adults, and don´t have too many positive role-models to look up to. A boy came up to me and wanted to play a game. He had a deck of cards with numbers from 1-12 and with the numbers in English written on the cards. I told him that I would love to play, but that he had to explain how the game worked because I´d never played before.
Do you know what the game was?

The game was that I held up a card and then he tried to say what number it was.

And there we were, sitting on the ground, playing this "game" for almost 2 hours.
It never got boring to him.

That fascinates me when thinking about how restless children can be. They have nintendo games, TV-shows, musical instruments, books, toys, after-school activities, sports +++ etc.
and they are still BORED!

The children loved to play, hug, draw, and learn English - and I feel really lucky to be able to do some of these things with them.

Maybe it would be better or more helpful to be in an organization that spent all it´s time systematically donating more food, more clothes, to focus only on teaching them English etc. during the visits...but in the moment it felt really important to just be there together, and hopefully together create a nice break from everyday life...both for them and for me :)

-AK