La Vida Idealist

Jennifer Yael Green is a writer and traveler who most recently spent a year as an English instructor in South Korea.  To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, she lives her life striving to write something worth reading, or to do something worth writing about. She spent several months volunteering in a villa in Buenos Aires, where she drank a lot of mate, led a dance class and taught English lessons.  She has lived on five continents, but recently settled in Los Angeles, where she works for the African Investment Fund and is a freelance writer.

I’d never even heard of paco before I arrived in Buenos Aires.

In fact, it was weeks after I’d begun volunteering as an English teacher in one of the villas (as the slums are called) before I received an introduction to this new and highly popular drug.

I was working at Conviven, a community center on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, right on the border of the Mataderos villa. My classes took place at a long wooden table in a home owned by an Argentine woman named Maria Rosa, and my students were mostly boys ages 12 to 19. I was hell-bent on getting beyond the glossy veneer of Buenos Aires, of tango and malbec and European architecture. I wanted to connect with my students, to become a part of this community.

What I seemed to have forgotten is that becoming part of a community, especially when you are an outsider, is hard work. Especially here at Conviven, where international volunteers come and stay for two months, six months, maybe even a year. They are here, and then they are gone.

It wasn’t until a friend of mine, who was visiting from the States, spent a few days in the villa with me that I began to learn a little more about my students and their lives. When Jose showed up, offering sweets and speaking in rapid Spanish about futbol, the boys began talking a little more. On the long bus rides back to Recoleta, Jose would share with me what the boys had talked about – that Israel was a serious boxer, that Abraham drove a cab at night to support his young wife and new baby, and that almost all of my students had friends or relatives who were using paco.

Paco is like cocaine for the poor, oftentimes called “cocaine’s garbage.” It’s made out of cocaine residue and industrial chemicals, and it’s incredibly addictive – the high lasts a very short amount of time, so paco users may smoke 30, 40 or even 50 paco cigarettes in a day. And it’s ravaging the villas in Buenos Aires, especially since the financial collapse in 2001.

Jose would tell me the boys’ stories – brothers who had stolen items from the family home to buy paco, friends who were literally wasting away because they were gaunt with hunger – keen for the next fix, but not for a meal. I wanted to talk to my students about the things Jose revealed to me, but I didn’t even know where to begin. And it wasn’t me they had chosen to confide in.

It was even more difficult after Jose left. It had been a relief to watch the boys, my students, talk to someone about their lives, share their complex stories and struggles. I worried because I felt I couldn’t be that kind of mentor to them, for a myriad of reasons.

I did get to know my students more as the weeks went on; they seemed to trust me, and we could laugh together, even when our lessons weren’t going as well as I wished they would. But there were many days I couldn’t even hold classes, because of drug raids in the villa. At least once every few weeks, I would ride the bus over an hour to Mataderos, past ferreterias, mini-marts selling cheap empanadas and car-repair shops. And when I would arrive, someone would tell me there had been a drug raid near Maria Rosa’s house and it was too dangerous to teach that day. I would turn back, wait for the bus outside the gas station, wondering whose cousin, whose father, whose uncle it was this time.

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