One Week into the Trip

Greetings from Argentina from the GSE Team!

Our team arrived safely in Buenos Aires on Wednesday morning October 26th after a long overnight trip. We were met at the airport by our first group of Rotary host families and immediately taken to our respective homes for a day of recovery from travel. The team was divided among several towns in the western suburbs of Buenos Aires with Rotary members from two different clubs. Our first full day on Thursday was exactly that = quite full! Our first stop was a meeting with the planning director of nearby town to learn about their master planning efforts and particularly how they are dealing with new housing and with rehabilitating some of the housing that has become either run down or socially challenged. We then went to a bank to learn about mortgage and lending practices. Generally we found that the people who actually qualify for loans are not those who really need them! Most people who purchase homes in Argentina do so with cash, so the concept of leverage does not really exist here....

We also met on Thursday with some of the faculty at the local University to discuss some of the new efforts around housing in Argentina and to see some of their work.

(Sara presenting to the Merlo Norte Rotary Club)

Thursday night we made our first presentation (in Spanish!) to a Rotary Club.After some technical difficulties that included a smoking transformer (!) all went quite well.


(Richard sampling Yerba Mate, a traditional drink of Argentina. We all needed to cut the bitter flavor with lots of sugar!)

Friday we spent touring some housing construction sites in the nearby towns and in the afternoon we visited a bilingual school during their sports practice. Richard was a big hit telling stories of surfing and the recent shark attack in Bolinas, which thrilled the teenagers to no end.

Saturday we had a city bus tour of Buenos Aires and saw some of the more important neighborhoods, (Photo: colorful La Boca Neighborhood in Buenos Aires) including several of the soccer stadiums (Boca Juniors and River Plate - should not even really mention them in the same sentence because the rivalry is so intense here). The team is looking forward to returning to the city again in another week or so for more time to explore.





Sunday we moved to our second club in Chacabuco (not on the map below, but just to the west of Merlot and Moreno). It is a smaller city of about 40,000 residents - very charming, very pretty and with a very nice downtown area that comes alive with everyone at night. (Photo: At the Chacabuco Rotary Club. They loaded us up with Dulce de Leche!) We are now settled in w¡th our second families and had another vocational day on Monday, meeting with a cooperative that implements affordable housing initiatives locally and then in the afternoon touring a number of the different barrios (neighborhoods) that the cooperative has worked on in the past 15 years. The instability of the economy and inflation has made it extremely difficult for any programs to have any sort of ´legs´in Argentina, and it seems that every time the economic situation changes here, the program becomes entirely new and different, making it tough for there to be any sort of institutional memory. This applies not only to housing but to many different government program. Needless to say, we are all recognizing the perserverence of the Argentinians in times of difficulty!


We are all happy and healthy, if a little tired out, but the families so far have been wonderful, the food is terrific and the programming has been very good. We heard that the last group of Argentines who visited the states from this district all gained 4-6 kilos in one month in the US, so we are all trying to watch our dulce de leche consumption!

We all send our greetings and best wishes to you all.