Buen día, Rivadavia

“Good day to all the town of Rivadavia, it's always a pleasure to be able to talk to you”. That's probably the most nerve-wracking phrase I've had to speak (in Spanish, of course) in my experience thus far as director of this project, because every time I have to say it I'm “on the air”.

Radio is a big deal here. In a small, rural town where access to TV is limited and illiteracy rates are uncomfortably high, radio still reigns as the king of local news, music, and advertising. Television is definitely present—both cable and satellite (DirecTV)–but with no local programming, the majority of TV viewing time goes to fútbol (soccer), novelas (soap operas), or pelis (movies). These things offer entertainment, but they do not—I would argue—provide the same feeling of interconnectedness with a community that listening to the radio can. And, of course, buying a radio is simply cheaper.

To further prove my point is this fact: there are three radio stations in Rivadavia. The community station, run by the municipal government, plays a mix of everything and is the most popular, followed by the other two, which are privately owned and broadcast exclusively evangelical Christian content.

Interestingly, despite their influence, they are surprisingly willing to give out free air time. And that's where we come in. Since we are doing so many things both in the town and in the community, the most effective way to get out a message is by dropping by the radio once or twice a week and announcing it on the air. Now that we are friends with most of the staff, we can basically just show up and within 5 minutes be in the studio talking about the latest plan or meeting to the entire Rivadavia area. The only unfortunate part is that the other ADRA team members seem to think it's most appropriate that I talk the most because I'm director of the project, even though I am obviously the least fluent in Spanish.

The truth is, though, that even with the semi-present language barrier, by the time I'm actually talking and conversing with the host I feel almost entirely comfortable. For some reason, despite all the nerves I have just beforehand, in the actual moment when I have no choice but to speak I get a wave of inexplicable fearlessness. Even if my words are simple and I make mistakes in pronunciation or conjugation, something about that spontaneous moment in which I am only subconsciously aware of the hundreds of people that might be listening frees me of my normal social inhibition. It's exhilarating, but strange; why is it that talking with more people would make me feel less afraid than talking with just one or two?

I still don't have a good answer for that question, but I do know that I love being a part of the radio medium. Before I arrived in Rivadavia I had actually started a weekly radio program with my friend Brian called “Teh 402 Show”. Using a rather clever combination of internet technology (Skype, Gmail phone, Ustream, and Facebook), we were able to broadcast our discussions, play our favorite music choices, and even take calls and texts. Even though we never got too many listeners, the idea of communicating with an audience was not only fun but fulfilling. In an age when we are overstimulated by the visual, the experience of sitting back and listening to a conversation or a song or a story is still incredibly compelling.

And here in Rivadavia, it's even more important. Being a constant presence on the radio not only helps our project to be better known the Wichí community, it also brings their situation to light in the community at-large. That heightened awareness of the problem is, in my eyes, the first step towards deeper understanding and less discrimination. By breaking down my language barrier, perhaps at the same time I am helping to topple bigger walls.

Flexibilidad

Always have a plan B, they say.

Less than two weeks into the project, we had already found ourselves in a plan B situation. We had come in strong on all fronts, creating positive, strong and mutually beneficial relationships with every institution in Rivadavia, except for the one about which we cared about the most: the Wichí community. It wasn't so much that our plans to reach out had gone sour... they just hadn't gone anywhere. Our attempts to draw people to meetings hadn't worked, so we did the opposite: we went to them.

It's never easy to break the ice when you arrive at the house of someone you don't know. Anyone who was coerced into door-to-door fundraisers in elementary school knows exactly what I'm talking about. Obviously we weren't selling chocolate or frozen pizzas or wrapping paper (curse you Sligo!), but we were, in a way, selling an idea. We had to sell the idea that we weren't selling anything, that we were there to help without asking anything in return. I am convinced that it is infinitely more difficult to do that than it is to sell an actual product. You always know what the motive of a salesman is, so it's really just the quality or necessity of the product that is up for debate. In our case, both our motives and our “product” are in question.

We had been going to houses all week to tell them about the upcoming survey, and at the end of each day it still seemed like there were countless more that we hadn't visited yet, or even seen before. Progress was relatively slow because we preferred to go as a group rather than split up. In the end we hoped this would save us time: by going together with our Wichí assistant/translator (Silvana), we could ensure that the message was understood and well-received in a single visit. Going solo meant risking misunderstandings—and repeat visits to clear them up. So, slowly but surely we were reaching the majority of the houses, and after a few long days at the end of the week we had reached virtually all of them on time, ready for the day of the survey on Sunday (22^nd of June).

Planning a community-wide survey of over 100 houses in one day is hard. It's even harder when you're not exactly sure where all the houses are and you don't have any standardized way of identifying them. It's harder still your survey is in a different language than the mother tongue of the people from whom you want to collect relatively complicated information (nutrition, education levels, medical history, work history, etc.). And, to top it all off, the majority of the people conducting your survey are teenagers who have never done one before, and you will be held responsible if they mess up.

Almost always I find that the level of stress I have about a specific problem is not at all proportional to the actual amount of work required to solve it. I'm not sure if I'm just speaking for myself on this point, but when I stress out a lot about a problem that seems impossible to fix, the solution is actually quite simple or presents itself on it's own (for example, one day after talking with a few members of the community, we learned that many families would soon be leaving for a month to find temporary work in a field 100 miles away. After stressing out—no, freaking out—for the rest of the afternoon about how the survey would be pointless and the whole project would have to be put on hold, a simple call to Beatriz revealed that only very few young men would go, never entire families. Problem solved.)

Fortunately this was the case for the nearly all of difficulties facing us for the survey. For weeks we had been asking the hospital if they had a map of the houses that they used as a guide for making their rounds, Silvana—who also works in the hospital—decided to simply sit down and make one herself. Although she is from La Esperanza, a Wichí community 20 miles away, she somehow created a rough sketch of every house in La Misión without even going to the community for reference—it even had names on each house. After a short discussion about spacing and layout, I copied it to a smaller piece of paper that we could hand out to each team leader. Problem solved.

The survey being in a different language was an issue we had been discussing since about a month ago when we had begun developing it. Here we were in Rivadavia and we were still debating whether we needed to translate it, and if so, how we would proctor it. After a five-minute talk with the public health agent who works in La Misión, we found out that he had no problems with communication even though he knows no Wichí and the hospital's questions were much more complicated than ours. Problem solved. (Well, almost. We still had to simplify and format our questionnaire, which did take a very, very long time.)

As for the unprepared surveyors, we were very concerned that perhaps our course hadn't adequately prepared them for being out in the field, especially with the differences in age and culture. Yet, on “D-Day”, we were all pleasantly surprised by the quality of the work they did. To get an early start, we had arranged to meet at 8:30 AM—on a Sunday. Even so, nearly everyone arrived even before we did, and no one was late. Throughout the day they showed respect, responsibility, and a genuine interest in completing the survey patiently, accurately and effectively. And we finished all of the houses before lunch. Problem solved—or maybe it was never there at all.

That's not to say that there weren't difficult moments. For one, of the two survey forms I sent to Beatriz to photocopy, she printed the older one, which was missing some important changes. Photocopies are ridiculously expensive here (50 centavos/page), so we had to hand-write some of the questions and staple in the extra sheet for about 120 forms. There was also some confusion about the map not being not exactly to scale, making it unclear where some houses were supposed to be located, and some houses were missing entirely. Another complicating factor was that on the day of the survey there were a few families that were at church, weren't at home, or were visiting in other parts of the community. There were also a very small number—two—who did not want to participate at all (somehow, nearly all of these cases occurred in my “zone” of about 30 houses). And it was a strangely hot autumn day, so we had to plan to return on another day to finish the seven or eight missing homes.

Needless to say that Sunday afternoon was a huge relief. I was dying from the heat and still on an adrenaline-high from the kind of nerves that can only come from worrying about being responsible for large amounts of other people. But I was happy. Plan B had worked.

Other moments that stand out:

Our new friend Pablo, who invited us into his home when we told him about the survey, and him repaying the visit at our house to talk again even though he was under the weather.

The four policemen we had asked oversee the survey being totally confused about the need for their presence, but patiently standing around anyways.

The negative body language of Pedro (one of the two who didn't want to participate) as he told us that he had already been surveyed, even though we knew he hadn't.

The old man who I mentioned in my last post being so excited to be surveyed that he bee-lined directly to us to let us know that we hadn't gone to his house yet!

The speeches of our students about their experiences during the survey at the final meeting of the training course, talking about how much it impacted them to see how people that lived so close to them were in such desperate need.

Carrying two enormous frozen goat carcasses by myself eight blocks across town for our asado (barbecue) to celebrate the termination of the course and the success of the survey.