Adam Sege • South Africa
Before I left, I wrote on this blog about the conflicting story lines that seem to dominate foreign perceptions of South Africa. Sometimes we see South Africa as a hopeful nation on the rise; other times, it’s a crime-ridden country with a government failing to lift many citizens out of poverty.
I think I saw the intersection of both narratives this week.
On Wednesday, South Africa held its local government elections for the fourth time since democracy began in 1994. The African National Congress has dominated each of the past contests, winning by large margins in eight of the country’s nine provinces. I won’t go into all the reasons here, but one is that the ANC’s legacy as the banned party that defeated Apartheid carries enormous weight to this day.
But this time around, you could feel frustration with the ANC. No longer was it just middle-class and wealthy voters that were disillusioned with ANC corruption and mismanagement; many poor voters were also blaming the ANC for the lack of electricity and toilets in their shack communities.
It was dark on Wednesday when we pulled into Motsoaledi—the settlement is off the electric grid—and it wasn’t hard to find the lighted tent where election officials were counting the votes. Nearby, we heard loud singing and saw people dancing around a fire. Along with two photographers and another reporter, I walked over to have a look.
When I started talking with one of the community members, asking what the song’s lyrics meant, he found another man in the crowd, who came over and introduced himself. I was talking with Lucky Ngobeni, a community member who had challenged the ANC in the ward by running as an independent socialist candidate.
With his supporters singing in the background, Ngobeni said he’d won that particular voting station.
I agree with many people here, both ANC supporters and opponents, that more electoral competition will lead to less corruption and more results. You can also make a strong argument that minor party candidates like Ngobeni are contributing to the ANC’s monopoly on power; the opposition is deeply fragmented.
But looking at Wednesday’s results, Ngobeni was hardly a spoiler. He took 7 percent of the ward’s vote—nothing compared to the ANC’s 88 percent—but far above the percentages of any established minor parties.
Those numbers show how dominant the ANC remains, even in the most competitive local election cycle in 17 years. But like Ngobeni’s candidacy, this election brought new challenges to ANC dominance, and I can think of no better symbol of where this country stands today than the celebrations I saw in Motsoaledi on Wednesday night.
I heard hope, in the songs of the residents supporting a local man who had challenged the ruling party and promised, if elected, to donate part of his salary to the community. I saw the reality of a community that tonight still sleeps in complete darkness. Inertia proved powerful, as the ANC won the ward again with 88 percent. But in the candidacy of a man named Lucky, 506 residents also found another option to vote for, a reason to vote in the first place.
Ngobeni’s supporters were dancing around a small fire Wednesday, but in a dark neighborhood, it burned brightly.
Thud. Clunk. Thunk.
The rocks were landing heavily, but the armored police vehicle was designed to withstand far worse. It held its ground, parked just yards away from the shack the rock-throwers were hiding behind. A few minutes earlier, I’d heard the ping of rubber bullets being fired, but for now, the police were holding their fire.
I was on a smoky street that smelled like burnt rubber, covering one of Johannesburg’s periodic service delivery protests with a veteran photographer named Boxer. The protest had started before dawn Tuesday in Zandspruit, one of Joburg’s many sprawling informal settlements.
In the morning a housing official had pleaded for calm, first through a bullhorn and then face-to-face with residents. He promised a community meeting on Sunday with government officials, and it had calmed tensions on the street he visited. But on this street a huge crowd was still gathered hours later, chanting, whistling and lighting a few small fires.
Back at the newsroom, a seasoned reporter had urged me to cover the reasons behind the protest. And when I asked residents why they were there, their reasons were clear and many: They wanted electricity. The toilet holes outside their shacks were so shallow that when they shat, they felt the water splashing up. The government had built a bridge and repaved the road in front of the settlement, but they had done little inside the community.
“The government is decorating the face of the area,” one resident told me, “but the inside of the area is rotten.”
More than anything, people in Zandspruit wanted houses. With informal settlements one of Apartheid’s ugliest and deepest legacies, housing is easily one of the biggest of the daunting challenges facing the South African government.
As a response, the government has built more than a million homes through its Reconstruction and Development Programme, distributing them to some of the country’s poorest citizens. The RDP homes are small and close together, but they’re clean and on the service grid. To people in neighborhoods like Zanspruit, they represent the promises of a better life embodied by the democratic government that took over in 1994 – promises that for them have yet to be fulfilled.
Along with “RDP,” I heard a lot of people talking on Tuesday about “Maureen,” the city councilor whose ward includes Zandspruit. The residents I spoke with were furious she had been nominated again by the ruling ANC party, and many said they won’t be voting in next month’s local government elections.
Looking down long rows of shacks, it was hard to blame them. But when I called Maureen, she was almost as frustrated as the crowd of people burning tires in her ward. She’d worked with other government officials to buy land for RDP houses, and with community input, the building plan was in the design stages.
But houses don’t just spring up overnight. Water, plumbing and electricity had to come in before homes could be built, the councilor told me.
“All of that is a process, and we are working as fast as we can on that process,” she said. “And it’s going very well.”
On a day when 16 of her constituents were arrested demanding more housing, the last part of that was almost laughable. It was symbolic, though, of the chasm that exists between the dominant political party here and the people that need it most.
The government is making progress building homes, and the process does take time. But the number of people living in communities like Zanspruit is still astronomical. For them the government is failing both in delivering basic services and in making processes like home allocation transparent and inclusive.
The anger I heard in Zandspruit felt deeply justified, and at the same time, I understood the councilor’s frustration that her constituents were taking to the streets instead of getting involved in a political process that takes time. But while both sides seemed far more reasonable to me than they did to each other, the conversations that should have been happening between them weren’t happening Tuesday. Feeling like no one was listening, the residents vented their anger with fire and rocks, and what they heard back were rubber bullets and a promise made through a bullhorn of a meeting five days later.
When that’s what the conversation sounds like, few of Maureen’s consitutents will agree with her that the development process is going very well.
With the city’s trash collectors on strike, I headed out Tuesday to see the places Jo’burg residents have been leaving their garbage.
Since the strike started last Thursday, the city has opened its yard waste collection sites to all types of trash. Residents have been driving their own garbage in– or, at least, trying to. The sites themselves filled up quickly, and the massive hills and seas of trash have spread far outside their gates.
Outside two of the sites I visited with a Star photographer named Jennifer, young unemployed men were sitting in the shade. When cars approached the dumping site, the unloaders would jump up, wave the cars in to a parking space and unload the trash for a small tip.
At the first site a small group of workers from a private contractor were attacking one of the trash hills with a bulldozer, transferring some of the trash inside the gates. Normally the garden site smelled like freshly cut grass, one of the employees told me. On Tuesday, the air was so foul my jeans still smelled when I got home hours later.
The city has sent inspectors to the trash piles to gauge the health risks, and in a phone interview Tuesday, a collection company spokeswoman called the situation “appalling.” Still, in a country where unemployment stands at about 23 percent, repulsive smells and health risks weren’t stopping the unloaders.
As the strike continues, many corners in downtown Johannesburg still smell like trash. Mixed with black bus exhaust and the ripe food from street stands, it can make for an interesting walk.
But this is a city of many smells, not all of them unpleasant.
My mornings here smell like flowers and French toast cooking in the kitchen of our bed and breakfast. And on a run after work yesterday, I breathed in the most seductive smells floating from a strip of Portuguese, Thai, Mexican, Middle Eastern and African restaurants.
As we pulled into each of the collection sites Tuesday, Jennifer and I rolled our windows up. But driving between one sea of trash and another, we rolled them down again, letting her cigarette smoke out and the warm Jo’burg air in.
The reporter who sits next to me at The Star was already on her way out of the newsroom when she invited me on my first assignment.
My first morning had been uneventful, and after reading through several entire newspapers I’d received the go-ahead from my editor to invite myself along on a story. Kay, who sits next to me, hadn’t seemed particularly interested at first, but an hour later she found me by the front of the newsroom, talking with another Medill intern. If I wanted to go with her I could, she told me, but she was leaving.
I grabbed my notebook, managed to only spill coffee twice on my shirt on the way to the car, and soon, we were off.
Judging by the speed our photographer drove at, we seemed to be running late. After pulling off the highway, he maneuvered the car over bumpy dirt roads with more puddles and pedestrians than other cars. We pulled to a stop by a green port-a-potty in front of a row of small homes.
We followed a woman in into a two-room home, where a front wall had mostly collapsed the night before during heavy rain. When community leaders hadn’t arrived to help, the family had called The Star.
And now here we were; Kay, our photographer, fellow Medill intern Blake Sobczak and me. It was too crowded to stay inside the house for long, so we walked back onto the brownish clay between the road and the house. An older man brought out a few step stools and insisted we sit down.
By this time, two dozen family members from multiple generations had come to watch. Whether it was or my accent when I tried out a couple words in Zulu, or being I was one of two white people in sight, one girl who was about four kept glancing at me and breaking into uncontrollable giggles.
The frail woman who owned the home plopped down on a stool as well, and our reporter started asking her in Tswana about what had happened. Since I couldn’t understand any of it, I watched our photographer prop himself up on the clay on his knees and elbows, trying to fit both the woman and the house into his shot. He watched through the viewfinder, finger resting on the shutter, and when the woman would gesture he’d fire off several quick clicks.
The woman was clearly exhausted, having sought help from neighbors for most of the day, and she was worried. Her relatives were watching closely, eager to make sure we saw how dire the situation was.
As the interview was ending, family members asked our reporter if she could leave money or food. Some of them chose to speak in English, and I heard Kay say something like, “I’m sorry, I’m just the reporter.”
The idealist in me wants to say that publishing the story will leave a positive impact, maybe even more than leaving a few Rand or a couple cans of food would. There’s the help that could trickle back to that family; on the way back, Kay said that readers sometimes find ways to help the subjects of stories. And more broadly, journalism at its best can lead to systemic changes, and in this case, you could argue the story might lead to productive outrage about the living conditions the residents described.
You could argue that, sure. But riding back to the newsroom, past neighborhood after neighborhood like the one we had visited, I wanted to feel good about the work we were doing but found it hard. I hoped I’m wrong, but it was hard to imagine our short story helping the family at all. And real story wasn’t even the wall collapse; it was the mother’s struggle to find work and feed her family, the kids packing into small rooms at night and the neighbors living in fear of a rapist who knows the neighborhood so well he only kicks in the doors of homes where only women live.
But the existence of poverty and crime isn’t news to locals in most cities, especially not in a city like Johannesburg. And at the end of the day, Kay’s job and ours isn’t to rebuid a wall or help a struggling family; it’s to help sell newspapers. Back at the newsroom, Blake, Kay and I huddled around a computer, churned out 300 words, and each moved on to our next stories.
I’d hoped to link to my story on this blog, but three days later, it still hasn’t run, and we think it probably will never make the paper.
Part of me hoped that reporting in Johannesburg, which has so many stories worth telling, would be the only proof I needed that I want to be a journalist for the rest of my life. I’ve had an exciting first week of work so far, but I’m not there yet.
Still, just because it’s hard to do the reporting that leads to progress doesn’t mean it’s not possible or worth the effort. There are plenty of journalists who manage to do it, and I’m lucky to be in a newsroom with some of them. And I think that if we’re creative about it, there are ways to turn long-term issues into stories that sell newspapers, or at least news, given the way the print industry is going.
Since starting to write this blog post, I’ve also started reporting a story that, although it’s challenging, fascinates me. I have more time and more room in the paper for this one, and it means a lot to at least one family.
For now, it’s time to turn off the laptop, though. Long day of journalism ahead of me tomorrow, and that’s exactly why I came here.
I’m headed tonight to a country often portrayed as moving forward along two competing story lines.
There’s the South Africa of progress, which in my lifetime has gone from an Apartheid state to a country that prides itself on being the “Rainbow Nation”; an infant democracy quickly establishing itself as an African powerhouse.
And then there’s the South Africa of failed promises, with high rates of unemployment, poverty and violent crime, and the highest number of people living with HIV of any country in the world. Frustration runs so deep that, in Skype interviews for a journalism class assignment, two South African immigration experts told me some government officials worry about the potential for an Egypt-style protest movement against president Jacob Zuma.
A lot of the time, news stories seem to reinforce one of these two story lines. Grisly crime stories, like this one, tend to suggest a failing, or at least a struggling, state. The World Cup, on the other hand, was portrayed as a celebration of a healthy nation recovering from a troubled past.
Dueling narratives are hardly unique to South Africa. Depending on the conversation, the U.S. is either the land of opportunity where a self-described skinny black kid with a funny name can grow up to be president, or we’re a materialistic/socialist/insert-adjective-here society losing multiple wars and sinking into debt.
In South Africa, though, the competition to tell the country’s recent history seems particularly heated. Considering the scale of the changes that country has seen in the past two decades, and the depth of the challenges it faces, that’s not surprising.
I’ve been thinking a lot about story lines recently, because a week from Monday, I’ll start working in an industry that breathes them. At the Star newspaper where I’ll be interning, my editor will expect me not only to dig into some of the country’s beauty and complexity, but also to translate the results of that digging into stories that make sense to readers.
It’s easiest for all of us to make sense of news stories that agree with the story lines we’ve already constructed. And I’m curious to see how the two South African narratives I’m familiar with will play out as I experience the country for myself.
But one of my goals this spring (South African fall) is to look for nuance and avoid trying to fit every experience into one narrative or the other. It’s the stories that throw familiar plots into question, from Watergate to the current headlines from the Middle East, that are often the most interesting and the most important to tell. From everything I’ve read to prepare for this adventure, I’m expecting to find a Johannesburg and a South Africa that rarely conform to simple narratives.
On a recent steamy afternoon, I showed up in a button-down shirt at the University of Salvador’s psychology building, ready to celebrate my friend Vale’s graduation. A bunch of Vale’s friends were waiting outside, dressed in t-shirts, and my outfit seemed to amuse them. Seeing my t-shirt underneath, my friend Marti offered to put the button-down in a bag. “We celebrate by throwing eggs and flour,” she told me. I thought she was joking—until I saw the bags holding flour and egg cartons.
Vale’s parents and her sister had driven 8 hours to Buenos Aires, and I congratulated them. Her dad shrugged it off with a smile, saying she hadn’t graduated yet. ”You have more faith in her than we do,” he joked.
After asking a few more questions (“When does the ceremony start?”), I put together that we weren’t there for a graduation. In fact, Vale won’t walk across a stage and get a diploma for a few more months. Instead, we were there to celebrate the end of her last exam period, in a way that, as far as I can tell, only Argentines celebrate.
A while after we arrived, Vale walked out to cheers and clapping from our sizable crowd. Tears trickling down her face, beaming, she hugged each of us and posed for a picture with her mom. The sappiness ended quickly, though; her friends were ready for the fun part.
Lugging plastic bags of egg cartons and flour bags, beer bottles, mayonnaise, seltzer and chocolate power we walked to a nearby park. One of Vale’s classmates was standing on the corner, smiling, with egg yolk in her hair and on the ground, as her friends pelted her.
We staked out our own spot nearby, busted out the eggs, and as the video shows, emptied all the supplies on Vale. “Please, give the father a chance,” her dad said, before drizzling mayonnaise all over her back. (A couple minutes later, he hustled to a nearby kiosko to get bottles of water and a towel for Vale to wash up with.)
I asked a couple times if the egging tradition has a particular meaning, and no one seemed to know. They seemed almost as surprised that Americans don’t do that, as we were that they do.
As a Spanish class final project last week, I wrote a paper on physical contact between strangers in Argentine culture. An Argentine, for example, won’t just kiss you on the cheek when they meet you; they’ll touch your arm a minute later to emphasize a joke. This is also a culture where strangers share with strangers. As one example, the iconic mate tea is shared by both friends and strangers through a communal cup and straw. Taken together, I think the physicality and willingness to share with strangers speaks to a different conception of strangers, one where people accept strangers as friends more quickly than I’m used to.
The day after I presented my paper, people I had never met before were handing me eggs and urging me to dump beer on Vale’s head. Apart from one other American, everyone there was originally from the city of Bahia Blanca, and many had known each other since high school. Sure, I stuck out a little. But as Vale celebrated with the closest people in her life, I was welcomed as a friend in a way that seemed as Argentine as, say, dousing a friend with eggs and seltzer as she walked out of her last college exam and into the real world.
Along with what seemed like the rest of the world, I watched last month’s rescue of the 33 Chilean trapped miners wherever I could find televisions: in a tango bar, at a cafe counter on a train platform, sitting on my host mom’s bed along with my host brother. The happy ending was a dream come true, not just for the miners, but for President Sebastián Piñera and media outlets across the world, who jumped at almost every chance to highlight the perseverance of a small but fiercely proud country that was bouncing back after a devastating earthquake.
One of the most interesting comments I heard that week came from my host brother. The rescue highlighted a real difference, he told me, in the bond between Chileans and between Argentines. They were only 33 people out of an entire country, but Chileans cared, and the government searched until it found them and brought them to the surface. Had the miners had been trapped in Argentina, he said, he had no idea what the outcome would have been.
Just days later, I had the chance to travel to Chile and see what he was talking about. Coincidentally the Phoenix capsule was on display in Valparaiso during my visit to Viña del Mar, a neighboring city, and David, Robbie and I waited in line with hundreds of Chileans for a chance to pose for a picture touching the capsule. Even though the person we gave our camera to for the big shot didn’t press the shutter all the way, it was worth it to see the scene: parents hoisting small kids on their shoulders, drivers slowing down for a look, at least one person posing with a flag in front of the capsule.
More than that though, our conversations with David’s host family revealed some of what my host brother had been getting at. Over delicious dinners, we talked about the miners and the earthquake, and also about how clean Chile’s country’s politics and police are, and how Chile’s indigenous people had been the one group that the Spanish were never able to conquer.
David’s host family was interested to hear that we noticed how much more poverty there is in Buenos Aires than in Viña del Mar. When David’s host father Claudio was growing up, he would take off his shoes on the way to school and put them in his backpack, because many of his classmates couldn’t afford shoes. But after the fall of the Pinochet dictatorship, the Chilean government set its sights on eliminating extreme poverty, Claudio told us. Their aggressive social programs worked. While there are certainly still poor people in Chile, like in any country, you don’t see the widespread extreme poverty like you do in Buenos Aires.
Our last night with the family, Claudio showed us most of an hour-long home movie about a recent family trip. The extended family has a truly amazing family tradition: When every cousin turns 10, the family brings them along on an expedition to summit a particular mountain, and the kid officially becomes “part of the family.” It’s a tough trip that involves a couple of days on horseback and tying ropes in to the side of the mountain, but Claudio has done it enough times to lead the expedition himself. When the family got the top, matching t-shirts and all, they unfurled a Chilean flag as they passed around a bottle of champagne.
It’s hard to imagine a similar scene playing out on an Argentine mountaintop. (Or an American mountaintop, for that matter.) Here in Buenos Aires, people have a lot to say about their government, but very little of it seems complimentary.
The day before we got to Chile, ex-president Nestor Kirchner, (the current president’s husband and the frontrunner in next year’s election) had passed away unexpectedly. According to my host brother, cars in our neighborhood honked in celebration when they heard the news. (When I told an Kirchnerista Argentine friend about this, he shook his head and said, “hijos de puta.” Sons of bitches.) A cab driver that day told us the good news was that Nestor couldn’t bring with him to hell everything he had stolen from the people; a week earlier, a different cab driver had told me he would kill Nestor and Cristina’s kids in front of them if given the chance.
A lot of that cynicism comes from repeated disappointment in the Argentine government. Since military dictatorships ended in both Chile and Argentina in the 1980s, Chile has seen relatively stable growth and stable politics. Many Argentines would say their country has seen neither. In 2001, for example, high inflation caused riots that forced president Fernando de la Rúa to resign and flee the Casa Rosada in a helicopter. Within the next two weeks, four different men were sworn in as president.
There also seems to be a cultural difference, surrounding what people feel comfortable talking about and criticizing, that has little to do with politics. While we weren’t in Chile for all that long, I sensed a higher emphasis on discretion; here they place more value on candor.
When Argentines generalize about other Argentines, it’s often self-deprecating or critical. In my Spanish class, “Argentine Identity,” American students make strong statements about everything we see that’s wrong in Buenos Aires, from how aggressive guys are in boliches (nightclubs), to the high rate of eating disorders among girls. I’m sometimes a little offended by what people say, but our Argentine teacher never is. She adds her own criticism that are sometimes the harshest of any of ours. (“Guys here say that Argentine girls are harder to get than American girls but easier to keep, that we’re less independent and more insecure, etc. There’s a fair amount of truth to that.”)
I think it’s that candor, along with the cynicism caused by disappointing politics, that accounts for the lack of nationalism here compared to countries like Chile, a cultural trait noted by Jorge Luis Borges in addition to my host brother.
At the same time, the bluntness makes conversations lively and leaves little off-limits for discussion. In a country that cares so much about soccer, it’s telling that few people still idolize their former star. When asked about Maradona, I’ve learned to say he was an incredible player and, with a smile, say he doesn’t know how to coach. More often than not, the Argentines I’m talking with will go a whole lot further, using colorful and often vulgar language.
For all that this country is struggling with– cleaning up its politics, creating stable growth and fighting poverty– I’m struck by how direct Argentines are about calling it all as they see it. It’s not a cultural value that plays out as dramatically as the kind of brotherhood the miners demonstrated in Chile, but it has value, too, and I’m learning from it.
Still, when I talk about this with Argentines, I have to remember to throw a few wry jabs— wouldn’t want them to think I was being too complimentary of their country.
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Given that I was hoping to spend this semester in an inland city in the fairly flat Yucatan peninsula, “seeing breathtaking landscapes” wasn’t high on my list of what I wanted out of study abroad. And even now that I’m in South America, it’s still an added bonus, not a main goal.
But damn, it’s a beautiful bonus.
Along with two close friends, I left Buenos Aires on Monday night, waking up on Tuesday morning to see the Andes out the bus window. Our first stop was Mendoza, a city in western Argentina that’s much quieter and more walkable than Buenos Aires. Most tourists go to Mendoza to tour the wine vineyards, but since our only day there fell on census day, a holiday that occurs once a decade, we drank mate in the city’s enormous park and played touch football with some Argentine guys that were surprisingly decent.
But if the Mendoza was pretty, our bus ride across the Andes and into Chile was stunning. Bus companies seem to only drive the route during the day, probably for safety reasons, and doing the crossing at night would be as much of a waste as it would be dangerous. As it is, the Andes are only barely crossable. Back in the day, someone realized that tunneling under a mountain would be easier than going over the top of the range. We gained so much elevation in a few hours that even though it had been about 80 degrees in Mendoza the day before, when we got off the bus at the border between Chile and Argentina, our bus drivers knew to wear jackets and winter hats. (Proving myself yet again as a gringo, I had left my hoodie in the bag under the bus, and had to man up in my T shirt.)
As the downhill started, everyone who was awake was staring out the windows as our driver brought the bus slowly and carefully around 180 degree curves. The older Chilean woman sitting near Robbie talked his ear off about Chile, the drive, and almost everything. The shier woman sitting across from me asked if her husband could read my newspaper, told me to get my camera ready and even started gesturing me across the aisle to their seats for a better view. A few seats back, a couple about our age had fallen asleep snuggling under a blanket.
Apart from Robbie’s new and talkative friend, it was a quiet busride, and I loved that. After three months in a city about as urban as they come, I was staring out at a landscape where the few signs of civilization—the road, our bus, and not much else—seemed so completely dominated by the mountains above us. Looking to tune out the bus even more, I scrolled through my iPod, trying to find the right type of music to go with such a wild view, but the quiet was a better soundtrack than anything I found.
There are few places to run here where the air doesn’t smell like diesel exhaust. Some nights when you’re waiting on the darkest streets, the bus takes half an hour to come. The food is bland.
But it’s hard not to feel incredibly luckily to be in Buenos Aires on days like last Sunday, when I spent my late afternoon listening to a friend’s band jamming in a plaza until the sun went down. You can’t see Alan in the video, but he was probably just being mellow a few steps back from the stage, sax around his neck, nodding along. Having only had a few conversations with him during work on the farm, I know him well enough to know when he invited me to the gig at the Mural Plaza that it’d be worth seeing.
The Mural Plaza’s in a quiet neighborhood just across the city lines of Buenos Aires. Like so many parks here on Sundays, the placita (little plaza) was busy when we got there. A few kids kicked a soccer ball around, groups of hippies smoked cigarettes and shared cups of mate, couples cuddled and families had staked out their own benches and corners of grass. At the entrance to the park, a couple guys grilled fairly flavorful burgers for the equivalent of $1.25.
For those kind of spring afternoons, I’ll gladly put up with dry chicken cutlet milenesas for a few more months.
Late last Saturday night, I watched my beaming host sister walk down the aisle of a beautiful, and packed, Catholic church. By the time the party started at a nearby tennis club a little after 1 a.m., it was technically Sunday morning, but the night, as they say here, was in diapers.
In the week before the wedding, I had asked a few Argentines what to expect. Eduardo, a gray-haired chain smoker in my art history class, said many wedding parties end with breakfast. (He also offered that I could wear his suit, but my program director had already made the same offer.) My friend Pancho told me to kneel in the church when everyone else did. (I followed his advice on Saturday, only realizing mid-kneel that only the Catholics were doing it.) My host sister, the bride to be, told me to announce that I wasn’t dating my friend and fellow wedding-crasher Claire, so that we could both flirt with other people.
The best indication of what lay ahead came from my host mom when I asked if there were going to be any native English speakers. (She’s lived in England and the U.S.) The answer was no, but more importantly, she told me, weddings here aren’t the best opportunities to talk.
When Claire and I rolled up at 1:30, the dance floor was packed and the champagne was flowing freely. Some of the songs were American; most were Argentine. During one traditional section called carnival carioca, Brazilian music came on, bizarre masks and hats appeared, and the bride and groom were hoisted up in the air. Between that and the plastic hats, that part could almost have been taken from a Bar Mitzvah.
Unlike the Bar Mitzvahs I remember, though, there was very little grinding Saturday night. While some couples danced together, there was a whole lot of throwing arms around whoever was next to you and dancing in a circle. Also unlike the Jewish rites of passage I’m used to, the older generation tended to stay off the dance floor. Argentines seem to have a higher threshold of what’s embarrassing—it’s not a word they use much—but even so, the parents that were there gave their grown-up kids plenty of space. (The exceptions to this were the relatives with young kids. Apparently if you bring your six-year-old to a wedding that starts after 1 a.m., he’s your ticket onto the dance floor if he’s on your shoulders.)
I witnessed no toasts, no grand presentation of a wedding cake, and almost no slow songs. The music pumped away the whole night, just in case any of us forgot we were there to celebrate.
My biggest rookie mistake was slipping out around 6 a.m., while almost everyone was still breaking it down. My host brother told me afterward that I’d left before the group photo, the video showing my host sister walking into the church a few hours earlier, and some sort of group singing or chanting. At the next Argentine wedding I go to, I’ll be sure to stay until the other guests leave.
I’ve been to several beautiful American weddings, and few have been what most people would call typical.
(Definitely not the pagan, spirit-invoking ceremony of my dad’s best friend from high school, or the Rastafarian party on Long Island after my aunt eloped in Jamaica.) As a result, I’m hesitant to use this wedding to generalize about all Argentine weddings, or to compare it to a “typical” American ceremony, which I’m not convinced exists.
Luckily, my host mom, who’s seen a lot more than me, did both for me. In Argentina, she told me, the idea of rehearsing a wedding before it happens is laughable. Whatever happens, happens. In some ways, that’s Argentine exaggeration for you; an expansive and truly delicious dessert buffet don’t just appear in a court yard at 4 a.m. by itself. Still, what my host mom seemed to be saying was backed up by what I saw on the dance floor through the confetti. Celebrating what matters most takes little rehearsal.
