Apartment by the Avenue (or: Adventures in Argentina)

By Kendrick Foster, SIP Argentina 2019 (Harvard '22)

1Plaza de Mayo in downtown Buenos Aires, viewed from the Casa Rosada.

My host father finally fixed his amplifier, so my apartment along Avenida Cabildo in the heart of Buenos Aires vibrated with Phil Collins’ drumbeats for the first time in six weeks. We had discussed this for a while (and even had an impromptu karaoke session with “Follow Me, Follow You”), but the amplifier constantly found itself under repair. I finally heard it in its full glory in the seventh week of my program, and my host family started off our session with his favorite song: “Home by the Sea.”

It made an ironic anthem for my time in Buenos Aires. “Home by the Sea” tells the story of a burglar trapped in a haunted house, forced to listen to the ghosts’ life stories. I lived an apartment smack dab in the urban center. I hardly felt trapped listening to my host families’ stories; many a time, I contributed a story or factoid of my own. Above all, for eight weeks, I felt like my host parents’ son. It was the best part of my time in the city.

2
My office, near the Congress building in Buenos Aires.

I spent eight weeks in Argentina interning for an NGO called Fundación Directorio Legislativo, which translates as the Legislative Directory Foundation, under the aegis of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies’ Summer Internship Program. More than that, I traveled to three other countries, celebrated the birthday of my host mother’s friends at a suburban home, rode a horse on a traditional estancia, and played truco at a senior citizens’ home. I would be understating things if I said I interacted with the porteño culture. I lived in it.

3A scene from the End of the World on Winter Solstice – my friend gave the story of our trip there with much more justice than I ever could in The Crimson.

4The estancia­ (or ranch) that we visited, about three hours south of Buenos Aires proper.

I definitely grew the most as a result of the program’s language immersion. We did everything in Spanish, and it was the first time I had spoken Spanish outside the classroom for such a long period of time, and while I wouldn’t say the classroom experience left me woefully unprepared, it did lack in certain practical elements. I also experienced Spanish beyond yanqui textbook Spanish; a friend’s host mother vigorously criticized us for using fresas instead of frutillas for strawberries, for instance. “Fresas are Mexican,” she sniffed. “Frutillas are real Spanish.”

Admittedly, my Spanish existed along a continuum when I was there. A laugh and a smile went a long way in times of utter incomprehension, yet I also apparently came across as friendly in Spanish with my host family’s friends (something that surprised me — I rarely come across as friendly even in English). Sometimes, initial confusion yielded to understanding: in the Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, a woman asked me if I had seen the special exhibition. I replied I hadn’t, but then sheepishly looked at the pamphlet in my hand, which I had got at the aforementioned exhibit.

Despite this criticism (and my sometime confusion), I felt my Spanish got better, especially in terms of fluency. I can now answer questions and participate in a conversation without stumbling over every other word, and I can order in restaurants without having to translate mentally. Although I didn’t feel intuitively that my vocabulary grew, my notebooks with more than 300 new words say otherwise.

My summer also crystallized my thinking regarding my career and academic path. Before coming to Buenos Aires, I had flip-flopped between concentrations, unsure where I wanted to be and ergo unsure how I was going to get there. Two experiences in particular helped me. At one of the first Friday cultural activities, we surrendered our passports and our phones at the back door to the U.S. Embassy. The cultural experience overall had predisposed me already to an international career, but the embassy staff sold me on the Foreign Service.

5The Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago de Chile.

And when I traveled to Santiago de Chile, I visited the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, which reminded visitors why we need to remember what happened in the past. History had always figured in my internal debates, but the museum, and its sections on the international aspects of Chile’s dictatorship in particular, convinced me that I should focus on history at Harvard. Now I regret not taking a class I had passed over freshman year, and I will be on the lookout for Latin American and diplomatic history classes at Harvard.

When I got back home, my family trooped out to a local Mexican restaurant, for good tamales and tacos are as few and far between in Buenos Aires as they are in Boston. I had intended to order in English, but somehow, the words tumbled out in Spanish.

“Why did you order in Spanish?” my dad later asked me.

I had no answer for a moment. “Out of habit,” I finally replied.