Protests and Pudding

Today was another very long day. It began when we woke up at 7:45 to get ready for the beginning of our orientation week. Our building where classes are given is actually very beautiful. It looks European-ish. It's very small but then there are only about 60 students in this program. Anyway we had a routine "This is Buenos Aires. These are the rules" kind of talk which made Ari and I very sleepy. So, we went home, took a nap, and then ate some chocolate pudding. :D That was nice. Then we went back to school for a tour of the city..which is now tour number two. The cool thing about going on this tour is that because it was during the week there were protests in front of the Pink House. There was one going on for the veterans of wars that went unrecognized by the state and we were told that every thursday there is a march done by the Madres de Plaza de Mayo. I really need to go into detail about this one because it's something that I hadn't known about before and thought was incredibly sad and interesting. The Madres de Plaza de Mayo is an organization of women who work to find the identities of their children,(thought to have been political dissidents) who were victims of "forced dissapearance" in the mid-seventies during the "Dirty War" in Argentina. These people, who were mostly students, were believed to have been heavily drugged by the military and thrown alive out of airplanes over the Atlantic Ocean. Without a body, the government could easily deny that these people had been killed or had ever existed. There were thousands of disappearances during this time, and this organization of mothers pulls for several causes that they believe their children were fighting for. Learning about this was probably the most interesting part of my day. A new friend told me that there's a movie that's all about this time in Argentina called "La Verdadera Historia" or something of that nature. I'll double check tomorrow.

signs from the veterans' protest:




One location under a now-highway where many bodies of "the dissapeared" were recently found buried. It has now been decorated to mark the spot and honor those found: