In the summer of 2005 I headed down to Argentina for an eight week Study Abroad program through Wheaton College. I was part of a documentary photography class and my task was to document a group home called El Retoño. I wrote an essay {scroll down to read it} about my time there, and the following shots were scanned from the original 35mm photos. They were part of an art exhibit at Eastern University in the fall of 2005.
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| Understanding |
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| Depth |
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| Loyalty |
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| Simplicity |
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| Dignity |
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Exposure
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| Gentleness |
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| Proof |
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| Perspective |
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| Forgiveness |
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| Confinement |
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| Clarity |
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| Revelation |
“A remnant will return…to the mighty God. There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.”
Isaiah 10:21, 11:1
Retoño is the word in Spanish that describes the shoot that springs up from the stump of a cut tree. But I hate seeing trees cut, especially when the only reason for their decapitation is to comply with the rules of the City of Wheaton, or because the sweet berries they produce apparently are a nuisance to the neighbors. So when I see a flattened stump, smooth and revealing the deceased’s age, with a miniscule shoot, awkwardly rising forth, defiantly—stubbornly, I can’t help but be proud of the little guy. It’s as if it’s saying as it grows, “Ha! I’ll show you!” This new growth is supposed to be stronger than the initial tree ever was; a remnant of sorts.
Retoño is also the name given to the place in Buenos Aires, Argentina that I was to spend a month documenting. The simplest way to describe El Retoño is by referring to it as a Christ focused Drug Rehabilitation Center. But those words carry perceptions and boxes that I’d rather not associate with the men, woman, and dog I had the pleasure of knowing. Quique, the director of the program, while sharing with us the background on many of the residents, described it, simply, as the provision of a space for people who traditionally aren’t given one by society. They are that remnant—in the process of returning to the mighty God. They are self-sustained by means of a carpentry shop. Their schedules include regular group sessions with professionals, and activities such as lunches prepared by their mothers every Thursday and late night soccer matches. But the task of documenting is monumental at the very least—astoundingly impossible at most. I would describe my time there more as an attempt to capture the mystery of their existence. And this I could not do with only my camera in hand, pictures can only reveal so much.
In archaeology, artifacts left behind by ancient peoples are the only clues we have to their long gone cultures. We know what was important to them by whatever remains we find: organic waste, tools, vessels and bones. These provide massive amounts of cultural information; yet things that culture embodies like language and story are not accessible through the material. The absence of the human is deeply debilitating. By that same token, often in modern days, when the people are present, artifacts are often overlooked, and their importance underscored.
Ancient tools are often studied under microscopic eyes for minute traces of use-wear. One can tell what a particular stone or wood tool was used for by the way in which the grains were scraped, by the particular rounding of the edges, or by organic components found encrusted in the crevices. So to me, the exploded soccer ball I discovered under a table on their patio (which indicated an extensive amount of use) was a clear indicator of cultural importance.
I wanted to take pictures of their artifacts; the things that inevitably imply and carry the spirit of the people using them. I wanted to take pictures of the people, but decided that pictures of people are too easy to judge—too easy to remember.
What I was struck by was the simplicity of our friendship, and by complexities unknown to me. Their dining room was strangely dim, and was furnished with picnic table-like accommodations: two long tables, covered by plastic mantels, and four long wooden benches. These faced a large television that was hung from the ceiling, frequently the host to various televised soccer matches—mostly Boca ones. The room is really L shaped, or more like an F without the top half. One section contained the two tables, and the other contained the quaint kitchen—yes, the kitchen with the unusually large number of bottles of oil and the leaky faucet. It is in this room that I most often found myself wondering about the problems that to me were subtle, but to them must have been always pressing.
What was the residue of nine years in prison? Polaco, “The Pole” (who really isn’t Polish at all, he’s just blonde), still has rustic tattoos on his arms from his prison days, but his character is vibrant and industrious. I asked him once if he had to take pictures of something, what would he photograph? And he answered, tenderly, “Ancianos,” the elderly. He thinks they’re beautiful and impressive.
My thoughts would then be interrupted by someone asking Quique for cigarette money. I was at a loss when it came to empathizing with the anxiety they must have felt in their skin and lungs every time they would light one, using the flame from the exposed water heater without even bothering to remove the cigarette from their mouths. Then Milagro would slowly sneak into the room, with his cute hat that he wore in an abrupt manner and his grossly homemade pajama pants.
What mysterious life did Milagro lead before they found him, old and rickety, living at the local plaza? One day he tried to tell me something about parachuting in the Falkland Islands…I believed him. Somehow, when you know people’s minds aren’t all there, your own takes a mini-vacation as well. They told me el Viejo had 11 children that lived in the northern province of Chaco. I believed them too, but I found Milagro’s truth much more amusing.
If there was ever a grave and heavy atmosphere, I felt it not. If there was some highly euphoric feeling I was supposed to be experiencing, I also felt it not.
If it is true that there are mysteries about them I will never grasp, it is also true that they were overly gracious in ways that I could.
They let me play soccer with them. They let a girl play soccer. The young men from my church wouldn't even let me play! They denied me, coldly, because I am a woman. I didn’t take serious offense to this; one grows accustomed to many things and machismo is one I have already crossed off my list. But the Retoño guys gladly let me join them every Thursday evening. They knew that by letting me play they wouldn’t have the best quality game they could have, but it didn’t matter to them. They were more interested in grace than in pride. I would get there way too early, and watch soccer with them on the T.V. I ran from my house to theirs, and they were dumbfounded by my actions, and commented to each other humorously on what it must be like to have unpolluted lungs. As I sat in their familiar kitchen, they´d be in and out, changing into their soccer gear, offering me mate and conversation. We then would start the ten block trek to the cancha, in little sparse groups, with sparse words. Gaty would follow us there, (he was our #1 fan—not to mention he was named after the goalie for the Boca team) loyally, and sometimes the only sound on the way there were the sounds of his little paws clicking along, stopping only to smell the scattered garbage piles on the sidewalk. Every week we faced off the same team (which consisted of the plump baker and occasionally his plump little kids, a bald middle aged man, the burly goal keeper, and two thin younger—cuter—guys). Every week our team wasn't the same: sometimes I couldn't come, or Polaco couldn't make it, but Alberto—our goalie—was always there, Aníbal, Lucas, Rodolfo, Martín (who sometimes was interchangeable between the two teams), and Gastón were the members of our crew. Every week, we lost—I think, and yet came back the next, unfazed. Alberto would place his 1.5 liter soda bottle filled with tap water on the left side of the goal. He would let the guys take a couple of practice shots, the small, hard ball would hit him or slam against the metal grated fence immediately behind him. The floor was made of tile; the slippery kind. As if that wasn’t challenging enough, the humidity in Buenos Aires has the devastating effect of causing condensation to accumulate on most surfaces, akin to someone taking a really wet mop and leaving most of the water on the floor. 90% humidity were the conditions on the first night I played, not exactly conducive to safety or finesse. So we played, clumsily and awkwardly; I stayed back on defense mostly, and the rest would slip from one end of the court to another speedily, but not gracefully—mostly due to the wetness, not to skill. After the game was over, and we’d kissed our opponents good bye, the walk back always had a different feel from the walk there. They wouldn't stop talking about the game—the good plays, the bad ones. After every other word their seemed to be inserted the word boludo or pelotudo which I am told are swear words, but even their Spanish became more tangled and mumbled, I couldn’t catch anything but those two words. They would laugh, and share a cigarette among the lot of them and walked proudly as we would make our way back. Once back, I'd kiss them goodbye, and run home.
If I wasn't kicking balls with them, then I was entertaining them at least. One day I convinced them to let me work in the carpentry with them. I had seen this beautiful wooden mosaic at the Museum of the Native American in D.C. by George Morrison. The room-sized compilations of perfectly interconnected wood he called “landscapes” mesmerized me. And ever since the day I saw them I had set out to make a miniature spin-off for myself. So I went in there, and I started working on my little art experiments in the wood shop while they labored away and shook their heads at me. Alberto would work on repairing a screen door, while the others came in inquisitively and watched. I would work on my little mosaic, under watchful eyes and mate drinking lips. They thought I was silly for spending an entire afternoon sawing little thin pieces of a pine twig I had brought with me from Valley Forge National Park. They teased me and blamed me for breaking tools clearly already in disrepair. Or when I asked Alberto to help me with something and he accidentally let his lit cigarette fall from his mouth to the shaving-filled floor, he looked around for it and when he couldn’t find it he told me if we lit the place on fire, he would blame me. Hippie told me I should come around more often, because some of those guys hadn’t set foot in there until I came. We laughed, and I told him I would.
I can't even count how many times they fed me. It seemed like every time I came over, for whatever reason, they would have something to feed me. They would pray before every meal, and after the person who had really prayed was done, one of them would continue in prayer saying: “Lord, please let this be the last time Stephanie comes to eat here, because she’s eating all our food...” And we would all laugh, well, I would teasingly shake my fist at them, but they laughed. One day Emily and I had gone over there to take photos and they were painting the house. They were all covered in paint and dust—Polaco was the worst. Emily decided to help paint and I went and joined Aníbal upstairs where he had just finished putting in a tile floor. We hadn’t had lunch, and were pretty hungry, but weren’t planning on stealing their food. At about 5 o’clock, Polaco appeared with some cold pop and alfajores. I ate mine gratefully and didn’t get a chance to thank him at the moment as he slipped down the cement stairs before I got the chance. So later, when it was time to leave and he was walking us to the bus stop, I told him how grateful I was for the food, and he explained to me that he had just gotten paid $10 pesos for a job he had done, so he bought the treats. The way he said it, so casually, gave me the impression that buying us treats was the only reasonable thing to do, even though he didn’t even know if we were hungry. If I were him I would have had many other reasonable and more needed uses for that money, but alas, I am not a redeemed ex-convict. I thought about that verse in Ephesians, “He who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with his own hands, that he may have something to share with those in need.” Maybe I was in need.
I decided to feed them one day. I baked them chocolate chip cookies. I baked in their kitchen, that same one they used to cook for me. The same one their mothers used every Thursday afternoon to prepare them lunch. Their oven, in order to work, needed the help of a knife that was lodged into the handle and at the same time managed to put pressure onto the knob that provided the gas for the oven. But this did not bother, or phase, me. I baked them cookies on pizza pans and thick industrial-like trays. When they were about ready, I asked Polaco for the spatula so I could easily remove them from the trays, he kind of smiled and laughed, and asked Rodolfo to help me get it. So Rodolfo came over, cigarette in mouth, and headed toward the huge pot containing the leftover soup from lunch, and he started to dig for something in there. I stopped him—thinking I somehow misspoke and asked for the ladle instead of the spatula—but he kept sloshing the soup, and to my surprising lack of surprise, and yet to my delight, he fished out the spatula—using the ladle—from the bottom of the soup pot. I washed it and used it to remove the first cookie, and ate it, clearly as a precaution for controlling quality. I had to try one before I let them decide for themselves if they approved or not. But my activity did not go unnoticed. Milagro, the most unexpected of them all, saw me out of the corner of his eye, and just held out his wrinkly hand in my direction. I slipped one in between his frail, shaky fingers...and after he took his first bite, he asked: ¿tenés una amiga, una vieja? Apparently he deduced that if I could make good tasting cookies, an older, woman friend of mine would also be capable of making cookies for him. I chuckled, it seemed reasonable to me. Needless to say, the cookies were a hit.
At the end of my time there, after many meals and shared cookies and smiles, it dawned on me that the number of unshared meals with them would outweigh the shared ones. I feel blessed by what I learned in that time, and yet still wonder how much was left unlearned, unnoticed, and undiscovered. In Brazil there is a saying, “You don’t really get to know someone until you’ve eaten a kilo of salt with them.” And while I do think Argentine’s might facilitate that process by the absurd amounts of salt they add to their food, a kilo is still a lot of salt, and a month is too short a time. A lifetime might still be too short a time.
