Ferias are my favorite!!

Hola todos! Espero que todo esté bien con ustedes y sus familias y amigos! (Just thought I'd throw that in there to get you practicing your Español!)

This past week FLEW by! With every week that passes, the realization that this whole trip is going to be over before I know it becomes more and more real in my mind. It's scary! I'm enjoying it so much here and I don't want it all to fly by before I know it!

So, I guess one of the biggest pieces of news is that I'm going to drop my history class because 1) I don't need the credit and 2) I want to have more time to get involved with my church here and to do a volunteer job with Anna, one of the girls from Clemson! I'm so excited! This idea was actually started last year by my friend from Clemson's Campus Crusade, Abby, and I'm so excited to continue it! What will happen is once a week Anna and I will go to a place that helps underprivileged kids by giving them many things they need, one of which is academic help. Some people come and volunteer their time as tutors to help the kids with their homework, and we could do that too, but what we're going to do is actually plans lessons and activities that correlate with different Spanish stories (for example a kids version of Don Quijote) to teach these children to love to read. I think their ages range from around 6 to 12 and Abby told me they are so sweet! I can't wait to start! It's going to be so much fun to do this with Anna too, instead of doing it solo!

Let's see, yesterday the group of exchange students (which has grown from about 14 to like 30 now) went to the local city of Alta Gracia, to tour the house of Che Guevara there. If you do not know who he was, he was a friend of Fidel Castro and a huge Communist leader in Cuba and in many of locations in South America. Many people are communists here and still worship his ideals. This is because the people here feel as though democracy has failed them, so they think the only other place they can turn is communism. Very sad. Anyway, after that, we went to a lake nearby and had a picnic, shopped, and played fútbol (soccer). It was a beautiful day! Please pray for one of the girls in my group though. I talked with her on the trip and she is having a really hard time with an illness she's been fighting since before she came to Argentina, but now it's gotten a lot worse. Please pray that the doctors here will figure out what is wrong and that she will not be stressed about it.

Tonight, I went to the feria downtown with sometime American and Argentine friends from my geography class! I loved it! I'm a sucker for handmade anything! Everything there is so beautiful! After that, I went to church where we talked about the meaning of baptism and then baptized around 10 people! Very exciting! I´ll put up a video of my church soon! That place is such a God-send. I love those people :) Tonight, I also found out about a college group in my church that goes to a park downtown every Saturday and plays sports with whomever is around, aiming to get into spiritual conversations with them! I'm so excited about going! I'm hoping to go next Saturday! We didn't have school Tuesday because of a holiday (look at next paragraph for details) and there's some holiday this Thursday, so I have a 4-day weekend next weekend and then the weekend after that is called Semana Santa (Holy Week) and so I'll have another 4-day weekend then too! Lots of time off school! I like this place! :) My classes haven't been too tough yet, but midterms are at the end of April (time is flying!) so I'm sure it'll get a little more challenging as we get closer to those.

So, Tuesday, March 24th, was sort of a day of sadness, as Argentina remembered the day that the Dirty War started in their country on March 24, 1976. This day is dedicated to the 30,000 people who were abducted, tortured, and most of whom were killed by the military government at the time. There was a march downtown for it and our culture professor invited all of us to come and participate so I did! Very interesting! There were all sorts of political groups represented, as well as different social activist groups. The news stations said there was a total of 20,000 people there! I'll put up pictures soon! The coolest part was, at the end of it, one of the main news stations in Córdoba interviewed me and one of my friends from Germany about what we thought about all of it! We didn't make it on TV the next day, (my family and I watched!) but it was still a neat experience! I talked about how I thought it was great that high school students were so involved and concerned with politics here. There were a lot of high school students in the march! The voting age is 17 here, which is high school age, so that might contribute a little.

I had an asado today with my parents, one of my sisters and her boyfriend, my mom's sister and her daughter with her boyfriend, plus my mom's mom! Lots of people! I just can't get over how good their meat is here! I always get so excited when Sunday rolls around because we almost alwasy have family asados for lunch! My family is so amazing. I have been able to get to know them even better recently as I can understand SO much more of their Spanish now than when I first got here and had the "deer in the headlights" look on my face when they talked to me :) I am really blessed to have such a big family, because many of the exchange students live with one or two people. There are definitely advantages with smaller families too, but with more people in my family, I have a lot more opportunities to practice my Spanish with them as well as listen to them speed talk to each other, as I try to keep up!

Well, I think that's all for now! Thanks for reading! God bless you!