suspiro

ayer hubo un robo en mi barrio, algunas cuadras de donde yo vivo. vi mucho sangre en el piso y hubo mucha policia tambien...

the thing about living in a less developed country is the very existence of those factors that make it less developed: more poverty, less stability, and just a greater sense of things being more "wild" than your average manicured suburbia. while argentina and buenos aires are relatively well-off compared to the poorest of the poor, "middle-income" for me is starting to become synonymous with peligroso. ironically, i felt safer in significantly poorer countries like haiti (two months after aristide was overthrown and where men walked around carrying machetes on the streets) or china (where construction workers lived and slept on rice bag cots in unfinished buildings next door).

i'm not sure what it is or why i get that sense here--but i imagine it's some mezcla of the post-2001 economic crisis here that left people wary and pessimistic about financial stability, the influx of poor children from the surrounding countryside who come to pick cardboard from the trash or juggle on the subway, and perhaps a relatively greater poverty in the surrounding country as well as the rest of latinamerica. in that sense, buenos aires is kind of a rich island floating in a sea of poverty. and por eso, it becomes all the more vulnerable to hungry pirates looking for some booty (hm, that sounds funny. i don't know how to use english anymore.) but on that irrelevant note, another thing that has been adding to this mounting feeling of peligroso is probably the cat-calls. sometimes i get tired of it and while i know in general it's harmless, as a girl it can sometimes grate on me, like it's stripping away some invisible shield i used to have and it makes me realize my vulnerability and relative physical weakness as a woman.

anyway last night as i was heading home, i wanted to stop by the local supermercado chino (small neighborhood grocery stores run by chinese immigrants) to buy some fruit. only when i arrived, flashing police lights twinkled on the street, the metal garage door was closed shut and a few people with umbrellas were hovered over a small door peering inside. curious, i went over to see what was going on. i just took a passing glance but was shocked to see a huge pile of blood oozing on the floor near the cashier stand. a peruvian male employee (people from bolivia and peru make up the working class here) with a distorted face and eyes slightly askew seemed to be explaining what had happened to a police officer. apparently the victim had been taken away and the police were trying to nail down the details.

i know these kind of things happen all the time. i got stuff stolen on the subway in the first month i was here. a friend told me that on average, these stores get robbed about 3 times a year (once up to 11 times). even at the taiwanese church, i met a girl whose brother had been shot and killed when their store got robbed. perhaps what surprised me most was that she said it so casually, as if, whose brother doesn't get robbed, shot and killed?

but i think all this hits closer to home because well first, it was very close to home (one block away?) but second, this is the grocery store i always go to. i've befriended the older couple who run the fruit stand in the back--we've exchanged details about our families as they picked out crunchy apples for me. the peruvian girls who man the cash registers always giggle because the owner (a big rough looking argentine-chinese man) always seems extra friendly to me when i come in. once i only brought ten pesos with me during a quick run for paper towels and eggs or something. as i waited in line, i picked up a piece of chocolate and added it to my pile, but when the cashier rung it all up, i realized i didn't have enough money and asked her to take the chocolate off. she called the owner over to erase the charge. he sort of growled, erased it, but then stuffed the piece of chocolate in my grocery bag and walked away. both cashiers giggled. i have this feeling that he might have been the one who got shot. he was the only one who wasn't there compared to the usuals, last night when i peeked in. instead, it looked like there was some other family member--a brother or something, standing around to answer all the questions from the police.

anyway, the ironic thing about all of this is that apparently i live in a nice neighborhood. while it was my goal to move away from the more touristy spots or expat locales, a local argentine friend told me that where i live now is a more cheta (snobby) area. personally, it's rather simple to me--and i like it that way--and i have to admit that the graffiti on the walls, hungry children eating a bag of stale bread on the corner and petty car thieves i see running from locked car to locked car belied anything more cheta about this neighborhood to me.

but perhaps cheta it is, and probably cheta i am, because nancy, these things just happen all the time, and i'm still not used to seeing dirty children sitting alone, crying on the street, or smelling the leprous feet of a homeless woman in the bathroom stall of a 24-hour burger king as she tries to wash herself with toilet water, or having people down the street from me get robbed and shot.

i still have that childish response: it's not fair, it's not fair. these things shouldn't happen.

but they do.

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公子，為何嘆氣？