Fabulous New Friends and Sweet Little Ones

We´ve made so many fabulous friends down here...half of them are cousins, and the rest are friends or novios, and they are SO MUCH FUN!!!! I don´t think I´ve mentioned yet today how much I LOVE Argentina!! :D



A bunch of the young people we´ve gotten to know down here


Hanging out with friends...Martín, Esteban, Rosario, and Magdalena


Sunday afternoons by the rio...in addition to being a national custom :) this group of young people from the church down here seem to get together most Sundays after church when the weather is nice to head to the river...all you need is friends, a guitar, some maté, folk music, and maybe some choripan (that would be the incredibly delicious Argentinian version of a hotdog - it doesn´t even compare!)




This was just a few minutes before I got dragged in, skirt and all - not that I resisted too hard - it was SO hot :)







And these are from our Dia de Gracias (Thanksgiving :) celebration with a bunch of friends here. It was so neat to be able to share this with them, and to give something back to these fabulous people who have welcomed us so wholeheartedly!


Turkey, anyone?? :D


Yummy! Who knows how, but we managed to get together almost everything needed for a proper Thanksgiving feast...turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, candied yams, apple crisp, and even sparkling apple cider (a family tradition :)


Truly a feast!





They showed us a few of their national dances, and we got to teach them an American folk dance (the Virginia Reel) too, which was so much fun!!


Cande and Esteban dancing the Escondito (I think it´s called)


Julia, Cande, and Magdalena


Morielle, Santiago, and Cande (Estás en casi todas mis fotos, Cande! :D )





Here are the girls from the Home where I´m volunteering and staying right now - they are all so sweet! Laura, Melisa, Ana, Ayelin, Antonela, and Antonela :)


Here´s the outside of the Hogar San Francisco...it´s really lovely inside too.




Here´s the main plaza in front of the Cathedral in Córdoba, the nearby big city. I usually hate cities, but Córdoba has slowly grown on me...


Just one of the many beautiful churches of Córdoba

¡Feliz Dia de Gracias!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!! It´s so strange being in a foreign country for this holiday (this is the third time that´s happened to me!), and have it be just another day for everyone here. My family is planning to have a Thanksgiving celebration with a bunch of the friends we´ve made here...but not till next Monday, which is when we could get our hands on a turkey and everyone could come. Also, my dad will be here (he´s arriving Saturday! :) How weird, celebrating Thanksgiving on a Monday! Well, it won´t matter to anyone besides us :)

PRAISE THE LORD, He FINALLY found me a place to volunteer, a home for girls in difficult family situations, run by some sisters. It´s in a small town outside of the big city of Córdoba, close enough that I´ll be able to spend weekends visiting with friends there and in Alta Gracia. To girls are so sweet, from age 7-13, and the sisters kindly offered to let me stay there, so I´ll have a place to be when my family heads on next week to travel in other parts of the country. I´m going to stay here volunteering in the Córdoba area at least through mid-December, and then I´ll have to decide whether to head back to the States with my fam or stay on longer here. At the moment the thought of leaving Argentina makes me want to cry...but maybe I´ll be ready to head back in a month...who knows!

It always amazes me how God works in my life (it´s happened so many times the same way that I´m finally starting to trust Him to work everything out.) I will have a LONG time (maybe years!) of trying different doors, wanting to do various things or go various places. For the longest time, absolutely NOTHING will work out, and I have a hard time not getting VERY frustrated. But then, all the sudden, a door will open and I´ll fall through it to find that everything is perfectly arranged for me on the other side. And looking back at the time I spent waiting, I´ll realize that I had so many experience, met so many people, was able to serve in all sorts of ways, and grew so much - none of which would have happened if I, in my impatience, had gotten what I wanted right when I asked for it. That was the case here, too. For the past many weeks, I´ve been on the hunt for a volunteer oportunity, first in Uruguay, then in one of the cities south of Buenos Aires. And NOTHING happened, no matter how hard I tried or how many people I contacted. Meanwhile, I found myself meeting all these wonderful people here in the Córdoba area and making a bunch of friends...so now, I am SO GLAD that I wasn´t allowed to leave sooner, before I could realize that THIS is where I want to be. So now I will not only have a chance to serve, but also friends and connections so I´m not just alone in a foreign land.

Alright, I really must go! Lots of love to you all! Have a beautiful Thanksgiving with family and friends. Please keep me in your prayers! And let´s always remember all the people out there who have no family and no friends...especially the children...

¡Gracias a Dios por todo!

Genevieve (to everyone here, I´ve ended up as Jhenny, Jhenafeef, Jhenifer, Sofia, or Sofie :)

Las Bellezas de Argentina

Have I mentioned yet that I LOVE Argentina?? :D A little more each day, but it was love at first sight… Maybe you’ve had the experience of coming to a place for the first time, and finding that you already loved it, before you even knew of it…Ireland was like that for me, too. Maybe it’s because it reflects a little bit of the realm of endless beauty only glimpsed in our best dreams and happiest memories, that we’re always looking for here on earth, and only ever partly find…

Here’s a bit about the past few weeks of traveling before we came to Alta Gracia, and this time with pictures, a video, and some music :)

We started in Luján, the spiritual heart of Argentina, and the most-visited Marian shrine in the world (something like 5 million people per year…maybe more!)


The beautiful cathedral of Luján - it truly felt like a place dedicated to prayer (unlike so many places in Europe, which can get overrun by noisy tourists :-P



We happened to arrive on the 200-and-somethingth anniversary of the founding of the town, so our first experience of Argentina was a fabulous party, complete with two concerts, a hot air balloon, and fireworks to rival the 4th of July!



I LOVE the people of Argentina – again, I’m still figuring out all the reasons why I loved them at first sight :) ... I love how there are so many children and young people and families about. I love how friendly people are when you start talking with them. I love that a bunch of teenagers, children, and cute old couples at a concert all knew their national dances, and spontaneously started dancing, with such poise and confidence.


Dancers, old and young



I LOVE Argentine music. Make that especially…I LOVE Abel Pintos :D He was the second of the two concerts in Luján, and we all LOVED him. I think you could call his style original modern Argentine folk, or something like that :) We bought one of his CDs there, and listened to it all the way across the country. I think we will all forever associate the vast beauty of Argentina with Abel Pintos and his music :)

These next two are just music - two songs of Abel Pintos, from his CD Sentidos (which you can buy on Amazon.com, incidentally :) I hope the quality of the songs is still good - I am absolutely not technology savvy!


Sueño Dorado


Bella Flor


On the way to Sunday Mass...




I was wanting to load a bunch more pictures, but the website is not cooperating...so that's all for now...still more to come... :)

By the way, tomorrow I'll be visiting the place where I hope to volunteer - please pray that everything works out well (and exactly how it's supposed to!)

I LOVE THIS PLACE!!!!

Sorry it´s been so extremely long since my last post - I haven´t had as much time on the internet while on the road here. I´ve been waiting till I could post pictures, and then decided you all would just have to do without them for a little longer so I could at least write something!

So we arrived in Argentina almost three weeks ago now, and within 2 days, I was totally in love. I LOVE this country!! So much so that I actually started writing up a list of 101 Reasons I LOVE Argentina... :D maybe someday when I have it with me, you´ll get to hear a few :)

We were road-tripping for a while here, but now we´ve settled down for a couple of weeks in a small town near Córdoba called Alta Gracia. It´s a medium-ish town between mountains and farmland (blessedly quiet compared to the city!) and the best thing about it is the Latin Mass chapel here that´s full of big Catholic families - very welcoming, loud, singing, folk-dancing, super-fun Argentinian-style big Catholic families :D I love it! Yesterday after church we had more invitations than we knew what to do with! We ended up at the house of a lovely abuela, happily eating icecream, squeezed into the dining room along with at least three of the families, half of whom seemed to be cousins, while the other half were married or dating - it was the most delightful cacophany!! Especially since most of them spoke no more than a few words of English, and we range in Spanish from barely communicative to still-having-to-work-really-hard-at-it. It was so much fun! After icecream and lots of conversation, my sisters and I were invited to go down to the river with all the older cousins/friends/siblings/novios. We crammed into way-too-few cars (I don´t even know if there ARE seat belt laws here :O ) and headed down to the river. What a great group of people. There were probably fifteen or twenty of us, a guitar, a baby, some cookies and maté, and we were all chatting in our various levels of halting Spanish or basic English. Then the guys brought out the guitar and started playing Argentinian folk music (I LOVE the music here!) accompanied by half the muchachos in amazing powerful voices. I love how they actually have a national folk culture here, with dances they all know and folk music that they can spontaneously sing together...though one of them, Santiago, said that young people in the big cities have lost a bit of that culture now, and tend to listen more to regular pop music like we might hear in the US (yeah, actually half the songs I´ve heard in this internet cafe have been in English :P I like their music better!)

On a side note, I love their names here...Santiago, Paulina, Emiliano, Candelaria, Adriana, Esteban, Rosario...they all sound like poetry! The accent in this part of Argentina sounds just like poetry too...even more Italian than in Uruguay! It makes me so happy to be learning Spanish with such a lovely accent :)

For now (and probably for the next of couple weeks) my mom, Morielle, Fiona, and I are taking more Spanish classes three days a week in Córdoba. After a month or more of using all the Spanish we knew, the four of us decided we were ready to learn more intensively. Today was the first day, but I already like the teacher and the approach, and I think we´ll learn alot. Though after four or five hours of speaking and understanding Spanish yesterday, my Spanish brain was NOT functioning today at all! From experience I know it will get better again in a few days :P

I'm still trying to find the volunteer opportunity - at least now I have several options to choose from in different cities - I'm just waiting to hear back from one more person, and then I'll have to choose...please keep praying for me! I'll let you know what I end up doing.

Well, it's late...more to come soon (I hope :)