Servas Stay – La Lucila, Buenos Aires, Argentina

We are now more than 2 months into our trip and things finally came into place for our first Servas stay. In short Servas is a worldwide person-to-person peace building organization that accomplishes its goal through homestays. We went through a fairly extensive interview process back in Durham to get “certified” as travelers and obtained a host list for each country we plan to visit. One of our goals for the trip is to experience the culture of each country in a deeper manner than one would as a tourist and Servas is an excellent way to do that. You can read more about this great organization here: http://joomla.servas.org/

Ecuador and Peru were rather limited in terms of the number and availability of Servas hosts. We did have a lovely dinner in Arequipa, Peru with a German family who is living there while their father teaches German. Argentina has far more hosts and we plan to interact much more with Servas here. Our first stay took place in La Lucila, a suburb if you will of Buenos Aires. It is really quite close to the city, only a quick 10 – 15 minute train ride (and that cost about 26 cents!) Our extremely gracious and friendly hosts were Claus, Birgit and their three-year-old son Moritz. They too are from Germany and are in Argentina to teach German at a local German school (they also know the family in Arequipa). It seems that one of Germany’s programs for international relations includes staffing (and paying for) teachers at German schools across much of South America. Wow, what an improvement from our country’s current approach of sending soldiers everywhere!

The hospitality that Claus and Birgit provided was really amazing. They opened their home to complete strangers and made us feel very welcome. Our stay was really great on a number of levels. We got to know them a little bit and learn about their experiences so far in Argentina and how things differ from their lives back in Germany. The kids got a chance to play with Moritz and with some legos and trains. We shared a traditional Argentinean asado one night along with many glasses of great red wine, many cups of coffee/tea together in the mornings and lots of conversation.

The first night we were there they hosted a Servas meeting and we were able to meet members from all around Buenos Aires. We had the opportunity to introduce ourselves to the group in Spanish, a little chance to display our new language skills. Ainsley did a wonderful job introducing the family and Kelli did well too. It was really nice to meet a group of local Argentinians, to hear about their experiences with Servas and learn more about Argentina.

Ainsley, Jack and Eliot really loved spending time there too. They had a new friend to play with, although poor Moritz was on the tail end of being sick. Ainsley tried her hand at reading some books to him in German. I was able to do some puzzles with him one morning and J and E were simply able to play. Without any real toys in our backpacks, all of the kids took to Moritz’ toys with glee. He was extremely generous with them, surprisingly so given his age and only child status. You will see in the pictures at the end that everyone loved playing!

Unexpectedly, Claus and Birgit invited us to stay with them again when we returned to Buenos Aires for one night on our way back from Iguazu. This made for a really pleasant start to the next phase of our visit to Argentina (the driving one!) and they also invited us to stay again when we return from our Patagonian wanderings. We look forward to sharing our trip with them and finishing up our stay in Argentina with new friends.

Thanks Claus and Birgit!