blood-letting (2)

I have O negative blood. Universal donor; extremely picky recipient.
Argentina's blood banks are chronically understocked, so when people have operations that may involve blood, they're asked to get friends and family to donate blood to make up for the blood used for them.
Last week, a friend sent an email asking for negative blood donations because her sister was having surgery. I'd never given blood, but thought it was a good time to start. So I showed up at 8.30am. Location? The Hospital Militar.
Young soldiers in fatigues pointed the way to the haemotherapy unit. First I had to fill out a lot of forms. "If you are a man, have you ever had sexual relations with a man?" Not a man. Easy. Then it got harder. "Have you ever had sexual relations with a man who has had sexual relations with another man?" or "Have you ever had sexual relations with anyone who has had sexual relations with someone in exchange for money or drugs?". "Don't know" was not an answer. The tone was set.
Then I had to wait for an hour and a half. Military efficiency clearly lacking in Argentina. Eventually I was called by a nurse in her fifites who took my blood pressure. As she's pumping away at the machine she decides to make conversation.
---So you're a translator.
(It was the boringest of my jobs so the best for the forms.) Yes.
---Have you finished studying?
---Yes. No. Well, I'm about to do a masters.
---Oh really? What in?
---Sociology.
---Really. (Looks up sharply from pressure gauge). Good. This country needs to educate its young people. I hope when you're finished you'll help stop with all this human rights nonsense. (Gives me three bags which will contain my blood for me to sign).
---What do you mean? (Fragment of me still hoping that I have the wrong end of the stick).
---Querida, look at all the security problems going on. (Raises voice) All this nonsense about the human rights of thieves. (Reference to recent media scandal where aging showgirl and TV queen Susana Gimenez publicly demanded the return of the death penalty after her florist was shot in a robbery. Most TV channels currently obsessed with the wave of crime and most viewers in favour of shooting petty criminals on site.)
---(Are they doing this on purpose to get my blood pressure up?) I'm sorry but I totally disagree with you but I came here to give blood for a friend. (Sign sign sign on the three blood bags).
---All right, no need to get upset.
I'm sent to a big tiled room full of reclinable blood-giving chairs. I'm not good with blood so I take a book with me to distract me. The TV is set to aforementioned crime coverage channel, TN, owned by Argentina's biggest media monopoly, Grupo Clarín, which controls 36 other media companies, including the one that makes the paper all local newspapers are printed on. More later.
Another nurse in her fifties comes over, swabs my arm, and looks at my book.
---Mmm. So you read in English.
---Yes. Well, I am English, so yes.
---Really? (Prepare myself for the usual list of questions and smile politely). How long have you lived in Argentina?
---Eight years. (She plugs the needle into my arm, tapes it there, and the blood starts to flow)
---And do you like it here?
---I love it.
---You don't say. (Eyes narrow). Even with all this? (Waves hand at TV. Once again, I said nothing, and the nurses are up in arms).
---What do you mean?
---There's no peace in Argentina!
---Well, there's no peace anywhere, you know.
---My son had a stopover in an airport in England during the summer and called me and said "Mum, you have no idea what this is like, the airport is amazing".
---It's true. We have nice airports. But it's not the most important thing for people in a country, don't you think?
---So what do you like so much about Argentina? (She is getting bolshy, I decide to respond).
---It has great public hospitals and a public education system.
Five minutes' debate back and forth about whether or not this is true.
---You've got to admit that for a developing country we could be doing much worse. (Jeez lady, I am trying to say nice things about your country but you're not having any of it!)
---(Finally, she concedes). Yes, we could be like Venezuela or Bolivia for example.
---(Oh no). Well, but the situations in Venezuela and Bolivia are really improving. In a few more years they're going to be an example for us all. (I have decided to lay it on thick).
---But they're run by tyrants!
---Are you talking about the democratically elected presidents?
---That Evo Morales is banning the opposition by taking them to court.
---Do you mean that people who were involved in the massacre of peasants at Pando are going on trial?
---You know missy, I've been in this continent a lot longer than you and I know all about electoral fraud. Look at what happened here. Everyone voted for someone else and yet she won.
---You mean the democratically elected president?
---Ah well! (She is really incensed). I can see that you are one of "the others"! (If only I could believe that this woman has been seeing too much Lost. She pulls the tube out of my arm and storms off and smears some on a big glass plate and drops some reactors onto it to check my blood type. She turns round, half scowling, half smiling.) You're negative!
Three minutes later I'm dispatched with a piece of cotton wool and surgical tape and not so much as a glass of water or a cracker, leaving my blood in a bag on the counter.
This hospital is not far from the ESMA, where lots of illegally detained women gave birth to children that were taken from them and given in adoption to military families or military sympathizers who couldn't have children. I wonder what these nurses were up to thirty years ago. Whatever it is, they are furious today.
And wait. I'm the one that's negative?

blood-letting (1)

Yesterday was the 33rd anniversary of the start of Argentina's last---and bloodiest---military dictatorship.
At 2pm, percussionists in red t-shirts were trickling into Av. de Mayo, which was already closed to traffic. We walked down the middle of the tarmac as shops began to close their shutters and clients---mostly foreigners---were brought their bills in restaurants. Looking down the avenue to the right, Plaza de Mayo was still mostly empty, except for a stage, crowd-control barriers, and more tourists. Bombos and snares were being hooked around waists at the first groups we passed. Five blocks later, as we hit the intersection with 9 de Julio, you had to push through the banner-toting members of political parties and human rights organizations to cross Av. de Mayo.
This was the most joyful and upbeat March 24th I've been to over the last eight years. Hard to say why. Hard, in fact, to get your head round 'joyful' and 'March 24th' in the same sentence. Running through the middle of the crowds was a dark blue canvas banner printed with photos of the disappeared, held up by hundreds of people at waist level. Each photo was the size of an A4 sheet and they were printed alphabetically in rows of four, so that even though all the 30,000 have not been identified, the banner stretched back for blocks. From time to time older women came by and peered at the names (we were holding up the middle of the B's). Most kept looking, one found her son's picture and took hold of the edge of the banner on level with it. Another was distraught. "They've mixed up the sections this year and I don't know where the M's are."
Luciana held up part of the edge with one hand and called Romeo, who was running around under the banner, with the other. His kindergarten teacher had written 'Have a lovely public holiday' in the exercise book they send notes home in every day. "Pelotuda. How can she write something like that?".
"Are you going to write back?"
"I'm going to put that for his sake we spent the day at the march."
The government made this a public holiday two years ago: El Día de la Memoria, la Verdad, y la Justicia [the day for memory, truth, and justice]. Many people don't know what the holiday is for and many more don't care. But along the avenue the crowds kept swelling. The red-shirted percussionists had already started drumming, with a group of about 50 dancers dressed in white edging forward in front of them. Behind, the banners kept coming: industrially printed swathes that stretched from one side of the avenue to the other, hand-painted bedsheets, and flags tied to bamboo poles. Scores of different Peronist movements chanting and drumming. Unions, theatre groups, children of the disappeared. Dotted along the edges of the banner, old ladies wearing the white headscarves of the Madres and Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo. Circling around them hundreds of families, friends, couples with pushchairs, hot in the sun.
The banner went taut and we began to move forward.
***
We finished at the ECuNHi, a cultural space run by the Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo inside the former Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA), the most notorious clandestine detention centre in Buenos Aires. Many of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo's children were tortured and killed here, and many of their grandchildren were stolen from here. There's lots more to be said about the ESMA, but it'll come in another post. For now, suffice to say that it was incredible to see these buildings filled with people of all colours wearing all colours, beardy-weirdy long-hairdness, old people and children, and folk singers and actors on stilts running rampant through the compounds.