Thanksgiving in Capital Federal - A Tale of Two Cities

Since I am working for a US company now, I had Thanksgiving off, which was a nice treat until about 1:00 PM. I slept in and woke up around noon. I had some freelance work I needed to wrap up so I made some coffee and plopped myself in front of the computer. I had the air conditioning on all night so I had no idea how hot it was outside. Well at 2:00 PM, the electricity went out. It's fairly common for the electricity to flicker on and off occasionally here, but after 15 minutes of no electricity, I ventured outside to be blasted with 93 degrees of heat combined with 90% humidity.

After five minutes in the heat and now dripping in sweat, I headed to a ciber (Internet cafe) to be connected to the rest of the world. Well the ciber had no a/c either, so I continued to swelter as I waited for my electricity to return (which it did by 5:00 PM, four hours later). In the meantime, I received an email from two of my three remaining friends who I invited to dinner (the others had already bailed on me) telling me they also declined to go to the only restaurant in Buenos Aires that serves a traditional US Thanksgiving dinner, which is something I was very much looking forward to going to. So, at this point, I was having a pretty lousy Thanksgiving.

Then, my conscience kicked in. Here I am living comfortably in Buenos Aires, Argentina; I'm able to put food on my table each night; I have a job; I have my health; and my family and friends are healthy. Yet, around me, tens of thousands of Buenos Aires residents are forced to live in Villas Miserias (shantytowns), often begging for money every day just to put food on the table.

After that revelation/epiphany, Thanksgiving took on a different meaning for me. The fact that I didn't have electricity for a few hours, or that my friends bailed on me for dinner, wasn't nearly as important as I thought at the time.

At 10:00 PM that night, Marcelo, my Spanish tutor from Argentina (who admitted to me that he had to look up what Thanksgiving was on Wikipedia because he didn't know what it represented!) and I went to a restaurant named Kansas, where we engorged on turkey, stuffing, potatoes, cranberry sauce, broccoli with cheese, and Malbec wine while just 1/2 mile away from us, several thousand Buenos Aires residents went to bed thankful they had enough food to survive another day.

This was a Thanksgiving day I definitely realized I had a lot to be thankful for.