THE ANTIPODES 1
ANTIPODES
INTRODUCTION
In November 2016 I had to cancel a trip to India so I looked for another place to go. I wanted to visit a country where I had never been to, not too far from Singapore, where I was living at the moment. I chose Taiwan.
When I arrive on my own at a place where I have never been to, it’s amazing. But to wake up the first morning and go out to discover that virgin land, is priceless. Taiwan was no exception.
I was born and grew up in Argentina but I have already spent almost half my life in Asia. Although I carry my country and its culture deep inside, my connection to the East is significant.
On that trip I found out that in 1895 Taiwan was the Republic of Formosa that some Portuguese navigators had named it after seeing such a beautiful island. (Formosa means beautiful in Portuguese).
Although, the cherry to the cake was to find out that Taiwan is the antipode of an Argentine province which carries the same name. Such a discovery led me to continue researching and I realized that Argentina is one of the few countries that has antipodes on mainland. Argentina’s antipodal points are in Taiwan, China, Mongolia and Russia.
The original idea of this project is to look for geographically opposite points, go to visit them, to photograph them and find stories. This is the starting point of a project that will certainly take me many years to complete but, as it usually happens, the most exciting part is on the way.
Singapore, December 2017.
FORMOSA antipode of TAIWAN
- LAGUNA BLANCA antipode of KEELUNG CITY
- SIETE PALMAS antipode of JISHAN
- EL ESPINILLO antipode of NEW TAIPEI
- MISION TACAAGLE antipode of TAOYAN
- GENERAL MANUEL BELGRANO antipode of PIAO LU MU PARK
- LAGUNA NAICK NECK
LAGUNA BLANCA antipode of KEELUNG CITY
LAGUNA BLANCA
Laguna Blanca is a city in the province of Formosa, Argentina, 140 km away from the capital that has the same name. It is my base in the area from where I will cover the only five inhabited points in the province that are antipodal to Taiwan.
I sleep in a small hotel, one of three in the city. The Imperial Apart Hotel does not have a restaurant. Neither has Laguna Blanca. Or I didn’t find them. However, there are the so-called “dining rooms” that only the locals know where they are and when they open. Five blocks from the Imperial Hotel there is a brand new service station that opened just a few months ago. This gas station saves me. It is my dining room, my office, my meeting place. It’s where I go when it rains and when there’s a blackout at the hotel. It’s where I write or read when I have to wait for the unbearable humid heat to die down. The gas station has air conditioning. An air-con in Formosa in the month of November is quite something.
The restaurant of this service station that has become my second home is run by Isabel Holgado, mother of a friendly boy called Santino. This woman of great drive not only fed me, she also allowed me to drive with her to the town of Clorinda and to cross the border to Paraguay where she does the shopping for her restaurant that has a variety of homemade food. The two hours’ drive allowed me to get to know her better. While studying design in Rosario, Isabel began to develop interest in cooking. She took classes and since then she has never stopped. I was also able to find out about a project that she plans to carry out in her own home kitchen: she is planning to renew it and enlarge it so that she can teach cooking to people who want another job opportunity.
At that restaurant I also met María Elena Gómez, Mary, a very nice Venezuelan woman who also works there. Mary is petite and always shows a broad smile while busy behind the counter. She takes my first order. The first of many that will come. I ask her what a Venezuelan is doing in that part of the world. Calmly, while taking orders, she tells me her story. She came to town with her aunt and her cousins who are surgeons. First they were in Buenos Aires, but things were not going so well for them so they decided to try their luck in Laguna Blanca. The story of Mary and her family moves me. A few days later I get the courage to ask her if I could interview her cousins. They accepted and this is what they tell me.
Yadira Carrero Barrientos is first a Venezuelan then a doctor. She graduated from the University of Carabobo, did a postgraduate degree in General and Laparoscopic Surgery and was a graduate and postgraduate professor at the Central University of Venezuela. She has thirty-six years of experience and many of them dedicated to surgery, which, as she confesses, is her passion.
“It all starts when the regime changes and Chavez comes to power. At first it was not very noticeable because Venezuela’s economy was good. There was work for everyone, there were no big changes in daily life. There were no major problems. You could travel, go on with your life. Everything was fine until work began to decrease. We had 30 operations a month. Then gradually started to go down to 10, then to 5 and, in the end, months went by without a single operation scheduled. There were no supplies in public hospitals and in private hospitals people could not pay for their surgeries. We saw that the situation was getting worse. Purchasing power was falling. Finally, we decided to do something about it, we started preparing the papers to leave. We wanted to try our luck in Argentina. We had traveled several times to Buenos Aires as tourists and we loved it.”
Yadira says that she was the first one to go to Buenos Aires to validate the degree and to look for a job. The first job she found was as a paramedic to treat wounds of recently operated patients at their homes.
“The papers were very difficult to get. Venezuela had no agreement with Argentina. It takes between 8 to 12 months to validate the degree. I also found out that I was to take an exam to validate the postgraduate degree elsewhere.“
Yadira says that a good way to validate a foreign doctor’s degree is to move to a place where they don’t have professionals in that particular field. Since there were vacancies of surgeons in their field in Formosa, they had the opportunity to move to Laguna Blanca. They presented all the exams and the province gave them a provincial license to practice. Their speciality is laparoscopy of abdomen, chest and neck.
“Then my cousin Mary arrived. A month and a half later, my brother arrived with our 87-year-old mother who has senile dementia. It was very complicated for us to leave her alone at home so I had to stop working to take care of her while my brother and my cousin went to work. We brought a little money that helped us support ourselves at the very beginning, while we waited for more documents from Venezuela to arrive. That was a very difficult time for us. But we finally got the documents.”
After patiently listening to his sister’s story, Carlos Carrero Barrientos starts talking in a slow pace with that musical Venezuelan accent. He remembers that the first days in Buenos Aires were quite hard. He worked as a paramedic. Sometimes he walked 30 blocks from one patient to another. While his dark eyes sparkle, he adds, “The bus fare was $30 and the pay for one treatment was $60.”
As they did not make enough money to go by, he took another job in a car wash. “I worked 12 hours a day and only had a 30 minute break for lunch. When I arrived home at night I was exhausted. My whole body ached.”
When I ask him if working as a surgeon isn’t physically more tiring, he says no. “You have mental fatigue, because of the concentration you have to have, but your body does not hurt.” And he continues, “We had mixed feelings. We had studied years to get the degree, we had done plenty of residences, did a postgraduate degree in laparoscopy, we went to congresses, we had spent years of training and you think, what am I doing?” However, thanks to the car wash he made a friend who introduced him to a doctor who belongs to an association of Venezuelan doctors in Argentina. “Thanks to her we were put in contact with Formosa government and we were able to start the paperwork.”
After washing cars, Carlos went to work at Once, a neighbourhood in Buenos Aires, in a fabric store owned by a Jewish man. There he learned to cut fabric. I dare tell him:
- Cutting fabric should be an easy task for you, you’re a surgeon.
-No, on the contrary. To operate, you use the tip of the scissors, to cut fabric you have to use the base of the blade and you have to have a steady hand to cut it straight. It is a difficult task.
He makes me laugh.
Carlos keeps telling me that in addition to washing cars, working as a paramedic, and cutting fabric at Once, he also tried driving an Uber but had to quit because he was robbed and beaten. He also bought a motorcycle and, they took turns with his sister and his cousin Mary, to drive it for a food delivery company. “We went through very tough times, but we also met very nice people who encouraged us. They helped us a lot. I always think that things in life happen for a reason, that there is a better tomorrow. I know that, eventually, doors open.”
Yadira and Carlos say that the first months in Laguna Blanca hit them hard because they came from Caracas, which is a big city, a little bigger than Asunción, Paraguay. But the Venezuelan colleagues who were already living in other towns of the province told them that of all the places in Formosa, Laguna Blanca is the best place to be. He continues: “Now that three months have passed, we realize that we are in a strategic place in Formosa and we have already settled in. We have a very good relationship with the people, they have been wonderful with us”.
I ask them if the idea is to stay in Formosa for a long term or if they receive the validation to work, they would go to Buenos Aires. Yadira tells me: “No, at the moment, we want to stay here. If I ever leave, I would love to go back to my country. If my country changes, in a reasonable time, I would return, but for the moment we are fine here. We miss Venezuela every day. It is not easy to leave your country when you are older. You can do it when you are young, but not when you are older.”
Carlos adds: “Here we earn much more than we would in Buenos Aires. People are very nice with us. We work a lot, we do surgeries twice a week, we work at the practice four times a week, we do shifts twice a week. We always operate together. We have two free weekends a month. Every day of operation we do about three surgeries plus emergencies, such as appendicitis and gallbladder. People come from everywhere: from Espinillo, Siete Palmas, General Belgrano, Misión Tacaaglé, Laguna Naick Neck. We are the only surgeons in the area. At the moment we only do invasive surgeries because we do not have the surgical instruments for laparoscopy. We asked the Government of the province to buy them for us and the equipment will arrive soon. There are supplies, there are medicines. We have a very good relationship with the paramedics, the nurses, the patients, with everyone. We feel less stressed than in Buenos Aires.”
In Laguna Blanca, Yadira, Carlos and Mary can have a better quality of life. They share a nice apartment, they have a car to get around and someone to take care of their mother while they work.
It’s already dark outside. I would love to spend more time listening to them but I don’t want to abuse of their generous time they dedicated to me.
I look out the window and see them leave while their voices still echo in the silence of the service station.
November 14, 2019
KEELUNG CITY
This is my second visit to Keelung City. I was there for the first time last year out of curiosity, to see where a Taiwanese friend of mine had grown up. I have known my tall, slender, elegant friend Patience since 1996, when we both had just moved to Singapore. Pat invited me to dinner at her house shortly after we met. When I arrived she was on the phone with her father who had just returned to China after fifty years. In 1949 he was sent to Taiwan “on vacation” but he was never able to return.
Keelung is the antipode of Laguna Blanca. It is where Pat’s father was born and where he lived after his return from China. It is where his daughters were born and where he lived most of his life. I couldn’t meet him because he was in China. I asked Pat if she knew someone who could help me in her town and she gave me the contact of a schoolmate named Shen.
Hong-Chang Shen, Shen (沈), who nicknamed himself “Alpha” has gray hair and a kind face. His energetic wife is called Chen Yue Lin (陳 玥 霖), self nicknamed “Beta”. She has short reddish hair, round framed glasses and a constant smile. They come to the hotel to meet me and help me plan my trip. They arrive with a bag full of grapes as a welcome gift and because they can never arrive empty-handed. Beta speaks a little English, and with my rudimentary Mandarin we can understand each other well enough. This nice couple gives me advice on means of transportation and areas where I can spend the night in search of the other antipodes of Argentina. We agreed to meet again the following Monday after my return to Keelung.
Shen is a professor at University. He teaches subjects that could be translated as “Adventure Therapy for Teenagers” and “Life Educational Experiences”. These subjects are taught in careers like “Social Work” and “Psychological Counseling”. Shen tells me that the objective of these subjects “is to provide tools to teenagers from dysfunctional families so that they can rehabilitate from drug use and recover from emotional disorders in order to reinsert themselves into society.
These teens carry out very diverse activities. One of them is a 500 km bike trip during the summer holidays in July and August. The objective is to transform the journey into a life learning experience. They set their own goals. “We do not impose strict rules on them, we only guide them. Money is not used, they don’t get extra help for the outside and the use of technology to communicate is limited. In short, a framework is created for them to get to know themselves better and to learn to be self-disciplined.
Adventure therapy is also applied to the development of active learning in young children and their families to stimulate self-initiative and good attitudes towards life. This programme has also been extended to remote villages and students with difficulties. These young people become capable, committed and influential protagonists to find out their own needs as of their community’s.
Days later, I went to Qī tóu (七頭) neighborhood to have tea at Alpha’s parents’ house, where he grew up. Alpha’s father, a fan of tea culture, gave me a personalized tasting of a wide variety of teas that made my caffeine intake go sky high. There I met one of Alpha’s sisters, with her daughter and her granddaughters. Alpha, the only male descendant, is a king among so many women.
I left them with my heart beating fast not only for the caffeine intake but also for the love they shared.
November 20, 2017
Heartfelt thanks to:
Isabel, Mary, Yadira, Carlos, Gisela, Puli and children, Alpha, Beta and family for telling me your stories.
Julián and Pat for the contacts you got me.
Alfre, for reading my Spanish versions.
In memory of Alf, my best and irreplaceable fan.
