ASB Argentina
We are a group of 20 Northwestern students planning to spend our spring break doing community service in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Schools from around the country are teaming up with Hillel Argentina to help improve the surrounding communities in Buenos Aires. We are dedicated to alleviating third world poverty and improving the plight of the international Jewish community. We will be working with both interfaith and Jewish community organizations on projects dealing with education, infant care, literacy and more. We will be partnering specifically with an under-resourced school to improve the quality of education for its students by painting murals in outdoor play areas, improving the music-education facility, and building a library so the students can access books and improve literacy. We will also volunteer in a childcare center that serves underprivileged families. By completing our service projects and spending time with the people of Buenos Aires we will prove to them that those facing the challenges of third-world poverty are not alone.

We have been fundraising so that we can make a donation to one of the causes that we will be working with (to be determined). If you are interested in making a donation, please contact Shauna Perelman at perlman.shauna@gmail.com. Please note that she will be out of contact while we are on the trip from March 20-28.

And don't forget to check out what our friends are doing on the ASB Cuba trip at http://asbcuba.tumblr.com!
March 24, 2009
Monday: First Work Day

Hi, this is Stacy Jacobson, junior trip participant. Yesterday was our first work day. We were up bright and early at 8 a.m. ready to start our community service project at the Tel Aviv School. We are working on making the play area usable and more inviting. Currently, there are soccer goals and a dead, overgrown garden. The schools that have been here in the weeks prior to us have done a great job painting the walls of the play area, which extend to the roof of the school, and have left just the last bottom portion of the enclosure for us to complete. We also will be fixing up the garden, and painting two murals: one on the wall behind the garden in the play area, and one in the music room of the school. We got to work first priming the walls and then painted them an off white color. At the same time, some students worked on cleaning up the garden, rooting up the overgrown plants and sweeping up trash and dirt. We also brainstormed ideas for our two murals. The one in the music room will be interactive in that it is made of numerous plaques that will be hanging on hooks so the students and teachers can move them around. We are thinking of mixing a musical theme with an educational purpose, but the actual theme has not yet been decided. We also brainstormed ideas for the mural on the garden wall, but one has not been chosen for that yet. By 5 p.m. when we left, we had completed the three coats of off-white paint in the courtyard play area, cleaned up the garden, and even shared lunch time with some of the students. They were so cute and loved showing off their English to us. We are looking forward to starting our artistic endeavors now! Signing off….more to come on last night!