This blog post is a few weeks late but as they say, better late than never. And in this case it might actually be better late than on-time because I’ve had some time to reflect on the experience and post something a little more nuanced than I’m really tired.My first week in Cordoba I started volunteering with Un Techo para mi Pais, an organization that builds emergency housing in poor and marginalized barrios (neighborhoods) and then continues to support these communities after the construction by funding daycares, helping kids with school work and investing in local projects.

Two weeks ago I joined about 300 other volunteers in a construction weekend. We spent two nights in an elementary school in Pueblos Unidos, a barrio half an hour outside of Cordoba. For two days we dug post-holes, nailed together boards and got to know each other and the families we were building for. Over the course of the weekend Techo built 30 houses, providing 30 families that most basic necessity of shelter.

My cuadrilla (work group) built a house for a Peruvian man named Lester whose house collapsed in the huge storm that rolled through Cordoba in late January. Lester is going to school to be a chef and the tuition is expensive so he hadn’t been able to repair his house. Since the storm, he’d been living with neighbors. Lester and his father-in-law Victor helped us out with the construction, and they put all of our shoveling skills to shame. Victor impressed/scared everyone by scrambling around on the roof and hauling heavy boards and sheet metal in flip-flops.

Lester’s adorable 4-year-old daughter Jasmina and a pack of neighborhood children also joined in on the fun, running around barefoot and playing with hammers and other dangerous construction equipment. This got me thinking about the Argentine attitude towards safety which goes something like “survival of the fittest” or “just don’t be stupid.” You know you’re not in the USA anymore when you take the machete away from the seven-year-old and say “Here, have a hammer instead.” (Contrast this with working at Mary Johnson where you’re not allowed to throw snowballs or climb up the slide and you have to record carrot-stick-for-carrot-stick exactly what everyone ate for snack.)

Each day we ate lunch with Lester, Victor and the neighbor family, stuffing ourselves on salty chicken, pasta and polenta and sucking down several liters of Coke. Turns out it’s hard to find any other liquid in the barrio. If I ever said I wouldn’t drink Coke even if my life depended on it I now take that back, because it did and I drank it.

We put the last nails in the roof after dark on Sunday night. I watched the sunset from on top of a house that had been only a dream 36 hours before. I finished the weekend dehydrated and exhausted (sleep isn’t high on the list of Argentine national priorities…probably because highly caffeinated mate is) but exhilarated. It was fulfilling to build something real and to have the callouses on your palms and the dirt under your fingernails to prove it… And it’s an incredible feeling to know that that real something you built helped someone. Not in an abstract way like donating money, or registering voters, or the million and ten other important, but distant, things volunteer organizations do, but in a real way because someone has a place to sleep tonight. And not an abstract someone either, but someone you got to meet and talk to and someone you enjoyed spending time with.

What struck me most about this weekend was how easily conversation and laughter flowed between people from different backgrounds and diverse corners of the earth. And really, isn’t that what volunteering (and also traveling) is about? Finding not the differences but the similarities, understanding what connects us, not what drives us apart, embracing the common human denominator and using that to build a better world.