My most important class is my Latin America in International Politics class at the Catholic University. It’s the only class I take with Argentines and is six credit hours. Even though the title says it’s about International Politics, we really are just learning about the governments and processes of rule in South America. The themes and readings are fairly interesting, but I have absolutely no background in this topic. Class is generally a struggle to follow what is going on.
At the beginning of the class, my biggest problem was with the fotocopiadora. In Argentina, because of import restrictions and other economic factors, the students don’t buy the textbooks they need. There are copyright laws, but they aren’t strictly enforced. Instead, the students go to a photocopy store (think Kinko’s) and request the readings they need. The employees will then photocopy what you need and you pay per page. Different teachers leave their materials at different fotocopiadoras.
I had the syllabus the first time I went to the fotocopiadora, so I thought it would be easy just to show them what I needed and it would be printed. Wrong. I was told to search through this computer database trying to find the readings, which were not organized in any way. I would spend twenty or thirty minutes looking for what I needed, holding up the line and gaining the ire of the employees. At one point, I asked the guy behind the counter for help and he asked when the reading was published, which I said I didn’t know. I told him I was an exchange student so I didn’t know the date was important. “Ah, sos una estudiante de intercambio. No sabés nada, entonces?” (“Ah, you are an exchange student. You don’t know anything, then?”)
I was so frustrated because my problems in class weren’t reading comprehension problems, they were reading acquisition problems. I can ask for help if I don’t understand the readings, but I couldn’t keep going back to the fotocopiadora day after day unable to find the materials I needed. There is a point at which I become so helpless that I stop trying. Thankfully, two or three weeks later, I found out there was a second fotocopiadora that had more of the readings and a staff with a more agreeable disposition. You didn’t have to search in the database there—instead they had folders for each unit in the class, and you search through the physical copies for your articles. Needless to say, I am much less stressed and will be going there from now on.