Mufa

In grammar 4 one day, we watched a movie called ¨La suerte esta echada¨ which translates too: The luck is pouring. It stars a big nosed Argentine man who is a mufa: a person so cursed with bad luck that where ever they go, whoever is around them, falls under a spell of mala suerte.

After we finished watching the movie, our teacher asked us, ¨Do you know anyone who is a mufa?¨ I looked down at my desk. I knew where this was going. Who was going to take the bait. Turned out, it was my friend Ed.

¨Lizzie´s a mufa.¨ He smiled and my teacher asked (not really knowing what she was getting herself into), ¨Oh Lizzie, what´s happened?¨

Oh well Sole, let me tell you. There was the three delayed flights, the disaster of a money situation, my cell phone that didn´t work for my first two weeks, my pink eye that lasted three weeks, hostel reservations that have magically disappeared, missed buses...

As I listed cosa after cosa after cosa other friends in the class started to join in.

¨Remember when every bus in Cordoba was sold out and we were stuck there for the night?¨ Veronika chimed in.

¨Oh and there was that time that the bus leaked and you and Devin were rained on for 18 hours?¨

¨...or that time you almost broke your back falling in the lobby of the school?¨


On and on and on. It´s embarrassing how often things go wrong, to the point where no one in the program actually expects anything to go right for me.

So it should have come to no surprise when this weekend 100 pesos ($25) was stolen from my wallet. Then the next night, my friend´s purse holding my camera and cellphone was cut by a thief and stolen. I stood in the center of the concert, getting shoved by people on all sides and tears running down my face, overwhelmed that something else could have gone wrong.

I went out after with some girls from my program, only to discover that my only pair of jeans had ripped almost in half in the back. Fail.

Fed up, tired, and knowing I had a phone call to make, I walked the farmiliar path to the internet cafe. I called home and wished my big brother a happy birthday and he gave me some much needed advice:

¨It sucks, and it´s awful that it happened, but you need to just take it as part of the experience. You only have a short time of your life to live in Argentina. Move forward.¨

I am a twenty year old, poor as trash college student trying to make sense of a brand new country where the language is still a struggle and sometimes I fall. Okay, a lot of times I fall.

But a lot of times life here is a dream. 80 degree days of tanning at the beach, mate with hombres lindos, Pablo Neruda in the Park, Che Guevara in the classroom, cafecitos and live music, museums and graffiti, Fernet and Coke, and castellano...always castellano.

So, maybe I am a Mufa. Maybe I am that rare breed of person where everthing falls apart wherever they go. But do you know what?

There´s no where else in the world I would rather be.