A CONVENTILLO IN THE ARGENTINE CAPITAL

Heads are bared as the robed priests and choir boys, with lights and lanterns, come into view. Such crowds of women follow! Little children dressed in white follow on, carrying silk banners. At length, to the muffled sound of the drum, and well protected by armed soldiers, comes the Virgin, carried aloft.

The excitement is now at its highest. Women are throwing flowers from the balconies to the Virgin. All are anxious to catch sight of the four prisoners at whose feet the Virgin had been made to drop a free pardon. Then follow in the rear more soldiers as a further escort.

In spite of all these feasts, the priests feel they are losing their hold upon the people, especially the women; and in order to revive religious sentiment cinematograph pictures are being shown in one of the churches to attract more worshippers. To lose the women is also to lose the children, the men they have already lost.

On our way to the capital of Buenos Aires, we pass miles of waving corn, with great expanses of grassland upon which graze hundreds of sheep and cattle. Here and there, too, we see ranches where the owners of the wheat-fields and cattle live.

Who are these people? Not foreigners, but our own British men and women, miles away from any city and from civilization.

There is no church for them to go to, so Sunday is the same as any other day; but occasionally they receive a visit from the chaplain of the South American Missionary Society. More often than not, they are without any spiritual help whatever, and yet how much we owe to them!

Supposing we had no church or Sunday-school, no one to tell us of the beautiful things of God—how we should miss it all! And yet here are these people living out on the plains of Argentina, with their little children, tending the sheep, and reaping the corn, all of which is for our material benefit.

The sheep and cattle are killed and put into the freezing-houses in Buenos Aires; the wheat is harvested and made into flour, and all is shipped from the docks every week, to England and other parts of the world. Shall we not send them news of the Bread of Life which perisheth not, so that the boys and girls of Argentina may know about the Lord Jesus Christ?

Now we are in the city of the whole continent, Buenos Aires. The houses are flat-roofed and have no chimneys, for the very simple reason that they have no fires. Most of the cooking is done either on a charcoal brazier or on a gas or oil stove. Most of the streets are very narrow, especially the older ones. The newer streets are made much wider, and down the centre are avenues of trees.

House rent here, as in every other South American city, is very, very high, so that the poor people live in “conventillos” such as you see here. “This is a form of slum peculiar to South America consisting of a square, or courtyard surrounded by buildings one or two stories high. A ‘conventillo’ sometimes contains as many as a hundred families, each one crowded into a single room, opening on to the common square. Here the women wash, and cook, and sew, and gossip and drink ‘matÉ’ with their friends (the native tea of the continent is grown in Paraguay). Here also the children swarm and quarrel at their games.”

Buenos Aires is a most cosmopolitan city, full of life, gaiety, and commercial activity; and yet so full of wickedness that many a mother’s boy has been ruined for eternity.

There are numerous factories of various kinds in the city and neighbourhood, in which hundreds of girls and boys are employed. In the richer homes the girls are kept very secluded by their mothers, having no purpose in life but just to dress up and make themselves look nice.

In the hot months everyone rises with the sun, and the first substantial meal, called “almuorzo” (breakfast) is taken at 11.30. The hottest part of the day is spent in “siesta” (sleep), under a mosquito net, on a shady verandah, after which you have a cold bath and dress ready for visitors, or go visiting yourself.

To speak of work amongst children in the Province of Buenos Aires would fill a book. The Christian workers of the Evangelical Union of South America are doing noble work in the Sunday-schools. We have not time to visit Tres Arroyos, where each Sunday two hundred children listen to the “Old, Old Story of Jesus and His Love,” or Las Flores, Coronel Suarez, Campana, or San Fernando, where the children are gathered together Sunday by Sunday.

The difference between these Argentine children and ourselves is just this, that everything here in Britain is done to help the children, and to surround them with a pure atmosphere and holy influences. Out there it is not so; everything is against the children growing up to be even morally good men and women.

They are so familiar with sin that their sense of sin is destroyed, and they are therefore harder to reach than pure pagans. If ever a city needed a “Blossom Home,” it is Buenos Aires, where we find children of all nations.

One of the finest institutions for children and young people in the whole of this continent is, however, to be seen here at the present day. We cannot leave Argentina without paying a visit to the suburb of Palermo, where are situated the schools superintended by the Rev. William Case Morris, the “Dr Barnardo of South America.”

While in business, in the Boca district of the city, some years ago, Mr Morris saw the poverty and ignorance of the children about him, and he longed to see something done for them. Of his own accord, and with his own private funds, he commenced a school for poor children. Upon this he spent years of labour and much money, seeking to better the lot of his juvenile friends.

With the South American Missionary Society at his back, he established day-schools, Sunday-schools, and schools of industry, through which hundreds of Spanish-speaking children have passed since their foundation.

Who are the scholars? With the exception of a very small number we find they are children of the poorest class. Many are children of invalid parents, others of widowed mothers. In the case of several, the father is serving a long term of imprisonment for crime. Some are almost alone in the world; many are quite alone—“nobody’s children,” waifs, to whom life is a dreary, desolate solitude.

Numbers of the children had been surrounded by an atmosphere of ignorance and sin, and would a few years later have been a cause of trouble to the police, had it not been for such an institution as this. It is not only a training place for the mind, but a school for character, where the children’s souls are lifted out of the mire and trained in the atmosphere of heaven.

What sweetening influences must now be at work, where every youth and maiden is who has passed through this school! Think of the five thousand who are being trained to be witnesses for Christ to their own people in this continent, where we see still so much darkness, degradation, and superstition.

The whole secret of successful work amongst Spanish-speaking children is splendidly summed up by Mrs Strachan, an E.U.S.A. missionary in Tandil. She says:—

“Our work in the Sunday-school makes us feel more than ever the pressing and immediate need of day-schools. It seems impossible in one short hour to make an impression on the children.“How can you teach a child that a lie is a lie, when lies are told at home and in day-school? How can you make him understand that to steal is a sin when everybody else tells him that the only sin about it is to be found out?

“The child of South America is up against all that sort of thing; it is the very air he breathes during the week.

“He comes to us for an hour on Sunday; how much do you think can be done to press home these powerful influences? We are more than ever convinced that if we are to do in this country a work that will take deep root downward, and bear fruit upward, the children must be got hold of, placed in the right atmosphere, and taught on the right lines. For this we must get the day-schools and get them quickly.”