Well, it ain’t much of a living, we can both vouch for that! While I pursued a career oriented option of teaching Geographic Information Systems (GIS) classes to a research group at the state university, my wife went with the tried and true standby of waiting tables. She worked five shifts at two different restaurants, Quinta Norte & Liverpool Pub. (photos included) Quinta Norte is a good Restaurant/Bar a block away from our house and Liverpool Pub was our joint for watching world cup games. We have been to each of these places around five times, which is more than anywhere else. I don’t have any photos of myself for this post. If I did, they would be of me dressed up as spiffy as possible, sitting around a computer with four others, pointing at the screen and asking if they understand what I’m trying to say.
On my original “Welcome” page, which I have moved into the blog chronology and plan to
replace with an updated and more thorough “About” page, I mentioned three jobs. The job teaching English fell through as the institute that I had been in contact with needed me just when we were going to embark on our month long journey to the North of Argentina. I have never worked at a winter resort and I really liked the idea of working as a snowboard instructor in the Andes. This turned out to be logistically infeasible as the closest decent resort, Las Leñas, is seven hours away! (one way, in good weather)
The process of getting my job started the month I arrived in Mendoza and ended last week when I was paid 350 pesos. I started doing volunteer work which was fine with me until they had me doing mind-numbing tasks like on-screen digitizing and data entry. When it’s your job, you gotta do what you gotta do, but not for free. After a few days of this I asked when they were going to start paying me. That question, and a bunch of follow up, got me a paying job about three months later. (We were traveling all of July and a third of August) They decided that training was the most valuable thing I could provide. I was asked to design a course, present them with a syllabus, and propose compensation that an under-funded university might be able to pay. I adapted a course outline from GIS training materials that the National Parks Service makes available online. I was happy that they accepted my proposal because teaching ArcGIS 9 to CIFOT in Castellano was challenging and rewarding. The job was fun and presented a good deal of interaction. My students impressed me with their understanding and attentiveness. They are not lacking in education; they are only lacking the monetary resources to purchase new software and training.
A conservative estimate of the hours I put into the class would be about eight hours preparation plus four hours of instruction for each of seven classes. This estimate does not including time volunteered, drawing up the proposal, or grading exams. This very conservative estimate of time invested results in an hourly wage of $4.17 pesos per hour which, in US dollars, is a whopping $1.39 per hour. Was it worth it? Undoubtedly. Here are a couple of comparisons for perspective. ESRI charges US$400 per student per day for an eight hour class. My wife’s 35 hours of waitressing netted her about $105 pesos which works out to $3 pesos, or $1 dollar per hour.
