A few afternoons a week our WMF Argentina community spends time with children, youth and young adults who live and/or work the busiest downtown train station and transportation hub in Buenos Aires. Hundreds of thousands of people pass through the Retiro station every day. Because of this, many youth and young adults living in situations of poverty come to Retiro to seek out opportunities to make money to live.
When we first arrive to Retiro for the afternoon and greet our friends, the first question is almost always the same:
“Did you bring mate?”
Mate is the traditional hot drink in Argentina shared among family and friends. The routine basically goes like this. A server fills a gourd (mate) cup with chopped yerba mate leaves and then pours hot water into the mate. Drinkers sip the hot drink through a bombilla, a silver straw with a filter at the end that prevents the leaves from entering the straw. The mate is passed around the group of friends or family. Each participant drinks the entire cup before it is passed back to the server who will then serve it to the next person.
We have one specific, special mate that we always take with us to Retiro. This mate was purchased over six years ago when our community first established new relationships with our friends at the train station. I love how this particular mate represents six years of friendship, welcome and hospitality among our friends. As we sit together on the Retiro train station floor or gather in the park across the street, drinking mate is an important mark of our community time together with our friends. It is a time that all of us look forward to.
Drinking mate is a critical part of sharing life together in Argentina. Go to any plaza or park around 5:00 PM on a nice day and you will quickly notice circles of family and friends laughing, talking and sharing in this traditional drink. Often our community comes together on Sunday afternoons to hang out and play, almost always with mate. Church events and fellowship times always include sharing mate. No visitor to our community escapes without tasting and enjoying the full experience of drinking mate. As the mate gourd is passed around the circle from friend to friend, we enjoy conversation, friendship, and laughter—mate is a symbol of life lived together.
For me sharing mate has become a meaningful practice of life in community. I often struggle with being present in the moment. Too often I am preoccupied with worries, concerns, and my to-do list. Instead of really listening and giving friends my full attention, my mind is wandering or racing with other things. Thankfully, I landed in a country that provides a cultural custom and practice that cultivates a posture of being present in the moment with one another. Drinking mate with my friends slows me down and helps me to savor the moment.
I have found the Argentine custom of mate to be a beautiful and meaningful act of community. To me it represents and provides space of belonging and sharing life together. In our WMFA community, we recently began the practice of expressing our commitments to one another through covenant. As we discussed meaningful symbols to include in our Buenos Aires covenant celebrations, a mate cup was one that all agreed needed to be included on the table. It is a perfect symbol to express our commitment to community and presence with one another. Sharing mate is a natural reflection of how our friends have welcomed us, and of how we continue to welcome each other.
*An earlier version of this reflection was first posted on This Ignatian Life blog on September 27. 2011 (http://ignatianlife.org/).