Things have been somewhat tense in Cordoba of late. Depending on one’s political allegiance, the explanation is that the provincial government have overspent, or that the national government is withholding money belonging to the province; either way the net result is that Cordoba has run out of money. Trips to town involve dodging demonstrations and riot-police, winding around road-blocks and crash barriers, sometimes finding that the shops have closed anyway, and then trying to figure out where the bus home might have been re-located to this time. Yesterday we heard that some sort of agreement might have been reached, so there is hope that progress might yet be made.
On Tuesday Joni and I went to the children’s home in San Marcos. We nearly didn’t go, we didn’t decide until late on Monday and it felt like a lot of hassle at short notice, but the opportunity came up so we took it. In the end it was a really nice day, catching up with the kids and the adults. One of the adolescents said “Hazel trajó la alegría” (Hazel brought joy!). Joni spent the day in the middle of a mêlée making mud pies; he came home exhausted and it took me ages to clean the mud out of his nose. There is a part of me that regrets that we haven’t gone to live in San Marcos, but we had two full-time job offers 400 kms apart so it is just a feature of life that saying yes to one of them would mean saying no to the other. I played with the idea of building in a program of visits to San Marcos from San Francisco, but the distance is too far really to develop anything meaningful, and I also believe in principle that mission partners need to be working more strongly in the communities where we are living rather than flitting in and out of places like a flock of seagulls, but I am already working on another blog about that subject.
The saga of Martin’s latest mishap rumbles on. He went for a scan yesterday which revealed that the tendon which allows normal folk to bend at the knee is no longer attached, which explains why his leg no longer works. The plan is that tomorrow they will have him in for day surgery to reattach the tendon. Our distrust of our insurance company (it’s justified; they’re rubbish) is sufficient that we are organising ourselves to pay up front via Visa (hooray for Visa) and to claim it back whenever the insurers decide to pay up some (considerable) time after the event. The insurer have embarked on their usual round of not-returning phone calls, while emailing us their usual stack of irrelevant forms “Write the numbers of your inbound and outbound flights”, while requiring us to prove that this wasn’t an existing condition “Well, I did used to be able to walk normally but unfortunately I don’t any video to demonstrate…” Luckily this surgery is only a fraction of the cost of Martin’s previous mis-adventure so we are able to circumvent the insurer with only a few minor squeaks from our bank. Meanwhile my job today is to purchase two biodegradable bone anchors in this season’s colours. I think I have located a source, but we need to go and talk to the company this afternoon.