Author: Hazel Frost

The plot thickens like lumpy custard. 

We have spent this week finding out about life in a cash-using society when you don’t have access to cash.  People do use cards here in big places like supermarkets and multi-national petrol stations (although YPF the state-run petrol company won’t accept cards).  But day to day purchases from butcher baker and candlestick maker are strictly cash affairs, as is the paying of the rent.  Since last Friday we haven’t been able to take money out of the ATM system.  We haven’t yet got as far as selling the kids into slavery, but our landlady is becoming antsy. 

We appear to have emerged unscathed from the latest round of ministry politics from which we can’t share details in public, but everything has gone quiet on the Western front at the moment anyway. 

Mission stuff chugs along.  I slipped up to Salta for a few days last week for exec meetings.  It was a nice change to go away on my own, and the meetings were far less arduous than sometimes so there was plenty of time for coffee and a long walk. 

I’m doing battle with 2 Timothy 4 for this Sunday.  It feels a bit like the wall at the three quarter mark of a long distance run; legs hurt and the end isn’t yet in sight.  Although in this case probably more brain than legs.  My four-sermon series has also just become five since the person up next is going to be away for the first Sunday.  But rather than spinning 2 Tim for another week, although there is more than enough scope to do so, I’m thinking I will probably do something random and one-off for Mother’s Day (19th October) possibly involving Isaiah. 

Currently listening to classic Marcos Witt, South America’s answer to Graham Kendrick.  Mexican, Marcos Witt was the mainstay of every church music group when I came here first in the nineties, and remains popular to this day with his mix of original numbers and enlivened versions of trad favourites. 

Yesterday was Joni’s 7th birthday.  We replaced his small second hand bike with an bigger and better second hand bike.  He wanted to take it to school.  We said he should test it out closer to home first.  Ten past seven in the morning found him doing laps around the plaza in order to convince us that he was safe to ride it to school.  He won. 

   

He decided that this year it was important to have his party on the same day as his birthday.  I made a guitar cake.  His friends were all impressed.  Birthday cakes here are normally either round or square with a plastic Spiderman/Disney princess (delete according to gender) stuck on top, so it is easy to generate a response simply by doing something different. 

Last week disappeared into a flurry of activity.  The fourteen – now fifteen – year old announced that she wanted to come and live with us.  That is unlikely to happen for a number of reasons, not all under our control, but it meant that I had to attend two meetings at the teens hostel with support workers and the psychologist to talk about how we can build stronger and healthier links with her.  And then there was just the normal stuff of life, taking and fetching kids, teaching English, feeding people, working with Maxi.  I’m still writing sermons, and there was also a Scout camp this weekend which always involves a couple of days of running around gathering things, planning activities, generating paperwork, and buying food; followed by running around of a different nature, after the kids all weekend.  And then I disappeared into a different sort of flurry; of icing sugar into the wee small hours on Sunday night in order to produce the requested guitar cake ready for the big 7 on Monday morning. 

Here are a few of the things that I am currently thinking about in no particular order…

From some conference notes I scribbled ages ago.  Sew seeds in the lives of individual people.  Currently plugging away on my 2 Timothy sermon series, (and realising that chapter one alone could occupy all four weeks if I choose to let it).  I am struck that while both Jesus and Paul at various times were surrounded by multitudes of people, when it comes to who they really walked alongside, we are talking about a handful of named individual mentees.  And I’m thinking that while doing big stuff is always more impressive on a human level, if we could make a real difference to three people’s lives then we probably will have have achieved more for the kingdom than any attempt to fit seventeen people into the diary before breakfast. 

From the Independent 7th September.  The scientist leading Britain’s response to the Ebola pandemic has launched a devastating attack on "Big Pharma", accusing drugs giants including GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Sanofi, Merck and Pfizer of failing to manufacture a vaccine, not because it was impossible, but because there was "no business case".  This of course is a totally  logical outcome of allowing the market to dictate policy; it makes far better economic sense to focus on long-term drugs for rich people (Prozac, Ritalin) than it does to produce short-term medications to save the lives of people who can’t afford to pay for it.  If we don’t like that, what are we prepared to do to change it? 

This one. http://www.williamwilberforcetrust.org/radical-hospitality   and this one. http://www.theveryworstmissionary.com/2014/06/3-tangible-ways-to-stop-sex-trafficking.html  I’m pondering on radical hospitality, what a fantastic phrase.  It took me a while to come to a decision for various reasons, but I’m supporting https://www.theexodusroad.com/ 

The Missing Billions: The UK Tax Gap estimates that 25 billion pounds is lost through tax evasion every year, of which 12 billion comes from (or rather, doesn’t come from) the 700 largest corporations.  Meanwhile the UK department of work and pensions estimates that for 2013-14 The total benefits overpayments due to fraud and error across all benefits is £3.3 billion.  So even if we were 100% charitable to the UK government and assume that the entire benefit loss is due to fraud rather than error, we can still see that benefit fraud is but small change compared to tax evasion.  The interesting questions are; why does the UK population seem better able to tolerate a higher level of stealing from the system by the rich than by the poor.  And is this phenomenon peculiar to the UK or have we hit on something about the human condition?  And wherever that philosophy might take us, the practical issue is this: you can carry on buying cheap goods from those 700 corporations, or you can lament the cuts to public services.  But not both. 

And finally.  Why is it that my new phone, which will probably make you a cup of coffee if you swiped the screen in the right direction, is completely incapable of producing anything other than a pathetic squeak when a text message arrives.  My old, sadly deceased, un-smart phone had no problem with producing a variety of sounds of different lengths and volumes according to the preference of the user.  I am told my new phone can be trained, but only if I go to a website, find the sound I like, download it, add it to the phone, and then select it.  Personally I’m struggling to imagine how adding several extra steps of work in order to render the machine fit for the purpose it was bought, could possibly be indicative of any sort of technological progress. 

A new computer in the house reminds me of how clothing worked when we were kids; enter a new coat and everyone else’s stuff shunted down a child.  Martin bought himself a new laptop when we were in England (higher spec, more choice, and better priced than Argentina).  So, I inherit the older laptop, and the even older desk-top, which had previously been Martin’s old desktop and more recently my computer-shared with the kids, has become the kid machine.  We (that’s the royal we, more accurately, Martin) rebuilt it with a minimum of software mostly for film-watching and game-playing, and shuffled it across onto a trolley on its own.  And now I have my desk back. 

I spent most of a morning devoiding it of sweet wrappers, Lego bricks, and assorted other juvenile accoutrements, followed by sorting nine months worth of filing (can’t always blame the kids for everything),  and lastly cleaning away the intermediate layers consisting of paint fallen from the ceiling and the plaster which is dropping off the walls. 

One of the things that surprises me for a few days every time we go back to the UK is that you can open a tap and hot water comes out.  Just like that.  So, uncluttered by notions of health and safety, we have taken ownership of this new shower unit, affectionately known as a widow maker:

Note the trailing flex, loosely stapled to the wall above the tiles, dangling across the plug socket, with the bath just a few inches below. The shower unit itself has an old fashioned kettle filament inside to heat the water.  Fill it up, plug it in, walk away, come back twenty minutes later, unplug (forgetting that bit is likely to render your partner a widow/er), hope it’s not too hot or you’ll have to go away again until it cools down, shower.  Done.  

Your perspective on this will probably depend on your context.  The clipboard wielding health and safety guys would have it down in a jiffy.  At another extreme, the 750 million people in the world who don’t have clean water to drink would be scandalised that we’re using it to wash in.  Our take is that having survived the last few winters without hot water in the house, we think we’re going up in the world. 

I have just put up some sermon notes on Philippians 2 (Filipenses in Spanish) from last week.  You can find them in Spanish under the sermons tab above.  I got brave and for the first time ever I didn’t write out my entire sermon word for word (which probably renders the notes less useful to the unsuspecting but what ho.)  I think it probably went better as a result, almost definitely sounded more natural because I wasn’t reading it out.  But it was a bit nerve wracking trying to keep remembering what I’d thought I was going to say about each part – hard enough in English when at least I have the advantage of all the vocabulary to hand.  My next challenge coming up is to deliver a short sermon series.  I’m used to my invitations to preach arriving at six month intervals so it is probably going to be good discipline to have to deliver something good quality three or four weeks running, and to give the whole series a coherent shape. 

If you’re not from the UK or have otherwise been living in a box then you might not have heard of Francesca Martinez.  She’s a comedian, who also has cerebral palsy, and I love her perspectives on life.

“I wondered why physical perfection was always linked to happiness when it often appeared to cause problems. I mean, if being rich and beautiful leads to inner peace, wouldn’t we all be buying self-help books from Kate Moss? So who did this ubiquitous superficial value system really serve?

It became clear why this mass worship of conformity dominates our culture. It’s not because it spreads light and joy and peace across the globe, it’s because our society is built on consumption. And consumerism will only thrive if you can convince enough people that they’re lacking in some way, and that what they really need is the latest product/outfit/look to be "normal". That’s it. We’re sold this lie so that we’ll keep buying crap that we don’t need. So that we’ll continue to attempt to attain "normality" through purchases and surgeries and upgrades and iShit.”

Check out the link to read the rest. 

There is nothing like leaving a house and coming back a few weeks later for seeing things with fresh eyes and going “what a flipping mess”.  Having a big house is bad for discipline.  This combined with the blessing that we have lived in this house for nearly six years, which is longer than I have lived anywhere since I left home at eighteen which was a long time ago.  Back then I used to be able to transport my life in one (pink and grey, Karrimor – do they still exist?) rucksack.  And of course accumulating kids increases the rate of multiplication of stuff on a logarithmic scale.  So I am gradually sorting stuff into keep-give away-chuck.  The spare room is done, apart from the cot to give away.  I’m currently working on the kids’ room, helped variously by Joni and the new drawer unit which arrived on Friday.  Our bedroom is next.  The garage will be last, by which time I will have either gathered strength or run out of steam. 

More difficult is the non-physical stuff.  What do we do with our time, how to find more time to do the more important stuff, how to be more disciplined about dealing with strident voices of other things which demand our attention but are probably  fundamentally less vital.  At least going away and coming back to some extent provides a bit of a hiatus and a chance to make some resolutions and decide what  to prioritise for those first blank diary pages after return.  Limit screen time and make it useful, read more, pray more, sleep more, love more, eat chocolate.

We snuck into the UK for a quick visit, managed to pack in a dozen or so meetings in eight churches, by the end of which we were done with meetings, people, and especially with the M25 so we didn’t do half the other stuff or see half the friends we had planned to.  Next time, next time… 

We have been back in the country for six days and in San Francisco for five.  Still haven’t quite managed to distribute the mountain of stuff that we transported across the Atlantic on behalf of other people (“Did you pack this yourself madam…?”).  It’ll happen.  In fact I need to make a couple of phone calls to find out where some of it needs to go to. 

Currently having technology failure, the first thing that happened after we arrived was that my pc decided not to boot up anymore.  It has gone for repair.  The next thing was that the phone line fell off the wall because the atmosphere in our office is mostly reminiscent of an Amazonian swamp.  Martin fixed it yesterday (the phone line that is, the swamp remains without remedy).  So naturally the car wouldn’t want to miss out on its share of the attention.  Luckily 22 hours plugged into a battery charger took care of that.  I’m hoping my pc might come back soon.  The laptop’s fine but I’m missing various useful documents, notably the one that has all my passwords to everywhere else, and I also have three hundred photos on my camera waiting to upload and sort into their relevant folders. 

We are currently in the UK for a short and not entirely organised visit. Happy to share coffee-beer-curry-greasy breakfast (possibly not all at once) with anyone keen enough to make a trip to sunny Baldock.

Watching the Argentina – Iran game. At least Argentina are still in the running, but it wasn’t pretty.