Author: Hazel Frost

It has been an unremarkable week in the soya-growing backwaters of central Argentina. 

We managed to find out when school starts… sort of.  Technically I have to attend a parents’ meeting tomorrow, and then classes start properly on Wednesday.  But naturally the teachers are on strike tomorrow; this happens at the start of every academic year.  So there won’t be a parents’ meeting tomorrow.  It might be on Tuesday.  And classes might start on Wednesday.  Or Thursday or Friday.  I have every faith that they will start at some stage. 

We managed to collect the medical certificates that Joni needs to start school…. sort of.  He has a local-authority issued health book and before the start of every school year we have to get two pages filled in by the paediatrician; one to say that he is healthy, and another to say that he is fit to do sports.  I kind of thought that meant the same thing, but apparently not.  Then we have to get another page filled in by the dentist, and another one filled in by the optician.  All this involves going to the “centro de asistencia” (public clinic) very early in the morning in order to queue up and hopefully to be allocated a numbered ticket for today, otherwise you have to come back and do it all again tomorrow.  So we went at 5.30 on Monday morning.  This won us tickets for the paediatrician and the dentist, although sadly not the optician; apparently they were only giving out 20 numbers a day for the optician so with every school child in the city needing his signature that’s going to take a while.  The receptionist suggested that we leave it a few weeks and then try again.  Fortunately school will be fine about that, they’re used to it. 

Apart from that, it has been the usual round of running a household and entertaining two children for the last week of the summer holidays.  Cleaning, cooking, parks, plazas, and painting.  We did the supermarket run and discovered that stock cubes and Joni’s favourite soya drink have also disappeared… that’s ridiculous, we live in the middle of the biggest soya growing area in the country.   Joni and I made a chocolate cake with smarties on.  Joni and Martin finished the base for the train track and I revamped the utility area at the back of the garage to make a permanent space for it. 

So term is about to grind into action.  Danny starts nursery on the 11th of March (at least they won’t be on strike).  And I’ve just been asked about my involvement with disabled kiddo from the village this year.  I need to think about that.  I’d like to be involved with him, and with the special school, but school won’t be interested unless I can sort out my qualifications.  Which leaves the glorified taxi-driver’s role.  On one hand it gets me in.  On the other hand I’m effectively subsidising the Argentinean state who have a legal responsibility towards him.  And on the third hand (alien life form) there is the little issue that our car continues to drink fuel faster than we can put it in, so subsidising the Argentinean state also turns out to be rather expensive.  We need to fix the car.  I need to go and see the social worker, and the kid’s grandmother, and probably also the school.  So that’s this week taken care of. 

Male bonding: Joni and Daddy’s woodwork project to create a base for Joni’s Christmas train set.  Challenging gender stereotypes: when he was done with gluing and screwing, he came and made cookies in the kitchen with me.   He’s pretty versatile is our kid. 

I hadn’t been to our local supermarket for the last two months, but I fully expected it to be more or less as I had left it, given that I can go a year or more between trips to our local shop in the UK and very little changes beyond some light rearranging of the aisles.  So this morning was definitely a cultural experience. 

The first surprise was the price rises.  Ok so inflation here is officially 8%, but everyone including the IMF knows that 28% is closer to the mark, so of course it would make perfect sense that everything had gone up 5% in our absence.  I just wasn’t prepared for the reality to be quite that stark. 

And the other thing was the gaps on the shelves.  Policy here at the moment is for strict limits on imports, and the few products which do get through are subject to a 50% tax.   These measures are supposed to encourage an increase in local manufacturing, but the gaps on the shelves suggest that the policy might not entirely be having the desired effect.  Bleach, washing up liquid, and roll-on deodorant seem to  have become relics of a past era, while washing powder has largely been replaced with tablets of soap.  Bizarrely the depleted washing up liquid section was sporting a jaunty sign reassuring the consumer that in the ongoing absence of washing  up liquid, the makers of Skip clothes wash powder have confirmed that this can be used to wash dishes.  I’m sure they’re right, it’s all based on the same stuff, but given that washing powder itself is becoming as rare as rocking horse droppings I can’t quite see how the advice would be helpful. 

Don’t get me wrong, we aren’t talking about Soviet food queues, or even post-War UK ration books, but I did take my shopping list to a hitherto western-style supermarket fully confident that I would be able to restock on the household essentials, and I did come out scratching my head and wondering what else won’t be there next week. 

There´s a reason why news updates should be short and regular.  Trying to include the whole of the last two months into a blog would be mission impossible both for the author and the poor unsuspecting reader.   The salient features are that we went to the UK for Christmas and January, which looked like this:

And then we came home for 48 hours before me n´ the boys disappeared on Scout camp for a week which looked like this:

Both trips were fantastic, despite (or possibly because of; variety is the spice of life and all) the nine thousand miles and 35 degrees Celsius of difference.  

Now I´m trying to rediscover my house, and gather the stuff that Joni will need to start the new school year.  Actually at the moment I´m not entirely sure what date he is supposed to start on; they weren’t able to furnish me with that information when we said goodbye in December, so I need to cycle past the gate at some stage this week and see if there is anything useful on the noticeboard. 

The three Scout groups of San Francisco spent Saturday afternoon constructing this giant flor de lis solidaria;

(photo courtesy of the local rag, me n’ my kids are down there somewhere.)  I haven’t figured out how to translate the title, flor de lis in “English” is a fleur de lis, which isn’t English at all but we don’t seem to have a translation for it, and solidaria is somewhere between solidarity and charity but not quite the same as either; without the connotations of pity which surround charity, but without the commitment to “standing with” which we would associate with solidarity.  So flor de lis solidaria is the best translation available. 

Our aforementioned thing is made out of approximately 160,000 plastic bottle tops, sorted into colours, and laid out as the world Scout symbol across “la plaza civica”, San Francisco’s central square and most important public space.  This photo is taken from a small aeroplane and I think it looks pretty good for our hard hours’ toil in the boiling afternoon sunshine.  Publicity stunt over, the bottle tops are then transported to Buenos Aires to the Hospital Garrahan which is the national flagship children’s’ hospital, I guess the Argentinean equivalent of Great Ormond Street.  The Garrahan have been fund-raising through collecting bottle tops for as many years as I have been involved in Argentina.  I have no idea what they actually do with them to turn them into money but I imagine it must be some sort of recycling, like when we used to collect milk bottle tops and ring pulls when we were kids. 

Three short videos for Granny and anyone else who can bear home-movies of other peoples’ offspring. These ones are from the end of year event at the swimming club, in which Joni participates with more enthusiasm than panache at this stage, but he’s very happy and definitely water confident.

Beginners’ underwater doggy paddle

Backstroke sort-of

“Spiderman jump” (so we’re told).

Signs that you might be becoming culturally adapted to Argentina;  You think it is your lucky day when there are only forty people in front of you at the bank (forty-one to be precise this morning). 

I preached on Sunday, continuing my meander around the “I am” statements in John.  It’ll be up under the sermons tab when I get round to putting it there.  I did “I am the gate” thinking about the start of Advent.  The summing up at the end conclusively demonstrated that the “summer-upper” had totally missed my point by a factor of a hundred and eighty degrees.  What ho!  We battle on. 

As soon as the service finished we hotfooted it out of the door and into our even hotter car to our rapidly-becoming spiritual second home of Miramar, complete with tent and related accoutrements.  We divided our time between the beach, the pool and the waterfront cafe.  We took a funny little 4×4 truck drive to see flamingos and black vultures.  I even managed to use the long lens that I brought back from the UK last year.  Next time I might even manage not to over-expose the images, and at least now I know where the vultures hang out, I’ve even got written instructions for future reference, so they’d better not move house without telling me. 

Danny dispensing baby-charm and blonde cuteness around the beach found himself set upon and photographed from all angles by a young girl who turned out to be working for the Miramar municipality to put together this year’s tourism website.  (It’s OK, no-one asks permission to take photographs here, that’s normal, we’re OK with that).  When the second young girl arrived, also armed with camera, the first one went into raptures about the toddler she’d been featuring.  “Oh I know that baby” said the second girl, “I took pictures of him for last year’s too!”  Sadly we’re not receiving any royalties for all this high quality photo material, but it’s nice to know that we aren’t the only ones who think our kids are fantastic. 

  I just finished knitting Danny a chunky hoody to take to the UK with us for Christmas, given that neither of my kids have ever experienced real sub-zero cold (I already made one for Joni a few months back which is still too big for him).  He though it was very funny.  Either he thinks I’ve taken leave of my senses bundling him up in a great woolly thing when it’s forty degrees outside at the moment, or possibly he just likes the idea of dressing up as the court jester.  Although of course he doesn’t need to dress up, he was made for the role.

Lucky I didn’t clear away those cobwebs then! 

This impressive beast has made herself at home behind the light switch in our washing area and is clearly doing a fine job at keeping our cockroach population under control.  Although actually we do need a few cockroaches because, strangely enough, they keep the scorpions at bay.  We have small scorpions “Alacranes” and they are occasionally fatal, but I’ve not yet seen one in our house.  So let that be a lesson to all you over-zealous house-wives out there; you need your spiders to keep the cockroaches down, and you need your cockroaches to protect your kids’ bare feet from the scorpions.  That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.  Hear the word of the Lord. 

This is me checking in with the world to report that I have nothing to report. 

The temperature has been around the forty degree mark most afternoons the last few days so it´s frankly astounding that I even have any brain left to do any reporting with, had I anything to report. 

Our car is going in for fixing yet again tomorrow, which is obviously not “news” in the sense of news being novel, different or unexpected.  We´re trying the posh dealership this time in the hope that paying through the nose might actually result in the car being fixed.  Its latest game is that moving in a slow queue or waiting at traffic lights causes the temperature gauge to rocket skywards.   Added to which, taking note of fuel consumption over the last little while reveals that our fuel consumption has actually doubled in the the last two years, (as has the price of fuel, so our unrepentant beast is actually costing 400% more to run today as it did a couple of years ago deep joy). 

Our power went off for sixteen hours yesterday.  We do have quite a lot of power cuts although mostly very short, and occasionally for a couple of hours, so a whole day without power is almost reportable news.  Which of course meant that the fridge defrosted itself, and we also didn’t have any water (water being pumped up from the underground mains pipe by means of an electric pump which every house has installed somewhere).  I could get along for quite a while without electricity but not having water lost its novelty value quite fast. 

The kids are fine, Martin´s writing stuff on the computer, the melon seeds that Joni and I planted the other day are coming through, my disabled kid is fine, my itinerant friend pops up every so often, the village “reimbursed” my petrol costs with counterfeit notes the other day (grrrr) and I didn’t realise till I tried to spend them the next day (double grrrr), there is no progress at all re recognising my qualifications although I’m finding imaginative new doors to bang on, and I did get paid an unexpectedly large some of money the other day for contributing frankly very little to someone else’s English class for in-service primary teachers. 

Here are a couple of photos that Joni and I took the other day while walking the dog. Seven thirty in the morning is the most hospitable time of the day at the moment;-