Author: Hazel Frost

Hello world.  We’re back.  Thank you to everyone who was thinking and praying for us. 

The boys did great.  Martin says he would even be happy to repeat the experience at some stage, although probably not next week.  Danny enjoyed going to nursery so much that we´re thinking he might as well carry on going there until the summer holidays start in December.  Joni thoroughly enjoyed having Daddy’s undivided attention all morning, every morning, to the extent that at the moment he’s struggling with the readjustment of having to share with the rest of the family again. 

Meanwhile, I had a ball, starting with flying over the Andes which was a first for me.  This through-the-window shot doesn’t begin to do justice to it, but you get the idea;

   

I enjoyed the weekend in Temuco with our Latin Link friends, drinking coffee, chewing the fat, a spot of epic dog-walking, and the confirmation service and subsequent knees-up at the Anglican church.  All highly agreeable.  Followed by an uneventful journey up to Santiago on Monday morning for the conference of the Ecumenical Disability Advocacy Network. 

Only in Latin America could we organise a conference for a bunch of people with disabilities and not think to go check the location; with 24 hours to spare, it was discovered to be completely inaccessible.  But only in Latin America could we manage to resolve the situation, in a completely new setting, with all catering and electrics in place as though nothing had ever gone wrong, and still start more or less on time (delayed mainly by the Venezuelan airline which had managed to both lose and break the specialised wheelchair of one of the key delegates.  Ooops.  Luckily, so the Venezuelan contingent informed us, one of Chavez´s main achievements has been that the Venezuelan population know their rights to the extent that they are able to quote chapter and verse of the relevant statutes.  So off went the airline representative to organise the purchase of a replacement wheelchair.) 

It was probably the best of the three EDAN events I have been to so far, or maybe I’m just getting the hang of them now.  As with any event, the sessions ranged from interesting to less so, challenging to less so, and relevant to less so.  There were some emotional reunions with old friends; and isn’t it funny how you have to travel half way across the continent in order to catch up with people who only live a couple of hours from home.  And of course many others started the week as strangers and ended it as friends; like the Peruvian member of government proudly displaying her first guide-dog, and the Venezuelan representative of the International association of mouth and foot painting artists who I helped in and out of bed a few times. 

  

Wednesday was “International evening”.  I’m not a big fan of talent shows, particularly those which aren’t on TV and therefore don’t come with a handy volume control or off-switch.  But when the Argentinean contingent called me to come and sing their national folksongs, my heart leapt with a little pride; my adopted people have adopted me.  And we were great!  We sung a set of traditional numbers, including famous Tango “Caminito”, and the folky “El Arriero”.  (You can find a zillion interpretations of both on YouTube).  The chorus of El Arriero (the mule-driver) goes

“Las penas y las vaquitas,
Se van por la misma senda,
Las penas son de nosotros,
Las vaquitas son ajenas”…

The sorrows and the little cows both follow the same path; the sorrows are ours, the cows belong to others.  Which I think is just great, and a wonderful illustration of that British-Argentinean talent for listing our woes, followed by “it could be worse…”  And then just sometimes everything falls into place, and for this one week it seems that the cows might turn out to be ours after all. 

“But if God is invisible then people would keep bumping into him”.  Good point. 

“Mummy, we have to be civilised” Admittedly I was pretending to beat him with a ping pong bat at the time but I was more than justified:

I was knitting a puppet for someone else, and Joni decided he would like one too.  Make a monkey, he said.  So I knitted a monkey.  At around the 90% mark he said “don’t want a monkey, make a snake instead”.  Redesign the head a bit, line the mouth with red, improvise a forked tongue, sew a couple of red buttons on the eyes, and Bob’s your uncle, or possibly your snake.  It probably wouldn’t feature on the centre-fold of “Good Housekeeping”, but considering it started life as a monkey, I don’t think I’ve done too badly; 

 

This photo appeared in yesterday’s paper;

which made me realise that I maybe should have been a bit more impressed at having been granted private audiences in the personal offices of some of the figures depicted here.  I guess it’s like a foreigner in England running into George Osborne or something; no good reason to know who this person is or why anyone should be impressed by the encounter (if indeed they should).  We may therefore have reason to hope that having made it this far up the food-chain, my qualifications are at least being given the best possible chance of being recognised by somebody somewhere. 

We received a fine for having an unpaid tax on our car from September 2009.  According to my husband’s anal comprehensive filing system, we officially took ownership of our car in August 2009, and we have no record of having received any bills until the 2010 tax bill early in the new year.  So I took the stack along to the tax office this morning.  “Ah we probably wouldn’t have sent you a bill because your address wouldn’t have been in the system at the point where the bill was issued”.  So you’re fining us for a bill from three years ago that we were never sent and couldn’t have possibly known existed since this is a local tax?  “That’s right” she said, without a hint of irony.  I paid it.  What else could I do? 

Meanwhile I’m off to Chile in approximately seven hours time, and although I have the power to transform a monkey into a snake, my stuff appears not to have packed itself at my command.  And they say faith moves mountains. 

Bobby Fischer here we come…

Really we’re just at the stage of “the horsey is called a knight and it moves like this…”, but he’s enjoying himself very much, as well as making for an impressive looking photo. 

Hey we’re English, we’re supposed to talk about the weather.  And we’re not the only ones; from the national broadsheet to the local rag, a paper isn’t a paper in Argentina if it doesn’t contain at least an entire page analysing comparative temperature and rainfall from one province to the next.  It’s one of those points of connection between our diverse nations. 

So here is yesterday’s weather.  Up in the hills it hails golf-balls on a regular basis, but down in the city this little lot that came down last night was by far the biggest we’ve seen since we’ve been here;

 

It was pretty loud on those shutters, and luckily the car was safely away in the garage.  And Martin would like you all to know that he took his life in his hands venturing out onto the patio to collect this two-centimetre specimen for your appreciation. 

Mummy, did you make me a cake?

I did (thinks; lucky I knocked that out at one in the morning after we got back from Cordoba last night).

Has it got smarties on it?

It has.

And chocolate icing?

It does (phew, good guessing mummy).

——————————————————-

What would you like for lunch on your birthday?

Cauliflower!

OK, and what would you like with your cauliflower?

Cheese! 

And anything else?

Fishcakes!

 

That part was actually harder than it sounds; from being in plentiful abundance three days ago, it took a trawl through three greengrocers to track down some cauliflower which had also inexplicably tripled in price; either the cauliflower season has finished, or possibly someone’s field was flooded out by all the rain we’ve been having.  The fish shop was also closed, but luckily we discovered the posh butcher also does fishcakes so we were able to meet all his requirements.

He had a kite with a lion on it for his birthday, which had its maiden flight at Scouts in the afternoon to much delight (both his and the Scouts).  It also accompanied us to the plaza today, although the plaza turned out to be rather more complicated owing to the presence of too many trees, unlike the scrubby bit of waste-land behind the Scout railway-shed. 

We’re doing his party on Thursday, partly because the weekend already had too much stuff in it, and partly because it’s a bank holiday (yes, another one) so some people are away including the lady who owns the play-barn which he and his mates are going to trash uh enjoy for his party. 

And isn’t it amazing what 24 hours can do?  Joni’s been showing us all day how much more grown up he is, how much taller he is, how much faster he can run (obviously he grew half a metre overnight) and generally how much more impressed we should be with everything he can do now he’s five.  So naturally, we have also responded by giving him an opportunity to impress us with how much more quickly he can tidy his toys away, and how much less complaining he can do when we ask him to help clear the table… High fives all round, he’s a fantastic kid. 

… And I can tell you why.

You can splash around in duck feet.

You don’t have to keep them dry. 

(Dr Seuss I wish that I had duck feet 1965)

Duckfeet wouldn’t be a bad option around here right now, given that my current choices are between the wet footwear or the other wet footwear, and this has been the view from our dining room window for various parts of today;- 

… I wish I had a whale spout

A whale spout on my head!

… BUT…

My mother would not like it.

I know just what she would say:

“Not in the house!

You turn that off!

You take that spout away.”

Very little chance of turning it off while the rain continues, as indeed it does.  Our own spout is caused by the grass roots restricting the bottom of the guttering.  Note how the water flows directly into the road, it’s meant to do that, which partially explains why San Francisco disappears anytime it rains for more than twenty minutes.  And we should be grateful for small mercies since the deluge into the road does at least mean that most of the water on the roof is draining off in traditional manner rather than via the alternative route through the cracks in the office ceiling. 

Loveliest of trees the cherry now

is hung with bloom along the bough

From Dr Seuss to AE Housman I think caters for a fairly broad literally span.  Ok so this isn’t a cherry, and it isn’t white and it isn’t Easter.   But it is pretty, and it is the view looking the other way from our dining room window, and it even still has a cloud of blossom on it despite today’s rain:

The sermon that I gave this morning can be found under the sermons tab. I think it went OK, I’m not fully convinced about how it holds together, but I’m used to my preaching invites arriving about a year apart so if I started having a regular fixture on the preaching rota then I will have to learn the art / discipline of producing something coherent on a regular basis rather than a corker once in a blue moon.
Other than that we had visitors over the weekend, prison-visiting types from Cordoba. “La Chanchita” has been going into prisons for thirty eight years, after becoming a Christian during his own youth spent on the wrong side of the bars. He’s an amazing character and we’re planning on going across to see him in Cordoba later in the week.

Concise Oxford English Dictionary © 2008 Oxford University Press:
inauspicious/ɪnɔːˈspɪʃəs/

▶adjective

not conducive to success; unpromising.

– derivatives
inauspiciously adverb,
inauspiciousness noun.

“Mummy, why do we have to see if there are any lizards in my hair?”  Yes, the weather is warming up and it is national nit week again.  I’m not quite sure how he made the journey to “lizards” in either language, but he doesn’t have any, or dinosaurs either.  We also learn that he isn’t a socialist as far as his own cash is concerned;  “No, because if I spend my coins then I wouldn’t have any coins left…”

The back half of last week degenerated into chaos when it started raining and the city disappeared.  On Thursday afternoon after three turns around the city trying to find a working route home the car gave up and sulked in the middle of the flood.  People might fall over themselves to hug and kiss each other here, but possibly not surprisingly, fewer are in a hurry to get their feet wet on behalf of their fellow man, and since our sulking Corsa was blocking the road I had the experience of pushing the car whilst attempting to operate the steering wheel by myself while watching several other drivers try to pass on either side, decide they weren’t going to make it and reverse away again, further soaking me with their tidal waves in the process.  Including a mini-bus filled with strong young male members of a local Christian foundation, may the Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon them (it may be that I didn’t use those exact words).  Fortunately our next-door neighbour appeared in his Kangoo and came to my rescue.  “Get in the car and I’ll push you with my truck”… you’ll do what???  “Get in the car…”  And bless him, he has obviously done this before because he used the front of his Kangoo to push me not only out of the flood and up onto the main road but almost back to the house, before my own beast reluctantly spluttered into life again, and what’s more he didn’t even chip the paintwork.  Which is better than I’d managed… I later realised that I had lost the front number plate at some stage during our sub-aqua city tour.  We’ve done this before, in exactly the same way.  And you needn’t think you can just pick up a replacement at Halfords.  Oh no, write off three days of your life filling in paperwork and collecting rubber stamps.  And the replacement has a big fat D in middle of it, for Dunce, so everyone else can see how stupid you were. 

Keen to avoid this fate yet again (actually I don’t even know what the replacement of the replacement would say; RS for Really Stupid maybe?) I did another little tour of the city, unsuccessful because it was nearly dark, and because most roads were still under water.  And thus went off swearing to the Scout group to start making pancakes.  Over three days we made, stuffed and sold nearly 700 pancakes for our camp fund.  Thursday evening was a rather inauspicious start since of our five gas rings we could only make four work, and of our zillion frying pans only two appeared to be suitable for cooking pancakes.  However, I did manage to gather one useful piece of information… the local TV station “Canal 4” doubles as an informal lost and found, since people hand stuff in there to be announced in the in-between-programmes bits, and other people go along to announce their lost possession, and so quite often the two manage to be reunited without any announcements being made.  So Friday morning I went to Canal 4, where the lady at the desk dug out a clip-board with a list of number plates that had been handed in (no kidding… so why don’t they change the design so that they aren’t held on by bubble gum and gravity?)  where sadly mine wasn’t on the list, so she added my details to a different clip board of number plates still presumed scattered around the city.  And then she suggested I should try the bus station next since apparently they also have a collection of lost number-plates.  So I did, and there it was, although I couldn’t collect it because it was by now in police custody and I was required to prove that I owned the car, which luckily merely involved a detour back home to collect the paperwork rather than three days sitting in an office generating it.  Followed by another detour to the supermarket to pick up a couple of cheap frying pans.  I hope not to see another pancake for some considerable time. 

And now this week is grinding gently into action.  I have another sermon to write for Sunday, which is quite an honour to have two so close together, I am normally the scraping the barrel option as far as the preaching rota is concerned, in fact this is the first time for literally several years where it hasn’t been a bank holiday weekend.  So I’m currently chewing on John 6 and why it matters that Jesus is the bread of life and what might he have meant by verse 26. 

Totally unrelated but definitely worth a look, this link is to the sassiest article I’ve seen on the Paralympics I like it. 

Out of focus and bemused

Questions that I have never previously been asked by a passport-office; “Can he write his name?”  “Can you get up in the morning?” 

Joni’s baby Argentinean passport runs out in November so I went to the civil registry to see about another one.  “Can he write his name?”  “Er, not really, he runs out of A4 paper after the first few letters…”  “Right, then we have to do this before he’s five because he has to be able to sign his own passport when he’s five.  Can you get up in the morning?”  “Er yes….” “Good, be here at seven tomorrow then.” 

That was yesterday.  Thus today found us in the passport department of the civil registry at 7 a.m. where an electronic device took his photograph and another electronic device took his fingerprints, and a human being informed us that a new passport will be arriving by courier in a couple of weeks. 

How do you solve a problem like…

  Maria isn’t her name, but it’s how we know her as it’s the first name she gave us.  And she isn’t so much a “problem” as a conundrum.  My itinerant friend reappeared this morning and our peaceful if not entirely productive post-passport-office mud-pie making session out on the patio suddenly became a confetti chase around town.  We went to her current bedsit, followed by two queues in the benefits office, followed by the bank.  The benefits office insists that there’s a pension in her name that has been drawn since 2007.  She insists she isn’t drawing it.  The bank insists that the money is being drawn out of her account with her bank-card from the cash-machine.  She insists that it isn’t her, although she has the bank card in her possession but claims not to know how to use it.  I would decide not to believe her, except that the benefit office also volunteered the information that she has been going in there every month for the last while to ask when her pension will be paid, which I can’t see why she would do that unless she really isn’t being paid it.  So, is this an elaborate hoax, or is she telling the truth, or is something very strange going on that I have no idea about?  What I do know is that if she were middle class and articulate, both the benefits office and the bank would be at least a little bit interested in finding out, but because she’s poor and confusing, they assume she’s lying through her teeth and they have washed their hands of her.  She knows that the jury’s still out as far as my believing her is concerned, but I am also morally driven to act as though she might be telling the truth at least until I’m convinced otherwise.  So where to go next? 

How do you hold a moonbeam?

Shrek was a strange creature of uncertain parentage.  The neighbourhood kids had aptly named him, for although he wasn’t large or green, he was definitely a species all on his own.  We identified shark, cockroach, anteater, and alien somewhere in his genetic make-up.  He came to live with us when his previous owners threw him out and he took to sleeping on our door-step, until we relented and started feeding him.  Dog-ownership is a fluid thing in Argentina, there are many street-dogs, and many of those are “owned” in the sense that someone feeds them, maybe takes them in at night, maybe does their inoculations, and maybe pays their vets bills.  A collar claims ownership of “your” dog.  So Shrek became ours, although he regularly lost his collar.  He knew where his food was, and he always came in at night eventually (although sometimes not until the wee small hours).  He liked home comforts, he would sneak onto a bed or the sofa anytime he thought no-one was looking.  He loved to play; chasing madly after birds and guinea pigs, or fishing for stones in the drainage ditch, or running after a ball with Joni (we got through many plastic footballs courtesy of his sharp front teeth).  He was clear he was top dog in the neighbourhood, often coming home with bloody ears from defending his turf, and he once spent three days hiding under our bed having misjudged the pit-bull that used to live next-door.  You can take the dog off the street, but you can’t take the street out of the dog, and today he died as he had always lived; chasing after the traffic.  Joni and I said a little prayer tonight to ask God to look after him for us.  Stuff theology. 

“See mummy, I got dressed very quickly so I won’t get trouble about daddy” 

Monday was a bank holiday, another one, this time remembering San Martin.  I asked one of the fathers at Joni’s school who San Martin was.  He said “some guy who rode a horse to Chile”.  Whatever, it was a day off.  So we went for a picnic to Miramar. 

“Ohhhhhhhhh, I don’t want to go to Miramar, the water’s all salty”  (Why do kids the whole world over do that ohhhhh thing when they’re whinging about something?  They come out of the uterus knowing that that will be the most effective sound ever when you really want to annoy your parents.) 

So we went anyway….

         

  

We managed the challenge of walking the parapet without anyone falling in…

  

Beware the wild baby…

And as the last vestige of light disappeared from the evening sky;

“Ohhhhhhh, why do we have to go home already?  Didn’t we bring the tent?”