Author: Hazel Frost

This is a scan of the cover of the text-book that I was recently using to study language and literature for my secondary school exams. 

That it was even considered appropriate material for the front of a book designed for mass use by Argentinean teenagers says quite a lot about national self perception.  Talking with a friend the other day Martin suggested that refusing to allow British cruise ships to dock in Argentinean ports, apart from cutting off ones nose to spite ones face, might not exactly enhance Argentina’s standing in the international community, to which the response was “That doesn’t matter, we’re already a global joke…” 

Which is interesting.  Consider the following: The country of Argentina is only 200 years old, a mere blink on the time scale of many other nation states.  Of those 200 years, most of the first 60 were characterised by civil war.  Thereafter, most of the 20th century was characterised by military coups and fascist dictatorships.  In fact 1989 was a landmark in Argentina’s history when one democratically elected president, Alfonsin, handed over peacefully to another democratically elected president, Carlos Menem.  All of which makes it all the more impressive that merely a couple of decades on, Argentina has one of the fastest growing economies in the world, and standards of living have risen exponentially even in the few years that we have been here.  Yes, the corruption makes us weep, and the bureaucracy makes our eyes water, but global joke Argentina certainly is not.  So I have yet to understand from where the negative perception originates, why depression appears to be a national sport, and even worse, why it could possibly be a good idea to instil this gloomy self-image into the developing psyches of the nations school-children. 

Time spent cranking into gear isn’t my favourite part of the academic year; too much up in the air, too many extra things to do; several of which wouldn’t be necessary but for the tiniest bit of joined up thinking and having basic information available.  So far we have made three attempts to ascertain Joni’s blood group.  So far we have failed to be in the right place at the right time.  So far we have discovered that there is only one place in the city where it is possible to find out ones blood group, and we even know where it is, having been there twice, and now we have the (hopefully?) correct information about which half-hour slot they do blood group testing in each day, it might even be 4th time lucky.  The one thing I really haven’t figured out is why school need this information at all. 

Joni is in the afternoon school shift (school being half days here) which isn’t what we would have chosen but we’re going to need to make it work for this year at least.  When he was at nursery in the mornings I used to do all the boring jobs in the mornings, and so when I was with him later I was available to him largely on his terms.  Now any admin type chore that needs to be done in the mornings (because that’s when government offices, banks etc. are open) will have to be done with two bored children in tow.  And there have been a lot of admin chores of late.  Hopefully it won’t be so bad as the year gears up, but the kids will agree with me that this one has been a trying week. 

On the positive side, given that school actually is only for three hours a day, we figured that we could well incorporate a couple of out of school activities in order to get him out of our hair for that bit longer broaden his curriculum.  I’m thinking that this is the year for swimming lessons given that he loves water and we’re quite often in or near it between Scout activities and family camping.  And then he himself out of the blue has decided that he wants to learn to dance.  Goodness knows which stork brought him; I was so rubbish that my dance teacher wrote L and R in blue biro on my shoes for the few short months of our relationship, and I can’t exactly imagine his Dad as the Sugar Plum Fairy either.  Maybe this is the Latino side of his dual nationality.  Anyway, we’re still at the signing up stage, but hopefully we’ll have both of these new activities assimilated into our developing routine within the next week or so. 

As for the rest of life, I went to the village for the first time today.  Scouts starts next week.  Special school activities would have started yesterday but it was raining so that’s next week now.  The Instituto Londres (Martin’s English teaching) is at the signing up stage, and prison Bible Studies should spring into action soon.  We also have a tentative plan to start an open Bible-study / prayer group in our house, at the behest of the lady who runs the grocery store across the plaza from us.  Now we just need to find a time when everyone can make it. 

Up until December the last we heard on schooling for Joni was that there were no spaces available anywhere in San Francisco.  And then everyone went on holiday for two months.  And came back again.  And there were still no spaces available anywhere in San Francisco.  The news from the inspectorate was a grand silence.  Ditto the various schools where we’d put Joni on the waiting lists.  We became accustomed to the idea that he was probably going to nursery for another year, which the director of the nursery was fine with, reassured me that they would happily cover the pre-school curriculum with him so he didn’t miss out.  I had an internal debate with myself as to what I would do if one of the sink schools offered him a place at this stage; would it be better to accept a place in order to have him “in the system”, or would he actually be better off at nursery anyway? 

Except that the school which phoned at the last minute turned out to be one of the ones on our original preferred shortlist.  No debate needed, and the next few days spent spinning around San Francisco doing paperwork and gathering kit.  The week started with a bank holiday followed by a teachers’ strike; two key features of a normal academic year.  But finally here he is at his new school in his new uniform;

It is supposed to be a smock, but having opted for the “he’ll grow into it” size, it looks more like a dress.  Luckily he loves it anyway.   The director informed us that she jumped the waiting list in order to offer us a place.  We will probably never know whether that was at the behest of the Inspectora “get these parents out of my hair…” or for some other undefined reason.  On balance I think it is probably mostly good that we don’t understand the half of the wheeling and dealing which goes on behind closed doors, and on this occasion we are more than grateful that it has gone in our favour.

Meanwhile I on the other hand finished my secondary school exams this morning.  Exams are graded from one to ten, of which six is a pass.  I scored a nine in language and literature, a ten in geography, another ten in citizenship, and an eight in history.  So I am now officially a fully fledged teenager, qualified to go to university, or to listen to loud music and stay in bed till lunchtime (Wotever…). 

Without wishing to detract from my own or anyone else’s achievements, I was surprised at the standard of the exams.  While I didn’t expect that they would be up to A-level (given that secondary school here is six years rather than seven), I did think that they might resemble an extended GCSE, whereas actually the written papers most closely reminded me of the kind of tests I would have invented for my bottom set year 10’s.  In Argentina this is your entrance to university, whereas in the UK a bottom set year 10 is mostly going nowhere, particularly in the current economic climate.  I guess we are back to philosophy of education; is it better to aspire to mediocrity for all, or to push the few to achieve excellence, and then use the extra tax they generate to fund think-tanks to figure out what to do about the disaffected underclass?  Although actually I don’t think dumbing down to mediocrity contributes very much to reaching the disaffected underclass; in my language exam the other week there were something like 120 students signed up for it, of whom 80 showed (all teenagers except me and one other foreign adult), and of those 80 half a dozen of us passed, of whom I scored the highest mark.  I suspect that disaffection is caused by a cocktail of social factors and that therefore you can design education to be as easy as you like and probably still not make a great deal of difference in terms of reaching lost youth.

Wotever… For me at least the next steps now are hopefully mostly bureaucratic.  Apparently it will take a couple of months or so to extract my secondary school certificate from the bowels of the Province of Cordoba’s education department, and then hopefully I can hand everything over to the Ministry of whatever it was in Buenos Aires who I am sure will be more than happy to tell me about whatever hoops are next in the obstacle course. 

I mentioned in our recent newsletter that there are some tensions associated with being English around here at the moment, which elicited some concerned responses, so I thought maybe I should flesh out the bones of that comment a little. 

The history of the Falklands-Malvinas is interesting, if complex.  I did some reading around it a few years ago and I keep meaning to write my notes into a coherent article, but it never quite makes the top of the to-do list.  Suffice to say in terms of claims to sovereignty, history neither comes down clearly with Argentina or the UK,  and regarding the present day situation, the UK’s argument re. an existing population sounds suspiciously like “squatters rights”, but equally Argentina’s argument over geography (200 kms versus several thousand) would also have Cuba as the 52nd state of the USA (being an island of a mere 80 kms off the coastline). 

So, what is going on at the moment?  Well the issue is hotting up.  As far as I can figure out, nobody on either side of the pond believes that this is going to result in anything more than verbal handbags, but the news has been full of threats and counter-threats.  This is probably due in part to the unfortunate combination of the thirty year anniversary of the 1982 invasion coinciding with president Cristina Kirchner needing to draw attention away from a raft of political difficulties here, and David Cameron being delighted by an opportunity to draw attention away from an economic crisis there.  (In fact quite an uncanny parallel on both sides to the political climate which culminated in war thirty years ago).

As far as we are concerned, we aren’t being spat it in the street, no-one has set our house on fire, and I haven’t heard that any of the British in Argentina are experiencing any overt hostility.  Our friends are still our friends (or they’re too polite to tell us otherwise).  But there are small signs of tension, particularly among strangers; a comment from a waiter that “you people aren’t much liked around here…” (shall I take my custom elsewhere?).  Or when we are asked where we come from and we say England, in less troubled times people respond positively, ask us questions, tell us about their aunt who once went to a conference in Birmingham… but at the moment saying we’re English sometimes results in a long pause while everyone wonders what to say next… I guess like I would if someone had just told me they were the Khmer Rouge. 

It is a deeply ingrained issue in the national psyche, as I have been discovering of late while ploughing my way through secondary school textbooks.  Not only does it have a whole article to itself in the Constitution, but it is also covered in history, geography and citizenship in most years throughout the secondary school curriculum.  When I say “covered”, I mean that each subject book for each year contains a paragraph whose content can be summarised as “they’re ours because they’re ours”.  And having now read my way through the entire six years right up to school leaving standard, I can definitively confirm that I have not seen any version where the issue is remotely fleshed out or founded upon any further facts or philosophy.  Faced with such a level of critical discourse, our best course of action in general is to steer well clear, apart from occasionally with a very few friends with whom we are able to engage in a debate over a beer, knowing that we will still be friends at the end of it (mostly my fellow Scout leaders!)

However, the current cranking up of political rhetoric is also producing a phenomenon which we have not previously experienced; voices of dissent from within Argentina.  Clearly nobody but the completely suicidal would go as far as actually questioning sovereignty, but a national newspaper La Nacion (The Nation; I have no idea who is behind this one except that they appear to be the voice of the opposition at least at the moment) has been running a bunch of pretty daring headlines over the last couple of weeks.  Check out…

• this one from the 17th February Caparrós: "Mientras haya gente que sufra hambre, cualquier esfuerzo por Malvinas es obsceno" (Caparros: “While there are people who suffer hunger, any effort towards (regaining) the Falklands is obscene”)
• this one from the 21st February Malvinas: un grupo de intelectuales pide cambiar la política.  Romero, Sarlo, Kovadloff y Sebreli, entre otros, instan a respetar los intereses de los isleños.  (Falklands: a group of intellectuals ask to change the politics.  These four, amongst others, urge respect for the interests of the islanders). 
• this one from the 23rd February Beatriz Sarlo: "Las Malvinas no puede ser una cuestión nacional sagrada"  La ensayista y escritora se refirió al documento que firmó junto a otros intelectuales que cuestionan la postura del Gobierno en el conflicto por las islas; "Queremos que se abra el debate", dijo. (Beatriz Sarlo: “The Falklands cannot be a sacred national question”.  The essayist and writer referred to the document that she signed together with other intellectuals questioning the stance of the government on the conflict for the islands.  “We want the debate to be opened”.  She said.

Keep your head down, and watch this space. 

Since the global media has deigned to run an Argentina story not linked to football or those islands, I should briefly say we weren’t in the train or anywhere near it, although Estacion Once was my mainline station for the two years that I lived in Buenos Aires.  But spare a prayer for those who were, and their families and friends.  I suspect the key word will turn out to be underinvestment; by all accounts there has been very little since the railways were renationalised by Peron in the middle of the last century, and a generation of reprivatisation hasn’t made any noticeable difference as the private companies largely make their money from government subsidies.  And of course the stuffed shirts holding the purse strings would be the last to squash themselves into the sweaty cattle-trucks that pass for urban passenger trains. 

On a more cheerful note, gifted with two bank holidays next to each other, and sick of the sight of textbooks, we piled ourselves and a tent into the car and disappeared off to Miramar for the long weekend. 

Miramar is Argentina’s answer to Clacton; a once-glorious-now-faded-but-lately-rediscovering-itself beach resort.  It is located on the shores of the Mar Chiquita, one of the world’s largest salt lakes, which at 80 kms across might be the sea apart from the water temperature (tepid) and the lack of waves.  It also has such a ridiculously high salt concentration that it is almost impossible to swim; my feet kept floating to the surface(!)  The first hotels appeared in the early 1900’s, when the nearest public transport was to Balneario some 12 kms away; the early hotels used to lay on transport along the then mud-road to Balneario bus station.  In its heyday Miramar had over a hundred hotels catering for every taste and budget, until economic hardship combined with two major floods decimated the town and the tourist industry.   For some forty years, the remnant of the unflooded buildings and their occupants have lain dormant.  I have no idea how people have made their living, but only a couple of years ago we went to visit on a bank holiday and discovered every business in the place well and truly shut, and throngs of potential tourists milling the closed high-street and wondering what they were going to do about lunch. 

Thankfully some enlightened soul (change of local government? Enterprising business person?) appears to have realised that the exponential rise in internal tourism in Argentina is there for the taking, and the town came together to organise themselves a crowd-pulling carnival weekend.  Although with our two in tow we didn’t sample much of the night-life, we did enjoy sampling the waterfront eateries and the buzzing atmosphere of people enjoying themselves. 

The kids did what kids the world over do at the seaside; the four year old practises principles of civil engineering with a bucket and spade, while the nine-month-old eats the sand.  All good developmental stuff.  We also at Joni’s behest went out on a boat-tour of the lake, ostensibly to see the flamingos, although we’ve seen flamingos at much closer quarters by driving a few kilometres up the shoreline, but the boat was fun and a pleasant angle from which to experience both the lake and Miramar. 

The campsite was great, facilities not quite up to the number of people occupying them, but service was friendly, and hopefully some of the profits from this year might find themselves invested for next season and beyond. Our newly replaced tent is smaller, lighter, a sensible design (species of dome), will pitch in ten minutes next time, and more importantly doesn’t collapse when it rains (having well and truly had its first baptism on Monday night).  Many hoorahs.  And so as Clacton and its East Anglian neighbours were to my childhood, to Miramar we shall surely return.