Author: Hazel Frost

San Francisco is currently doing that thing where the temperature drops from 30 degrees to twelve with barely a pause for breath in the middle.  That blink was autumn.  Oh sorry, you missed it.  There’ll be another one going the other way in six months time; we’ll call that one spring. 

So what’s news around here?

The Good

While it would be difficult to justify calling Scouts a significant part of my “ministry” (whatever one of those is), it is probably the area of life where the most identifiable progress is actually happening.  On a personal note, I have sat through enough training days to gain my “wood badge”, meaning that I am now officially a Scouter.  This is good for insurance purposes, and also for my self-esteem; I have a recognisable qualification, therefore I am.  I suspect related to this, the grizzly old Scouter who had thus far failed to meet my eye, much less speak to me, and whose comments have suggested he struggles with both women and foreigners, greeted me like a long-lost relative the other day, and even gave me a lift in his truck.  I don’t know why it matters that he accepts me, but somehow it does. 

Away from the personal, our group meets in an old railway shed, just a few metres along from a couple of other old railway sheds, which house a whole community of otherwise homeless families.  As in the UK, Scouts in Argentina have traditionally performed a baby-sitting service for the middle classes, but our Scout group here for the last ten years has been trying to make inroads into the railway community, and this year some of their kids have finally joined us.  This brings its own challenges almost too many to list, but these are the guys who could really benefit from what Scouting has to offer, and if we can both keep hold of our existing members and integrate the new arrivals, the cross-fertilization process could yield manifold riches all round. 

The Bad

Our missing mother mentioned a few entries ago was located safe and well and working as a farm-hand about a hundred kms away from here, but has since apparently disappeared again.  As yet unconfirmed rumours suggest that she may now be in a different province a thousand kms north, and more worryingly, that she may not have gone entirely voluntarily.  What is certain is that she is vulnerable and therefore this is going to need checking out just as soon as anyone figures out how.  Finding one person in a rural area of a country eleven times the size of the UK brings a unique set of challenges, the first of which is to persuade anyone in authority to give a damn about a dark-skinned and uneducated female whose family aren’t articulate enough to fight her corner.  

The Ugly

Wrestling with a broken umbrella in the rain is worse than merely being rained on.  At that point the very existence of the umbrella ironically becomes the red herring, as we have to work through the whole frustration of “this is an umbrella, I chose it for a specific function, it ought to be performing that function, maybe I could get it to work if only I just try…” until eventually wetter, later, and crosser than if we’d ditched the thing and walked home in the first place, we are forced to concede that the effort has been wasted.  In the case of a shoddy local product, or an even shoddier Chinese import, the sensible solution would be to cut ones losses and buy a better one.  However, with this umbrella, we have the equivalent of shares in the company, an on-going relationship with the directors, and we also pay an annual “hire charge” for the privilege of using the umbrella.  On paper, this could mean we have a positive influence over umbrella design, and on a personal level to ensure that our model performs the function for which it was made.  Unfortunately in practise, the response of the management has been to assert that we were wrong in expecting the umbrella to keep the rain off and not to turn inside out in the wind.  The silence thus far from anyone else in the board room suggests tacit agreement with this position, lack of interest, or possibly just the hope that we might go away.  As a champion of “make do and mend” (I’d have been a poster girl for “dig for victory”) my house is full of stuff I’ve grown, sewn, fixed; and full of other stuff waiting for me to figure out how to fix it or make it into something else.  But there comes a point where even I have to concede that darning the previously darned is counter-productive and re-heating the previously re-heated is downright dangerous, so we have to ask how much longer it is possible, sensible, or realistic to keep going with our broken umbrella.  If you’re finding this all too cryptic, I apologise.  I’m trying to juggle wanting to write about what’s really going on in our lives, combined with not wanting to damage anyone else on route, combined with feeling nervous that pointing out that the emperor has no clothes on might result in the boy being put into the stocks rather than the scoundrel tailors.  “Complicated” might be a better word than “ugly”, but ugly fitted the cliché! 

This whopper has been christened “The Watermelon of Doom” after one of Joni’s favourite stories from 64 Zoo Lane 

It’s nearly as big as Joni, weighs at least as much as he does, probably the only way it’s going to fit into the fridge is if we take the rest of the contents and all the shelves out first, and we’re going to be eating it for some considerable time to come.  Martin reckons we should hire an industrial fridge, I’m thinking it might just be more practical to chop it up and share with a few friends.  

Sometimes I love the things my kid knows… 

Walking the dogs in the early morning sunshine; “Look mummy, an hornero nest”.  An hornero is a little brown bird, quite common round here, which builds a distinctive mud-oven nest, often found on top of telegraph poles:

I love that he knows the names of the different species rather than contenting himself with the generic “birdie”, and I also love that he’s enthusiastic about spotting them when we’re out. 

This afternoon, when I came in having left Daddy in charge; “Turtles swim in the sea, but tortoises don’t swim”  (Daddy; “sorry, we didn’t get the washing up done, but we had some important research to do on the internet…”  I love the fact that he loves finding things out, and that he wants to share the fruits of his new-found knowledge. 

This evening, while we were building with the ubiquitous Lego; “My birthday’s in September.  I’m three, but I’ve got to be four”.  That’s right babe, and you know a lot of stuff for someone who’s three.  

Sometimes I also love the things that he doesn’t know… Reading one of his favourite books:

(picture from Dinosaurs’ Day Out; Nick Sharratt)

• “Mummy, what’s that”
• “It’s a remote control”
• “What does it do?”
• “It’s for changing channels on the television”
• “Oh…” (Not entirely convinced) 

I love the fact that he doesn’t know what a remote control even is, let alone how to operate one.   We’ve never deliberately set out to ensure that he doesn’t know this, nor would we necessarily seek to prevent him from finding out, but I love the fact that he knows where horneros and turtles live before he knows how to flick through the channels.  Is some knowledge worth more than others?  I think so.  Am I an intellectual snob?  Probably.  Is this always a bad thing?  That’s what I’m trying to figure out.  Answers on a postcard. 

Hopefully tomorrow my latest sermon on John 13 "Jesus washes his disciples’ feet" will be available under the sermons tab at the top of the page.  It should be up by now, but for the spurious error message informing me that my file size is 375 kb which exceeds the maximum size allowed of 1 mb… which clearly it doesn’t.  My being married to the technical guru is frequently all that stands between my computer and defenestration. 

So, for those who read Spanish or like to look at the pictures, come back tomorrow and hopefully it’ll all be there for you.  Beamer technology hasn’t quite made it to the whole of San Francisco yet, so for this sermon I dug out the trusty poster-paper and paints, crayons and marker pens to make my visual aids the old fashioned way, and added photos of same to the pdf document prior to failing to up-load it here. 

It’s hard to tell how my sermon was received, I suspect it was probably too content-rich for the audience and that I probably lost most of them at an early stage… certainly the guy who spoke at the end gave every indication of not having had the foggiest clue(!) and his feedback afterwards is that the congregation "aren’t used to anything didactic, but it does us good to have something different for a change"…. damned with faint praise?  Still, lots of people said thank you anyway, and Martin now has an invitation for Easter Sunday which is quite an honour so maybe it wasn’t as bad as all that. 

Totally changing the subject, this yummy juicy melon

is the latest offering harvested from our patio the other day.  It is now no more, but there are still another couple ripening out there if I can manage to stop them from being eaten by the platoons of bugs first. 

It appears to have been a slow news week in the global village.  The Independent Newspaper (UK) managed an article on “The ten best dressing tables” and another headed “A Day that shook the world”, whose first sentence read “On 2 April 2005, the third-longest serving Pope in history died at the age of 84”.  I might be missing something, but I imagine that even most of the folk currently calling for the guy’s beatification probably weren’t completely astonished six years ago when he popped his clogs at a frail 84.  It’s tempting to conclude that isn’t a lot going on in the world, but I suspect this has more to do with our miniscule attention spans… once the wars, natural events and humanitarian disasters have been going on more than a week, we’ve run out of things to say that would hold our readers’ interest so it’s easier to fill the inches advertising dressing tables or eulogising dead pensioners (dressing tables?? do people still buy those?)

Our local paper  "La Voz" (The voice) ran a back-page spread on the introduction of road-side breath testing in San Francisco.  Apparently drink-drive laws have actually been in existence here since 1996 (the “apparently” says it all) so it is probably a fitting birthday celebration of its 15 years on the statute book that we are finally resourcing its enforcement.  Anyway, the news is that road-side breath-testing is regularly confiscating between fifteen and twenty vehicles a night at weekends, which is pretty impressive given that the check-points are always in the same place; you’d have to be drunk to forget to avoid them.  And the police are becoming accustomed to receiving death-threats by irate punters who consider it a violation of their human rights not to be allowed to drive their vehicles in whatever condition they see fit…. anyone who ever labelled individualism as a northern hemisphere characteristic might want to try living here for a year or two. 

Meanwhile, we might not own a dressing table (or ever had to provide a road-side breath specimen) but life in the Frost household was quite busy last week between driving around the countryside trying to fix one set of problems for eight hours on Monday and a different set of problems for twelve hours on Thursday in between writing a sermon for Sunday, all on top of our normal weekly work-loads.  This afternoon we had our seven-month antenatal check-up which we both passed with flying colours, so I can only conclude that B2F thrives on frenetic activity (like his brother), although I am personally looking forward to a slower routine this week.  This evening Joni asked me what the baby in my tummy’s name was, so I asked him what he thought his brother should be called… “Toby… Thomas…. Henry…”  We probably should think about finalising this decision before his list of suggestions expands to include Cranky the Crane or the Fat Controller. 

I have another preaching invitation for this Sunday, although this time from a different church in town.  So far we haven’t made too many forays into other churches, so we thought we should make an advance trip and spy out the land as it were.  We were given the “government health warning” from a member of our own congregation whose parents are members of the other one: “It’s small, elderly and very traditional.  Expect hymns and an organ”.   Yep, got the drift, we’ll be fine with that. 

Sure enough, we pulled up outside what could have been an old-fashioned little Methodist-style chapel.  Two banks of pews are visible through the open door, symmetrically arranged on either side of a central aisle.  Milling around the back, we could see a small gaggle of predictably salt-and-pepper headed parishioners.  So far, so unremarkable, we might have been in any of thousands of little churches on any regular Sunday across Europe or the Americas. 

I was both pleased and surprised to discover two of our neighbours among the ranks of the salt and peppered.  One is our favourite grandmotherly neighbour who always detours across the plaza to say hello when she sees us, and to let me know how wonderful it is that Joni is given the freedom to enjoy playing in the mud, so it made me happy to find out that she was a Christian…. maybe I should have guessed.  The other lady I knew to be a Christian, but I thought she attended a larger church across town.  “No, I have been there, but they have loads of people doing things, so I came here because they need people who are able to serve”.  I loved that; I think in five years here that’s probably the first time I have ever heard from someone actively swimming against the prevalent current of consumerist and thrill-seeking spirituality. 

We were warmly greeted, took our places, armed ourselves with hymn books and were pretty much settling into a familiar “doing church” groove albeit amongst strangers, when the guy leading the service burst into song.  A traditional hymn it might have been, but set to a raucous folklore accompaniment on his backing CD.  I’m not entirely sure how well it worked as a piece of music, but the concept was novel, and it certainly woke us out of the groove, as well as setting the tone for the sermon where a lady came to the front and screamed down a microphone for twenty minutes, also followed by bursting into song.  Never judge a book by its cover.  So here I am today flicking through the gospels seeking divine inspiration or even some human imagination as to what I might do on Sunday.  So far the only decision I have definitely taken is that I will not be singing from the front.  The congregation will be grateful for this, even though they may never know it. 

Reasons to be tired

• It is officially supposed to be Autumn, having passed the equinox the other day, but thus far the temperature has stubbornly refused to dip below 30 degrees.
• I am seven months pregnant (Martin reckons this is the main reason, only I keep forgetting, which is quite impressive given that I look and feel like a juggernaut).
• The thunder and lightening woke us up at six this morning, and Joni arrived in our bed shortly after.
• Life is quite busy, between the project at Quebracho Herrado (me), and prison (him), and working with the family from Luis Sauce (me), and teaching English (him), and the special school (me), and Scouts, and church, and… and…
• Every time I think I’m about to have a clear morning while Joni’s at nursery, something else happens.  Today I had to detour round town to buy a replacement bit for the bike pump which died while I was trying to put air in my tyres prior to leaving the house.   
• I am still trying to have my qualifications recognised here.  It is turning out to be the most grinding bureaucratic process of my life so far, and we’ve been through a few of those in the five years since we arrived. 
• We are the registered keepers of a three year old… no explanation needed. 

Reasons to be cheerful

• Today the weather finally broke and it has been raining most of the day.
• The lady from Quebracho Herrado phoned at midday to say don’t try and come this afternoon as it has rained 80 mm’s during the morning and the village is under a sea of muddy water.
• Joni and I made the most of an unexpectedly free afternoon playing in the puddles in the plaza (including one beautifully muddy one strategically located at the bottom of the slide which he practised landing in at speed from various angles).
• Being soaked and filthy lent itself nicely to him not objecting to an early bath.
• Hence he was asleep before nine o’clock for the first time in ages. 
• We are blessed with a ridiculous number of bank holidays, the next of which is tomorrow.  The “registered keepers of three year old” thing makes lie-ins unlikely, but some slow coffee drinking time may be negotiated in between plaza trips. 

“How can someone give up on their little boy?” asked Martin.  It’s a poignant question as we both instinctively glance across at our own little boy playing with his train track on the dining room floor.  We’re a long long way from being perfect parents and God knows we’re still going to hurt him and each other many more times yet as we muddle through towards adult-hood (both his and ours!). 

You can’t give something away if you never had it in the first place.  We were raised and shaped in humanly flawed but loving environments.  We have been educated by people who believed in us, both formally and informally.  We have enjoyed (and endured) rich and varied life experiences.  We have chosen to have our little boy(s) and we want to give him (them) the best that we have to offer, far from perfect though it will certainly be.  I have no idea whether she has ever experienced love, and I do know that as far as “choosing” to have a child is concerned, she is little more than a repository of sperm for someone else’s gratification.  With no support structure, we should maybe be more surprised that she has dedicated herself to her burden for nine years, rather than wondering why she seizes her chance to escape when the door opens in front of her.

And true to form, the axe-wielding system cludges into action.  The social worker lays down the law; “That’s abandonment of a child.  The police will bring her back and then we can enforce a program of visits”.  Yes, that’s bound to work; the shot-gun between the shoulder blades method of mentoring the needy mother towards a mature and loving relationship with her little boy.  You can’t give something away if you never had it in the first place. 

For two pins I’d adopt him myself, but apart from not being on the cards, it is probably better to support the extended family who are looking after him, complicated though those relationships are going to be.  It was his birthday on Tuesday, so we showed up with a cake and a present.  “Oh, yes, we’d forgotten…” Birthdays are a big deal in Argentina.  People have alarms set in their mobile phones to remind them to send a text greeting even the most minor of acquaintances in their agendas.  But you can’t give something away if you never had it in the first place. 

How can someone give up on their little boy?  Because even those who have experienced love will fail every day to live it, so for someone who is still living in Egypt…?  Which is why God brought Israel out of Egypt before he asked them to love him.  And even then they still didn’t manage it.  Paul says to the Corinthians that God comforts us in our troubles in order that we can comfort with the comfort with which we have been comforted.  And we still don’t manage it. 

Thinking around all this, I was reminded of an old Petra number from the eighties, “First love”.  So I went looking for it.  (The video’s not great if you’re lip-reading so I’ve added the lyrics underneath).  Personally I’m not sure about affirming Jesus as my “first love”; if I’m honest there are various contenders for that title in my life, not least the little boy playing trains on the dining room floor, but, I think it is a powerful song; I’m weak, I’m flawed, but I know that you loved me first, and because of that, I keep coming back. 

Sometimes I feel I’m pulled in so
many wrong directions
Sometimes I feel the world
seducing my affections
It’s not that I don’t know the way
It’s just a heart that’s prone
to stray
But with my weaknesses admitted
You will keep all that I’ve committed
So I commit my heart to you
My first love.

First love, first love
My soul longs after you.
First love, my first love
I want my heart to stay so true.
Because you first loved me,
Jesus, you will always be
You will always be
my first love.

It’s taken me some time to try to
comprehend.
A love that doesn’t change
A love without an end.
A love that keeps forgiving
A love of sacrifice and giving
I delight myself in you
My first love.

If I ever lack endurance
I remember you assurance
That your only banner over me
is love
If my heart begins to waiver
Woo me back, my loving saviour
Woo me back till I return to
My first love.

For those who read spanish, or want to look at the pictures, the sermon I preached this morning on Luke 17 “Ten men with leprosy” can now be found under the sermons tab at the top of the page.

Rio Primero means “First River”. It is a town with the river of the same name running through it, or else it is a river with a town of the same name running along the bank. The province of Cordoba hosts Rios Primero, Segundo, Tercero and Cuarto amongst our collection of imaginative place names. Fortunately both the town and the river of Rio Primero are more picturesque than their utilitarian monikers would suggest. So we met up there with some friends from Cordoba for a long weekend’s camping (Monday and Tuesday were bank holidays here, apparently celebrating “Carnival”; if you can’t find a national excuse for a bank holiday, borrow one from Brazil; maybe someone should suggest that as an plan to the bank-holiday-starved folk back in the UK). We found a sweet little municipal-run campsite, where we spent most of the daylight hours in the river, punctuated by a couple of excursions to the local plaza after it cooled down in the evenings.

Children at play…

Big boys play cars…


… yet another flat battery.

Giant locust wants to play too.