Author: Hazel Frost

They have a different understanding of time out in Quebracho Herrado. It is a very little village; only 400 inhabitants or so, and although it is only twenty kilometres from the thriving city of San Francisco, it might just as well be on another planet.
This afternoon I called in for a coffee at the bar on the plaza, but I found the door barred. Behind the door sat the owner, drinking mate, and since she was clearly visible through the door, I knocked.
“Are you closed?” I asked (stupid question, but I hoped it might give her an opportunity to say that she was just opening)
“We’re closed” she said firmly.
“When are you opening?” I asked, more tentatively.
“Later” (Obvious response to a stupid question).

On my travels around the village today, I heard that the “new library” has managed to collect some books to put on the shelves. That’s good news. How long has the new library been open? Seven years.

I also heard that the “new doctor” has made such a positive impression on the people of the village that they are even starting to go to his surgery rather than travelling to San Francisco. That’s good news too. How long has he been living here? Oh, since about a year last June.

So really, who knows how long it might take the coffee bar to prime their machine.

One of the best and worst characteristics of Argentina is her spontaneity. Sometimes it drives us mad that nothing is ever organised until two minutes before it happens. Other times we love not having to do that “comparing diaries” thing when we want to see people, which leaves everyone free to “seize the moment”.
11.30 Sunday morning, church had finished earlier than usual, so what shall we do? “Let’s throw a couple of chickens on the fire and invite some people round”.

12.30 Sunday lunchtime the scene looks something like this:

1.30 Sunday afternoon the scene looks something like this:

Sergio, an ex-prisoner friend of Martin’s came to stay for a bit this week to take some time out from his not-too-easy home situation in Cordoba, so of course we did the obligatory trip to Miramar on Monday afternoon to see the ruined town and the flamingos on the salt-marsh:

I have also been to Quebracho Herrado a couple of times, particularly making friends with a family who have a disabled child who isn’t receiving any schooling or stimulation… I’m hoping to build up enough trust with the mother that at some stage she might let me take him out for a walk around the village on my own, as a starting point for working with him and see where we go from there. This is a rural community, trust takes time to build and people are both curious and suspicious of outsiders. In fact as I was walking round the village the other day, a lady on a bike slowed down on her way past me and asked “¿Quien sos?” (“Who are you?”) which was honest if slightly breathtaking in its directness! Question is… what is the answer, and is it the same as the answer she was looking for?

Joni and I were in Buenos Aires for a couple of days last week for team meetings. San Francisco to Buenos Aires involves a night each way on a bus, and since it is the first time I have travelled with him on my own, and since the last time we took him on the night bus he yelled and screamed the whole way, I was feeling rather daunted by the prospect. However, happily to say, he was highly made up by the whole transport theme; going on a big bus, sitting upstairs and looking down on the lorries and cars and buses and even the odd train. We didn’t get a lot of sleep but it was all good humoured and we didn’t prevent anyone else from sleeping which is probably a good thing in the interests of international relationships and all.
Anyway, the photo I didn’t take… Down by the river in Buenos Aires is a stretch of road where the lorries pull over to rest. While the lorries are resting, the drivers meanwhile are “entertained” by painted women clad in scanty underwear and impossible shoes (and painted men clad in scanty women’s underwear and impossible shoes. The transvestite sex industry is bigger in Buenos Aires than anywhere else in the world. Is that a valid claim to fame?). They strut their stuff openly between the cabs. Since last time I passed this scene a large sign has been erected: “No fishing allowed, of any sort”. It’s probably bad taste, but it made me smirk.

I had one of those conversations the other day… It opened thus:
“Everything OK for Tuesday?”
Me: “what about Tuesday?”
“The women’s meeting… (person) said you were going to be doing the teaching for the women’s meetings for the time being”

I really don’t mind doing the women’s meeting, I can even cope with not being consulted, but it would have been good at least to have been told… Welcome to Argentina. Thus I have initiated a series on “little known women in the Bible”, which will run either until I run out of women to talk about, or until the women of San Francisco become fed up with me and find themselves another teacher!

And thus another week has disappeared, filled with things, both expected and otherwise.

Our stove has been installed. This is a traditional wood-burning stove known as a “salamandra”. It heats our main living area very nicely and we are both getting more adept at lighting it. Martin’s first attempt involved a litre of diesel, which was dramatically effective, if smelly. One thing we are lacking is an axe, I did manage to split a log yesterday by wedging a tea-spoon into a crevice, but it is less than ideal.

After months of faffing, the community project in the village of Quebracho Herrado looks like it might actually be going somewhere. I have driven there four days this week for different reasons. We have rented a room, which from my point of view might not have been the highest priority, but having arrived at this point, now we need to furnish it as well as working on growing relationships in the community. I had a couple of families to visit this week, except that now I also have an unplanned trip to Buenos Aires this week, so the visits will probably need to go on hold again.

I planted a little lemon sapling at home, trying to fill the spaces that are currently filled with weeds, with things that don’t need lots of looking after and might give us useful produce. Am also hoping that it might provide some shade for the herbs when it grows a bit.

While Guides are rather thin on the ground in Argentina, (although they do exist), Scouts on the other hand are quite plentiful; there are three units that I know of in San Francisco, and these days they are all mixed gender anyway. In Argentina the Scout association is strongly linked with the Catholic church, which personally I wouldn’t have a problem working with, but it might have caused me to be cast into the outer darkness by some non-Catholic Christians around here. Fortunately, one of the groups here in San Fran is not directly affiliated to any church, so I made myself known to them and was invited to join. On my second week I found myself in charge of a cub-pack, which was a bit hairy since I don’t yet know the kids’ names. Luckily there were some stray venture scouts (called Caminantes) kicking around, who came and gave me a hand, and we all survived to tell the tale.

The last few days we have been entertaining Megan from Scotland, who has been doing her university language year in Cordoba. Today we went out touristing to a little place called Arroyito, whose main claim to fame is that it is the original home of “Arcor”, one of the biggest producers of chocolate in Argentina. It also has a nice river for walking and chilling out, and today we also watched the fire-brigade putting out a minor bush-fire near the river bank; there has been a drought for nearly a year here in Cordoba, things are pretty dry. Joni liked the fire engine, he has been practicing saying “nee-nor” to the pictures his Fireman Sam book!

Someone sent me a bunch of articles on practical theology which I am ploughing my way through in idle moments. The other day I was reading one by John Swinton (2003 Journal of Pastoral Theology) called “The Body of Christ has Down’s Syndrome”, in which he quotes a care worker as saying “I sometimes wonder if Jesus had Down ’s syndrome”.
When it came down to it, neither Swinton nor the careworker went on dogmatically to defend their hypothesis, if only because probability is stacked against them. But it is interesting to think that if a film-maker portrayed Jesus as having Down’s syndrome (to give but one example) it would definitely cause a reaction, be it positive or negative, and it would be most likely referred to by the critics as “making a statement”. Conversely, when Jesus is shown as being blonde and blue eyed, as in the film we endured enjoyed the other week, no-one bats an eye lid, even though statistically it is even less likely that Jesus was blonde than that he had Down’s syndrome. This portrayal of Jesus becomes even more questionable in the light of passages such as Isaiah 53 which suggest that Jesus had nothing striking about his appearance, and Mark 6 where they ask “Isn’t that the carpenter?” i.e. where did this common or garden bloke get this teaching from? The fact that scripture tells us virtually nothing about Jesus’ appearance means that we have to guess that he was probably quite similar to the people around him, so while he was unlikely to have had Down’s syndrome, he definitely wasn’t blonde.

I think this relates to something that Francis Young would refer to as the “idolization of Jesus” which when I first read that phrase I thought it was a strange concept, and I thought she was about to try and tell me why Jesus wasn’t really God or why he shouldn’t really be worshipped, but actually she went on to talk about how we create a false idol out of the real God. I suspect our reaction to “the Jesus with Down’s syndrome” compared with our non-reaction to “the blonde Jesus” is about our idolization of him, that it is OK (in our minds at least) to tell lies about Jesus as long as our fictitious image of him is one which is recognised as positive by our own society. The net result of which is that we prevent Jesus from challenging our stereotypes by ensuring that our “graven image” of him fits right into them.

Mama Mía but it’s cold. At this moment it is 4 degrees both outside and in. Our house is huge and wonderful and versatile and unheated. We have just bought a gas heater and a wood-burning stove, but they both need installing. This may happen tomorrow. In the meantime we are wearing three jumpers each, and sleeping in thermal underwear.
Meanwhile, our child has learned how to say “mine”. Actually he says it in Spanish “mío”. Things he has designated as his include all mobile phones in the universe, all the lollypops, particular any that are already in other kids’ mouths, all the footballs, the swimming pool where we go a couple of times a week (“pool mío”), the car keys, daddy’s glasses, daddy himself (“daddy mío”) and the little girl who lives round the corner (“Abeeeee mío”). Her usual name is Abril, she’s nine years old and Joni adores her. She and her little mates quite often come round and borrow him to go and play on the swings in the plaza just across the road from us. It’s a fine arrangement; Joni gets to go to the park, the girls get a “walking talking living doll” to play with, and we enjoy a few minutes’ peace while still being able to eye-ball them all from out of the window. Everyone’s a winner.

I was supposed to producing pizzas for our cell-group’s film evening. After cycling round three supermarkets and discovering there was apparently some sort of national shortage of ready-made pizza bases, I gave up and bought the flour to make them instead. Handily printed on the side of the flour packet I found recipes for bread and pizza bases, thus saving me from having to trawl the internet to find out.
The instructions read thus…. (in Spanish)

1. Put the ingredients into a bowl, apart from the water.
2. Add a little warm water. To achieve this mixture (“What mixture?” thinks Hazel) mix one part of very hot water with one part of cold water. (“oh, they’re telling me how to mix two temperatures of water together”)

While I’m touched by the efforts to which Pureza have gone to ensure that my pizza turns out perfectly, I rather suspect that anyone who needs to be told how to mix hot water with cold water in order to make warm water, probably shouldn’t be allowed in the kitchen unsupervised. For the record, a kilo of Pureza flour makes six round pizzas and they all tasted fantastic.

A not very News-worthy Roundup of the last ten days, which we aren’t exactly sure where they disappeared to. Oh look, I’ve figured out how to do strikethrough text in HTML. The thing about writing our own software is that we don’t have handy buttons to do these things automatically, coupled with the fact that I’m a natural technophobe so please at least act like you’re a little bit impressed.
Our friend Sergio came out of prison, and we went to see him give his testimony at a church in Cordoba, along with his family, friends and even a Christian prison officer. He was initially homeless, so we invited him to stay with us, which wasn’t ideal as he is doing a course in Cordoba, as well as wanting to be closer to his kids. However, someone has now lent him a house to look after which is only a couple of kms outside Cordoba, and he is very happy with it; Martin is meeting him for lunch today.

I took a women’s meeting at short notice. We did a little Bible study about Lois (grandmother of Timothy, see 2 Tim 1:3-6 and 3:14-15) and I told them that grandmothers are the future, which I think they liked.

I also led our home group last week, which was going quite well until someone started talking about the demon in her bathroom, and the lady next to me started whispering “don’t worry, she’s mad”. We made 48 empanadas to share afterwards; empanadas are like meat pasties only smaller, so you have to calculate 5 or 6 per person. I’m also in charge of writing the next study; still ploughing our way through Mark, I’m in chapter 5 for this week.

Martin went to the prison in San Francisco on Saturday with our friend Miguel, which they were both pleased about, and we all went back to Miguel’s village of Porteña afterwards for coffee and cake with Miguel and Mrs Miguel. They are really solid “salt of the earth” folk, I always like to see them.

I spent an increasingly bad tempered day-and-a-half trying to sort out Martin’s insurance claim for his knee operation from last September. After all, if you are an insurance company purporting to deal with people living and working abroad, it would naturally make perfect sense for you to operate an email system which dumps attachments into a black hole, thus preventing anyone from sending you their claim forms. Doh! We finally solved it by Martin putting the whole thing onto a web-page and sending them the link to download it themselves. However, once they actually had the file, they turned it round in 48 hours which we can’t really complain about. The claims people were probably so surprised that a form had made it through their torturous communication department that they dealt with it by return as a mark of respect to a superior technical intellect. Or something.

We are making progress on the poo saga. After having to empty the black hole (not the same one where the insurance company’s emails go to… or maybe…) for the third time, we pleaded with the landlord, who agreed that we need to be connected to the mains sewage. So she sent a couple of goons around to measure up. Apparently their measurements are then sent to the municipality for project-planning permission. Time estimates for this to be given range from “a couple of weeks” to “a long time” so in the meantime, permission for pooing will be granted in exceptional circumstances.

These are our own home-grown kumquats being pickled in whisky: obviously next year’s project will be to distil the whisky as well. We also had our own spinach in the pasta sauce yesterday, and my parsley and oregano are coming on a treat.

I have finished all my immigration paper work. I never have to do any of that again. Yesterday we left home at six in the morning to drive to Cordoba. We spent three hours queuing in immigration, and another three hours queuing in the civil registry. Joni became fed up with the whole thing at about the twenty minute mark, and most of the rest of Cordoba became fed up with us fairly soon afterwards, that is apart from the folk who appreciated it as a welcome diversion that he was smearing a green lollypop all over the chairs in the waiting room and occasionally over the legs of some of the people sitting on same. Martin still has one trip left to the civil registry, but by popular agreement he is going on his own next time. Apart from the high-pitched screaming, and spreading green lollypop across the world, Joni spent some time learning how to take his own clothes off; so I realised when I looked round and saw he was down to his nappy. We arrived home some fourteen hours after we had left, about two and a half minutes before our bible study group descended for their weekly meeting. Luckily I managed to chop the onions and tomatoes to go on the pizzas in the small talk bit before the meeting happened, while simultaneously bathing Joni (green lollypop in hair).
Today our kitchen flooded, which we thought was the washing machine until we realised that the water was coming up through a drain cover in the floor. So Martin went to look for a plumber, who came and informed us that we didn’t need a plumber, we needed to empty our septic tank yet again. I tried to ask him why it had filled up so quickly, and the explanation was something to do with “napas” coming down from above. Which was either something spiritual or something in plumber speak but either way I wasn’t getting it, so we called the sucky hose people to empty the black hole again. The sucky hose people said, “it’s your washing machine, you should try to tip the water out somewhere else”. Hmm yes, like over the neighbour’s wall or where? Which still didn’t explain why the tank had taken six months to fill up the first time and two weeks the second time. We really haven’t done that much extra washing, even counting the green lolly incident. In the afternoon I took the lid off the black hole, and was slightly disconcerted to see the water levels already rising. So we called on our neighbour, Sergio, who is also a builder and plumber. He tried to explain the “napas” which as far as we can make out is something to do with the water table, and it depends on the level of humidity and whether it’s a north wind or not. So I think that means I was right in the first place… “something spiritual in plumber speak”.

The last few days I’ve been involved in an ongoing argument over someone else’s blog; which at least makes a change, it’s usually my own stuff that gets me into trouble! It has been doing my head in more than most arguments usually would, and it has taken me ages to figure out why. Here’s a bit of the original:-
We have managed to artificially create an income discrepancy – our lab was populated by a single statum of the beekeeping class before we brought fair trade principles in, but now our lab contains one class of rich Fair-Trade-branded beekeepers whose livings are subsidised by rich people assuaging their conscience with expensive brands, and an another class of poor beekeepers untouched by the “benefits” of Fair Trade on the same income as before. So Fair Trade widens the gap between rich and poor – actually it creates one – which is a bad start. A rising tide does not float all boats.
Now comes the funny part. If we extend Fair Trade subsidies to the majority of beekeepers in our lab, then the situation is even worse. Now most people can afford to pay more money for goods and services as income is higher, inflation happens and prices go up, but a minority of people, the newly-poor beekeepers, still have the same income and can buy less food then they could previously. Bringing Fair Trade into our lab means that some of our beekeepers now have a worse life than they did before, whereas those we have helped are getting more in but are spending more to get the same life as they did before. Oops.

There then ensued a 32-comment discussion, and I think the referee would probably agree that I lost. And it’s taken me all day today to think about why I couldn’t just move on from that. It has been an interesting exercise, if somewhat navel gazing. For which I apologise a bit but I’m still going to write about it. So if you don’t want to see my navel, it is OK to stop reading now.

The first thing that didn’t do my head in was the niggly stuff. Like when I was accused of “appealing to emotion”, by the same person freely using phrases like “rich people assuaging their conscience”. That’s annoying, but it’s not the main point, and it doesn’t do my head in, things like that happen in arguments. We’re human beings.

The secondly thing that didn’t do my head in is that the theory was plain wrong. It assumes that “beekeepers” are in some little sub-society a very long way away from anyone else. Whereas in our little corner of the world here at least, the “beekeepers” work in organisations which also employ supervisors, team leaders, foremen, etc. And the whole organisation itself exists within a town community of lawyers, doctors, businessmen, the butchers the bakers and the candlestickmakers. Within that context, the beekeepers are nearly at the bottom of the pile. So introducing fair-trade, or in our own context, equivalent initiatives, doesn’t push prices up, because that’s already been done by the lawyers, the judges, the politicians and the business managers (who around these parts are mostly in bed with each other, spawning questions such as “where did the government’s money go?” and “who ate all the pies?” but that’s a whole other story). And it doesn’t make the fair-trade (local equivalent) beekeepers rich because they are still essentially primary producers and if the gap between the cost of their honey verses the honey down the road gets too big, even do-gooding bleeding heart liberal types like me will eventually stop buying it. What we see round here at least is that the outcome of co-operative ventures is to boost the member beekeepers into positions of participation and choice-making, like choosing to work eight hours rather than twelve, or choosing to enable ones off-spring to continue studying, or for the beekeepers themselves to complete their schooling at night school, or in two cases that I know of here, for the profits to be ploughed into other things; in one case community projects, and in the other case, into supporting Argentinean missionaries overseas. However, we digress… although it caused me to expend probably too much emotion that the theory was defended to the death as though it were a globally generalisable fact without ever giving one concrete example where the theory had been shown to function, that in itself isn’t what did my head in. Having wrong hypotheses, and defending them, are still basic human rights and necessary for scientific progress.

The third thing that didn’t do my head in, but probably should have done, is that it is patronising. The underlying conclusion is that it would be better to leave people in poverty than to support an initiative that might later be shown to have unequal outcomes. Why is that patronising? It is one of a raft of rather too many models which are proposed for “other” people a long way away, particularly in “developing” majority world contexts, but nobody would seriously advocate as a great idea for Liverpool or Bradford, let alone Oxford or Tunbridge Wells. However, there are already plenty of patronising theories floating around here, one more of those doesn’t do my head in.

No no, the thing that actually did my head in, I realised as I cycled back from the supermarket today, is much more selfish and close to home than that. It is the frustration of being out-articulated. That for me is an almost unknown occurrence. I lose arguments all the time (ask my husband!), I lose arguments because I am wrong, because the other person knows more, because I walk away, because the other person shouts louder, because we all degenerate into childish sillinesses and for a zillion other reasons, but never because the other person is more articulate than I am. In fact, it’s usually the other way around. It has been an interesting exercise today reflecting that winning an argument by being right is not always directly correlational to winning an argument by being articulate, and thinking about times when I too may have gained an advantage simply by being more gifted with words than my sparring partner. It’s not been a comfortable process to think through, but it’s probably been good for me to do it. So to you, who have unintentionally led me here, I say “thank you and no hard feelings”.