Author: Hazel Frost

There is something smug making about the sight of newly-jarred marmalade cooling on the worktop, and the smell of home-made pies baking in the oven. I don’t even like marmalade, but I enjoyed the whole faffy process of peeling and chopping and grating that is involved with preparing the oranges, and I love the witches cauldron sensation of stirring a big pot of bubbling gloop.
I made some plum jam a couple of weeks ago, which I do like. Plums were on offer, so I bought quite a lot, along with the sugar to make jam, and I dumped it all in a heap on the work-top, and I thought, “I dunno, that looks a bit much to me”. And then I thought, “that’s because if I was making this in England I would have been thinking in pounds not kilos”. Doh. So then I divided it all in half which looked more like normal. Then I learned that my largest pan isn’t really big enough to make jam. And as a result of that piece of learning, I also learned that jam that has boiled over and caramalised onto the cooker takes a jolly lot of scrubbing to clean off.

Last night I made three pies to feed our bible study group after the meeting (evening meal happens late in Argentina, people go out first and eat when they get home afterwards, so we normally just invite them to stay on when the study ends). We know that at least one family survived to tell the tale because they invited us to an asado (BBQ) for lunch today (it’s the may-day bank holiday). And today I also made a pineapple upside-down cake, and a board-book of transport pictures for Joni. So now I’m officially smug, at least for the next three minutes, when I shall be forced to relent and tackle the fallout from bath-time.

I was cutting the grass, which isn’t my favourite job, partly because the grass cutter is rubbish so I always end up having to take it apart three times and swearing at it, which doesn’t improve its functionality any more than the taking it apart does, but it makes me feel better. Anyway… I was cutting the grass, and I realised that the grass in one small area was longer and lusher and greener than in the rest of the garden, because it was standing in an inch and a half of, let’s call a spade a spade, POO, seeping out of the top of our sceptic tank. There are still areas of San Francisco that aren’t on mains sewage, and even in areas where the sewage system has been put in, it is up to the individual house-owner to organise, and pay for, the connecting up. Hence, many haven’t. Particularly owners who don’t live in the property anyway, like our landlord. He assured us that it wouldn’t be necessary to connect our house to the sewer because our sceptic tank would never fill up. Which now we have actually seen inside the thing, it is difficult to see where he thought the contents would disappear to, given that the tank is concrete. We find there are some quite big cultural differences around what constitutes “telling the truth”; it does still catch us out quite often. Or maybe he just thought that English people don’t poo. Anything is possible. So now we have had our first experience of the poo lorry. Think about the tanker that used to empty the Greenbelt “tardis” portaloos, only bigger, making satisfyingly slurpy noises up a big sucky hose powerful enough to hoover up any wayward children (that’s a cautionary tale in the making). They dug around in the garden a bit and found a small entrance to a big hole, that’s the cess pit I think. It’s called a “pozo negro” in Spanish. That means “black hole”. Fair description. The “black hole” is connected to the big concrete tank which we already knew about, that’s the one that was overflowing in the first place, and the big concrete tank is connected to a second, smaller, concrete tank whose purpose I am unsure about. Dem bones dem bones… Hear the word of the Lord. So now we have the guys’ calling card conveniently attached to our fridge in readiness for next time. And the learning outcomes of this story are: if you want to improve the quality of your lawn, we know a handy source; and “excessive toileting is a sin”.

Copyright notice: these photos aren’t mine; I’m still hatching a plot to replace my camera later on in the year.
These photos were taken by one Megan Ramsey, Scottish lass, who is spending some of her university language year in Cordoba, and came to stay with us for a few days to remember how to speak English and see something else of Argentina.

So we took her out to Miramar, a little town of some 1600 inhabitants, on the shore of the Mar Chiquita, (“Little sea”) which is a big salt-lake.

The lake is 115 kilometres long, by 88 kms across, so it does look quite a lot like a sea, as well as being salty. I think it is the fifth largest salt-lake in the world.

It is home to some 300 species of birds, which is something like a quarter of all the species of birds in Argentina, including three types of flamingo. The flamingos are quite shy so they don’t always stick around to be photographed, but there is one on the right hand side of this photo, pretending to be a stork.

In the back-ground is the imposing bulk of the ruined “Hotel Vienna”, which is a conspiracy theory in the making. It was built with German money during the second world war, as a five-star hotel, totally out of keeping with anything else in the area, it opened in 1945, and closed some fifteen months later, leaving a German scientist as caretaker, who was later found poisoned in the basement. No-one has ever come forward to retrieve the body of said caretaker, or to claim ownership of the building or its contents. It has gradually fallen into decay, until in recent years the local tourist board has recognised an opportunity to capitalise on its mystery, and is now running guided tours every afternoon and selling souvenir T-shirts and postcards from the old foyer.

The lake has expanded greatly in recent years. The most famous flood was in 1977, when a large part of old Miramar became submerged, and the army was brought in to blow up some 35 blocks of the town where the buildings had become unstable due to the water. Walking along the shore there are still large areas where flooring and foundations are clearly visible, and swimmers are advised to stick to the marked bathing areas which have been cleared of broken piping and other nasty surprises.

With its ecology, geography, history and tales of intrigue, not to mention the fried “pejerrey” fish sold in the many restaurants along the front, Miramar is a fine place in which to waste a sunny afternoon.

This is a quote from our friend Simon’s blog, which is fairly pertinent to some things that are happening here at the moment…
“Some may rankle at the idea of allowing unfettered discussion of church activity, but we are in a generation which mistrusts authority claims and places a high value on ‘freedom of information.’ While no substitute for peer-to-peer accountability structures, being honest and open with the world at large is not merely important for its own sake, but also helps us to ensure we have no hidden agendas. The Christian message has always been communicated not only through carefully selected and polished words, but also through an open and public witness. Instead, therefore, of giving in to concerns of vetting and message, we should be eagerly looking out for opportunities to live out Acts 20:18 in the information age”.

Question is, how can one work effectively across two cultures, when one culture values, even requires, candour as a sign of credibility, while the other would see anything less than a fully united front as a sign of disloyalty and a breach of trust in relationship?

Now I’m not always very wise and I have been known to talk out of turn, but I think that would be quite a conundrum even for someone who was very wise and didn’t talk out of turn. So if you are that person, answers on a postcard… or better still post a comment.

Sorry about the long silence, here is the list of excuses…

1. We have a small child who likes pressing buttons, so only one of us can be on a computer at a time when he is at home.
2. We bought a second hand PC for me, which took a while to organise and set up, and then turned out not to have enough memory to be useful, but it does now.
3. I am sorely feeling the lack of a decent camera following our little house-breaking event, had hoped to rectify that by now, but…
4. I was writing an essay in Spanish, which probably isn’t a great work of literature, but developing a topic over 6,000 reasonable quality words has been a good exercise, and hasn’t left me with too many brain cells to think about a lot else for a couple of weeks.

Here are some of the events of note from the last couple of weeks…

1. The kingdom of God is being built in Argentina… Although I’m not sure we’re necessarily having a great deal of influence over it!
2. Martin has been invited to produce the Bible study material to be used across all the cell-groups in our church. This is an unexpected opportunity, and he is leaping at the potential to have an influence over how the Bible is studied here.
3. Joni has started going to a little kindergarten in the mornings. It is called “garabatos y redondels”, which means doodles and circles. We aren’t sure whether he is a doodle or a circle, but he seems to enjoy it. He has a little (or in his case three sizes too big) uniform to wear which he is modelling here.
4. We have a new member of the family. Shrek was camped out on our door step for a month while we played hard to get and definitely weren’t going to adopt another dog, until the day we gave up and adopted another dog. The local kids had already named him Shrek, not sure why, he’s small and skinny and definitely not green, although he is quite a funny looking creature with his oversized top jaw, and only three toes on each front foot.




5. Mr independent has learned to push his own pushchair. Unfortunately he can’t see, or steer; and any attempt to help him results in a major strop.




6. I found the culprit who has been eating my plants.

I have set myself a challenge this year to read through the Bible in Spanish. It is doing me good for at least three reasons.
One, I am encouraged that I can actually read and understand the Bible in Spanish these days; currently ploughing towards the end of Leviticus at the moment.

Two, it is a good source of new vocabulary; my latest word is “degollar”, which means “slaughter” and appears a lot of times in Leviticus. Unfortunately I haven’t yet found a use for it in my every day life.

Three, it makes me approach the text afresh, and read it properly as if for the first time, so I am seeing things that I hadn’t seen before. Like all the verses in Leviticus 15 about sex and ceremonial uncleanness and washing with water. Call me un-devout, but my first thought was “imagine knowing which days your neighbours have sex on according to who has got their washing hanging out”.

Said by:-
A certain pastor; “Servanthood is a position of leadership and authority”. And there was I thinking it was the other way around. Apparently, or so his exegesis went, there are two levels of servanthood. One is anyone who is a Christian, but they don’t actually have to do anything to be given this title, that’s just another word used to describe Christians. The upper tier of servanthood describes people who have been given leadership roles in the church. So you can be a servant of God, and it doesn’t mean anything and you don’t have to do anything, or you can be a servant of the church and that means that you have a special position of leadership and authority.

A certain mission partner; “I don’t care if Walmart is inethical, it’s cheap and they have peanut butter”. Must have read the manual on servanthood written by the above guy I guess. In the mission quite a few of us are involved in projects related to poverty reduction, community programmes, wealth creation projects that kind of thing. A project is going to change the lives of how many people? Ten? Twenty if we’re lucky? Compared to how many people we are actively maintaining in situations of injustice through our every day buying decisions? Hundreds? Thousands? It’s often a decision of time, lack of it, but the irony is that if we really had to choose one or the other, we would do better devoting less time to our little project (rescuing babies out of the river) and more time to making our own buying decisions more carefully (asking who’s throwing them in in the first place).

A certain husband of mine; “God must really hate Sundays”.

There’s no answer to that.

When I say the temperature has been dropping to 30 degrees at night, you will understand that it has been rather warm around here of late. We finally have a computer set up, which is still driving me a little bit crazy (even more than usual) trying to persuade it to behave in something like a predictable fashion. I have spent a lot of time combing random “options” boxes looking for elusive settings to tweak. All further complicated by the fact that the next step in our child’s development has been to learn that the big green button switches the whole darned thing off, which is even more annoying than when he merely used to “help” by typing on the keyboard. So now I can only really use the office when sweet child is in bed. Unfortunately he only seems to need marginally more sleep than I do…
The weather probably has quite an effect on our energy levels, the heat here is also described as “especial” because of its high level of humidity. Things seem to grind along expending energy and wasting time without actually achieving anything very much.

Joni on the other hand is in a great phase, it’s like he has just realised that he knows how to learn and is making the most of it. Apart from pressing the big green button, yesterday he was filling up pots of water and pouring them out again (not into the computer but it’s only a matter of time), today he learned how to hold his own cup of milk without spilling it over Daddy. He loves books, although we don’t often get to read the traditional left to right version of the stories, since he takes charge of deciding which order to look at the pages in. Language is coming along nicely, he can put together a whole paragraph in some alien language with inflection and everything, and he is learning individual words in both earthling languages. “Daddy” is used for important people; i.e. daddy, mummy and the dog(!) although he can say mummy too (mostly when he’s cross; pattern set for the future…), and “agua” (water) is used for the water in the swimming pool, and for anything that he thinks might be edible, apart from banana which he can say (nana), or biscuits (bis bis). Newest additions to the vocabulary are “key” (he likes to steal those!), “car” and “shoes” (pronounced without the vowels; sh’s). We’re hoping to send him to a playgroup this year for a couple of hours in the mornings, but there aren’t that many that accept kids as young as him, although there is obviously the demand because the ones that do, don’t have any free spaces. I need to mount a piece of research to find out which ones we haven’t been to yet and go on a little tour.

Chile tried to kidnap us. The annual conference of the Latin Link team was being held in Chile for the first time this year and we thought we’d take the car, being more environmentally friendly, possibly slightly cheaper, and an opportunity so see some different bits of the continent on route.
San Francisco, Argentina to Temuco, Chile is probably three days hard driving, so we did it in five more gentle ones. On the way out of Argentina the border guards were rather flumoxed by our status as foreigners with temporary residence, Argentinean ID cards, and driving a vehicle in someone elses name. Two of them poured over our collection of documents for a considerable time, while our child explored the multi-sensory properties of the fire extinguisher. Finally one of them said: “Have you ever seen ‘Terminal’? It’s a Tom Hanks film about a guy who gets stuck between two countries because neither of them will allow him in….” Thanks pal!

There is nowhere to get money out at the border, so we thought we should find a town with an ATM. Before we arrived however, we had to go through a tunnel with a toll booth. “Oh well”, we thought, “we are so near the border they’re bound to accept Argentinean pesos….” Ha ha. “You must pull over to the side and see if another Argentinean coming through would be willing to change money with you”… Goodoh. Luckily a Chilean behind took pity on us and changed enough to see us through to the next town and an ATM. Chilean money has a lot of zeros, we never quite figured out what it is really worth.

The conference went well, greatly improved by the fact that no-one had had time to make a programme in advance, so we did what we had to do, with no unnecessary space fillers, plenty of coffee-drinking and general spontaneous bonding which was only slightly marred by the latest outpouring of “management-speak gobbledegook” from the upper echelons. I guess it is a few years since the last phase of gratuitous jargon so I probably ought just to give thanks for the peace while it lasted. We also ate good food, swam in a lake, saw a smoking volcano, and picked ripe blackberries by the road side. Joni enjoyed having a bunch of willing slaves / young people to boss around for a week, and he learned some new words including “agua” (“water” in Spanish), and “come ‘ere” in English.

Mapping in Latin America is an art-form encompassing a variety of genres such as impressionism, abstract, and fantasy. Mostly it was possible to identify that our three maps were of the same area; towns with the same names, in a roughly similar configuration. The similarity ended when we started attending to detail: Towns are variously depicted as being joined / close / up to 50 kms apart, with the roads between them being possibly a major road / a minor road / no road at all. However, having beaten the worst of the maps on the outward journey, we confidently designed ourselves a slightly different route for the way back.

We left Temuco on Saturday morning and progressed nicely to lunch in Santa Barbara, and to a little place called Ralco early in the afternoon. The road out of Ralco towards the frontier, apart from being unpaved, also seemed to be heading in the wrong direction. A trick of the map? Or the wrong road? We stopped to ask. Right road. The whole area had recently been redesigned to encorporate a massive HEP project, so there was a large lake 20 kms long or so which also wasn’t on any map, and the quality of the road suggested that it had been recently hacked out of the hillside with a pickaxe. We bumped along for some 30 kms or so before running into another little village, where a “you are here” board suggested that we weren’t on the right road at all. The man in the little shop confirmed that indeed we should head back to Ralco and take another road out, which apparently we would find off the plaza. So we bumped back 30 kms along the rocks to Ralco and drove round the plaza a few times. Not finding anything reminding us of a major route to anywhere, we stopped to ask an old guy sitting outside a bar. “Who published that map?” He said. “You should phone them and complain…” The road that used to go from Ralco to the frontier no longer exists despite being present on all three of our maps, and the border post has been moved further north, accessible by a road not shown on our maps, that we would need to reach via Santa Barbara.

Deja Vu, we headed back to Santa Barbara, which was probably just as well, being low on fuel and biscuits by then. Arriving in Santa Barbara we sat in the plaza with ice-cream taking stock of our situation. Having been given more than enough duff information we were reluctant to trust the old guy completely, but who out of the strangers around us would be able reliably to corroborate his story? As we pondered our possibilities, a couple approached and asked if we needed help. They worked for the local government on tourist development, and they took us to their office, and showed us round the tiny museum, as well as confirming that the border post has definitely moved, and that there was a “good road” which would take us there.

By this stage it was evening, so we stayed overnight in Santa Barbara and launched our second attempt at leaving Chile on Sunday morning. Clearly one of the first jobs of the local tourist developer will be to put in a few sign posts, we took a scenic tour through charming little un-named villages on unsigned narrow dirt roads before popping out onto the main road that would lead us to the frontier. The main road became less main, then disappeared into a national park. A guy manning the gate confirmed that we definitely could exit to Argentina by keeping straight ahead. So we did.

The definition of “good road” has been broadened to mean “it exists”. We crossed boulders and deep sand, rivers and ravines with some spectacular views over the national park, at least for the person not driving. What looked like a village on the map turned out to be a military outpost. Every few metres along the road was a monument to a dead soldier, mostly dated in the last couple of years. We wondered what Chile does to their young soldiers, but remembering the sight of the Chilean army goose-stepping around Santiago in their Prussian uniforms, it might be better on the whole not to know. The road was some 60 kms long, which at barely faster than walking pace took most of the day.

We arrived at the border in the late afternoon, where a cheery guard said “You didn’t do that in a car did you?” and another cheery guard said “They shouldn’t have let you out of Argentina in the first place”. Oh. He showed us a book of rules, including the clause saying that only people with full Argentinean residence are allowed to take an Argentinean vehicle out of the country. Luckily the guy who let us out didn’t know that, because now this guy couldn’t do anything except let us back in, which he did with good humour, which was fortunate because it still took us two hours of driving through the desert to reach a town, Chos Malal which we had stayed in on the way out. It welcomed us back like an old friend, the hostel even offered us the same room again, and we celebrated with ice-cream, followed by heading out for barbecued goat in a nearby restaurant.

We arrived home to San Francisco late last Wednesday, via San Rafael and a broken windscreen (more unpaved roads). We still don’t have a computer at home, hence the continued lack of communication, but we are hoping that might be rectified in the next couple of days.

We are off to Chile for the next little while, starting on Wednesday. Apart from that, we had our house broken into on Friday so we are currently without internet. That’s not strictly true, we are without anything to plug into the internet. And even that’s not quite true, because the idiots managed to leave behind the cable when they took my laptop. Only thing worse than a thief has got to be a stupid one. Our old desktop is currently on long term loan in the prison in Cordoba, so we need to organise borrowing it back after we return from Chile; in the meantime, ironically, it will be safer left in the prison!
Back at the beginning of February sometime.