Author: Hazel Frost

I started writing this last August and it has sat on my desk-top not writing itself ever since, so this is me finishing it by hand. Technology huh!
This cartoon appeared on the Asbo Jesus blog on the 4th of August.



Which generated quite a lot of discussion on the site, including this comment; “I am getting pretty sick of all these progressive/emerging conferences that say want to reflect the kingdom of God and yet you go to the gathering and it’s like a college reunion…”

Then a couple of weeks later in August, some USA friends in Bolivia wrote in their news update; “X went to Cochabamba last weekend to be part of a Christian Education Conference. He was scheduled to teach two seminars and we wondered if this was good stewardship to go that far and only speak twice…” Now to be honest, I have followed the progress of this family for the last fourteen years or so, and I have lots of respect for what they are doing in Bolivia, but the impression I had of their lifestyle is pretty much “corn-fed USA”, so it kind of surprised me, in a positive way, that they were thinking more widely (sorry if I have underestimated you, guys), and it also made me ask a few questions of my own.

Some time around then, the first advertising mailshots started arriving for our own Latin Link “Inspire” conference held in the UK. My attention was grabbed by the one that highlighted how many missionaries we are flying in from Latin America to contribute to the weekend. I had kind of thought that in times of increasing carbon awareness, it might be considered anachronistic to measure the importance of ones event according to the number of air-miles clocked up by the speakers; but apparently we haven’t yet got that far in our thinking.

Also around the same time I was reading an article on “vulnerable mission” on the Oscar website where the author was also publicising his forthcoming seminars on “vulnerable mission” to be held in three different countries. Which made me think that if we are prepared to spend thousands of dollars jetting around the globe in order to discuss how to make ourselves more vulnerable to the people we are working among, without even blinking at the irony inherent, surely surely we have lost the plot completely.

We receive monthly updates from the Oscar website, (which incidentally is a fine source of information and resources). The last section of the monthly update is a gazetteer of upcoming events. There are zillions of them. I could spend my entire life cruising from Christian event to Christian event. What are they all for? What do they achieve?

I imagine that at least some of it is about scratching backs and boosting egos, hence the “college reunion” quote above. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that; heck we can all use a bit of ego boosting from time to time. But I suspect that there might not be entirely 100% correlation between “doing things that make me feel busy/useful/important” and “building the Kingdom of God”, and that it might be a good idea once in a while to stop and be honest about the real reasons why we are doing some things, and not doing others.

Christian events enable us to opt out of real life, which let’s face it, is difficult and tiring and we all need a break from it from time to time. And we are also able to pretend that “back there” somewhere else in our real lives, we are doing better than we are because Christian events don’t require us to prove that we are walking the talk outside of the cosy walls. The 3D people I work with are much more complicated than the 2D powerpoint presentation I put together about them. They also don’t applaud me in the same way as the audience of the powerpoint presentation. It is much easier to be loving to the people who speak my jargon over the coffee that someone else made, than to the kid whinging around my legs or the beggar at my door while I am trying to cook dinner and mop the floor. Take me out of my environment and I can do the image thing; look like I am getting it all right for two, three, even four days at a time. I can also fail to mention to my fellow conference goers that I too am unable to sustain this for more than two minutes in my real relationships back in my real life.

Here in Argentina there are a million self important little ministries who measure their own significance according to the number of international conferences the pastors / leaders attend. How childish, we say, how mickey mouse. Absolutely. Which is why it is hard to know how to respond when those very leaders say of our mission members “(Person) must spend their entire life on board a bus or a plane”. And of course our temptation here is just as high to fill our time with things that make us feel busy/useful/important, as we flit in and out of the meetings we have organised, and just in passing don’t quite have time to allow too many people into our lives in any real or sustained way. Is the observation true? Maybe or maybe not. Are all the miles travelled justifiable? Maybe or maybe not. Actually I don’t think those questions are too relevant. What I think is more relevant, is that this is the impression people have of us. This is the image we have created. This is the Christian life and ministry that our mission (and probably lots of others) has been modelling. So are we going to be OK about this, or do we need to start dealing with it?

Sometimes there’s too much real life going on to do it justice by writing about, and sometimes the most interesting things can’t really be aired on a publicly accessible website. Sometimes other peoples Real Lives make mine seem too insignificant to write about. I wonder if Balfour ever regretted his declaration.
Anyway. Saturday Martin went to the prison in Cordoba, taking with him a guy from here who was visiting for the first time, always a nerve wracking experience, although apparently he was spared the worst of the security checks (I won’t go into details, it’s not pleasant). Meanwhile I had a phone call from one of our team members who is normally in Buenos Aires, to say that he was in Cordoba, and was going to pop over and see us in the evening; (three hours drive constitutes “popping” around here, Argentina is a big country). So in the evening Martin and Rafa arrived back from Cordoba, shortly followed by Dany and Flavia. As soon as they arrived we had an appointment with a notary to sort out the papers for our car (Dany was the previous owner and the car is still in his name), so we spent a happy two hours sitting in the notary’s office (notorious office?) while the lady shuffled papers around us. Then we picked up Marisa (member of our church who is involved in the project in the village of Quebracho Herrado), and went out to see the village with her, picking up a couple of roasted chickens on the way back for dinner.

Sunday we went to church, entertained a bunch of neighbourhood kids, waved Dany and Flavia off to Villa Maria, their next destination, picked up Marisa again, and went to another church, out in a different village of Porteña, 40 kms away, where there is a guy who is involved in the prison ministry which Martin is hoping to hook up with here in San Francisco. Arrived home at 2300 hours, and a family from church came round to share food (evening meal happens late around here, midnight is quite normal). At 2 in the morning I remembered that I was supposed to have written an email to someone, and decided that I didn’t have enough braincells left to put a sentence together (sorry Viv!)

Today and for the next while, I am helping in the mornings at a summer play scheme for kids with learning disabilities. Which is how I got into this whole silly game in the first place, working on a play scheme for disabled kids when I was 15 years old. Full circle. In about an hour or so, someone is coming round to talk to Martin about prisons, we’re not sure exactly who it is, he just phoned up, but we think it might be a guy who Martin met the other day who has a son inside.

Meanwhile, there are some slightly bizarre (to us anyway) military maneovres happening in the upper echelons of the church, causing political rumblings in the rank and file. Luckily this one isn’t being funded by the USA, so there is hope that the outcome might not be quite so bloody. We are trying to provide a space for the wounded and the offended to sound off (partly because we agree at least with some of them), but we’re trying to do that in a way that might enable people to build bridges and move forward in relationship rather than to bed into their trenches or resort to guerrilla tactics.

It’s silly season in Argentina, post-Christmas, summer holidays, everything official stops till March. By April things are just about getting into the swing of the year. By October people start saying “can’t start anything new, it’s nearly the end of the year”.
We’ve been taking the car out to discover the back of beyond around here. Main roads are asphalted, minor roads come in a range of potential surfaces. Martin downloaded some GPS software from the internet, so he with his toys, and I, armed with my binoculars, have been enjoying discovering a whole new world in the bush, spotting birds, iguanas, and the odd hare.

Today we went out to the village in Quebracho Herrado with a couple of church folk, found somewhere which might be suitable to rent for activities there, a couple of rooms at the back of the bar, and a large patio area attached. It needs a bit of restoring, and we need to find out how much they would want for it, but it feels like we might have taken another step forward.

The post Christmas trough started early, not helped by the fact that it rained nearly incessantly from Wednesday to Friday. New Years eve went OK, there were fifteen of us around the table for barbecued cow. Some of our guests couldn’t get transport, so I played taxi-driver. Dodging the fireworks being set off by small children in the middle of the main roads helped me to realise why sensible taxi-drivers take the night off. New Years day, we spent the whole day trying unsuccessfully to decide what we were going to do with it, and yesterday didn’t fare much better either. So now we’re all worn out from arguing about doing nothing. Luckily it’s sunny today, there’s hope for 2009 yet.
And a merry bloomin’ New Year to you too.

I was humming a little song out in the garden this morning as I was putting in bedding plants with the enthuseastic assistance of some of the neighbourhood kids;-
“… and my desire is to have you near, Lord you know that you are welcome here… “

and the internal voice said “Really? What if I appeared as a bunch of grubby nine year olds talking incessant rubbish and spreading mud across the patio?”

Which reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend here the other day, who said “Evangelicals never tell so many lies as when they are singing”. Which caused me to smile ironically.

As for the kids, they’re fine really, we do encourage them to come, and we like the fact that they feel free to make themselves at home in our house. But there are moments when…

The area around San Francisco reminds me quite a lot of South East England; understated, and under-rated. It would never figure in the seven most spectacular sights of the world, or even in the seven hundred, but it does have a quiet charm of its own which is worth stopping to appreciate.
Today it rained, so I took Joni out for a lesson on splashing in the puddles. He’s a fast learner, I may live to regret that bright idea. These photos are from the other day on our favourite walk. It takes about an hour and a half; or two if you keep stopping to take photos and talk to the horses…

Go down to the football pitches, and turn right into the lane;

Trees and football pitches give way to fields which held winter barley, recently harvested;

Watch out for bird life; from big birds of prey (Carancho), to the flycatchers with their long scissor-tails, and even tiny humming birds. Ever tried to get a photo of a humming bird? I haven’t succeeded yet, it’s jolly not easy, especially with such willing assistants as Joni and the dog.

Carry on up the lane to the horses field. Horses still play an important part in Argentinean life, both for work and play. At one end of society, the polo world cup is no longer played because Argentina won it too many times; and a proportion of the illegal drugs sold for human consumption start life as illegal imports for doping race-horses. At the other end of the scale, it is quite common to see ragged, moth eaten, knock-kneed beasts moving builders rubble, or pulling carts with entire families and their belongings. There doesn’t seem to be a great understanding that looking after ones animals might make them last a bit longer. However, our horses here are neither ill-treated nags nor ill-treated race-horses, but somebody’s pride and joy, well groomed and gentle, they quite often come to the fence and let Joni stroke their noses;

Turn right past the farm, and go down another lane. Notice the owls on the fence posts, they’re nearly always there on the same posts. Sometimes they even stay put and let us walk right past them;

Keep on till the point where the tracks cross. Watch the field flatten out, and the sky open up;

At the crossing point turn right. Pass the “vivero” (nursery, of the plant-rearing variety, we’ve been enjoying buying things here) Beyond the vivero, the barley gives way to two big fields of yellow sunflowers, which the parrots are loving at the moment;

Stop to look (point / wave / say “moo” at) the cows and chickens in the farm-yard, and then head up the road for home. With any luck it might even be time for a mid-morning coffee.

Big grown up baby becomes a toddler; Joni took his first independent steps at the end of last week. He is rather pleased with his new trick which is rapidly developing from “party piece to impress the neighbours” to “useful means of locomotion”. It is quite a performance; he pulls himself to his feet, grins around to make sure that everyone is watching, gives himself a little round of applause, and then sets off in an optimistic stagger.

Meanwhile, Mummy and Daddy are learning that not all silence is golden. Yesterday when it went ominously quiet, we found he had been busy unpacking the bags of fruit and veg shopping from underneath his pushchair, and he was located sitting on the floor surrounded by fruit, thoughtfully munching on a peach, which looked like he had probably sat on it first.

Still no internet at home. Starting to feel rather like Robinson Crusoe carving notches in a stick and sending smoke signals to passing ships.
First we were tourists, then we were precarious residents, and then we were temporary residents, and now we are “precarious permanent” residents, which sounds like a contradiction in terms (“BT helpline” etc). I think that means we have made progress. We managed to escape being sent to take our fingerprints and photos yet again. I said we had already done those quite a few times, and she said “Oh have you been here before then?”, so then she went and dug out the file six inches high with all the zillion photocopies of our birth certificates, photos etc which we have presented on previous occasions. I think we can safely conclude that no-one ever looks at any of it.

We spent the weekend simultaneously at a funeral (they’re two day events here) and a church conference, as well as hosting two families who had come from Cordoba for the church thing. It felt a bit like the restaurant sequence in “Mrs Doubtfire” attempting to slip seamlessly from one to the other so that no-one missed us from the important bits of either.

Yesterday afternoon I went to the prison together with another lady from church. Someone else from the church said “I really feel it is the will of God that you shouldn’t go”. So I said “that’s interesting why do you say that”. And she said “they look up your bottom I went once I didn’t like it”. One day we might have to unpack the intriguing theology that says if it didn’t give me a warm fuzzy, it can’t be the will of God. Needless to say we went, and survived to tell the tale.

Joni is learning about animals, we see cows, chickens, horses, sheep, goats, and lots of stray dogs when we go out and about. He gets very excited about spotting animals in pictures or on TV. In fact he has seen so many cows that when we saw the statue of a horse and rider in the San Francisco central plaza (San Martin I would think) he pointed up to it and started mooing like a cow, which entertained the public at least.

Stop press… we now have internet at home as of just now. It too is a little precarious, but Martin has his technical guru’s hat on, so we should be fully up and running any time soon.

In France the adage is “I think therefore I am”. In Argentina it’s “I have an ID card therefore I am”. We submitted our application for ID cards a year last May, but the government here has contracted out the service to the lowest bidder, and we all know what that means. There are an unimaginable number of things that one cannot do without an ID number in Argentina, they ask for it every time we try and use a credit card, or make a doctor’s appointment, or fill in any sort of form, or receive any services in our name, or register our child for anything. Passports are just about acceptable, except that the UK passport handily has one digit more than an Argentinean ID card, which either sends computer systems into flat spin, or lops off the end digit, giving us the same “unique” number as some other unknowing Argentinean who clearly isn’t us. Hence it was with great joy this week that we have finally collected our ID cards, known as “DNI” or simply “el documento”.
This week’s tricky question… What does a muslim in Finland do if Ramadam falls in June? I asked Martin, and he said;- “so that’s what your mind is doing when you’re quiet…”, which hardly strikes me as a comprehensive answer. So if anyone out there knows, please share.

I’m working towards my ambition to be an earth mother. We’re making progress, as long as you don’t count the bit where I fed the baby half a packet of cheese flavoured crisps yesterday to keep him quiet while I chopped the salad up. I’m enjoying having my own cooker again, tried out a new recipe for hummous this week, tasted great, we introduced it to some Argentinean friends last night, very successful. We also squeeze our own orange juice most mornings. Making yoghurt is too ridiculously easy in the Argentinean summer; warm up some milk in a pan, dump in some old yoghurt, plonk the whole thing in a sunny spot on the patio, out of the reach of baby and dog (that’s the hard bit), ignore for eight hours. Fridge. The end. Speaking of the patio, our orange tree is just coming into flower, and in the beds we’re growing mint, parsley, chicory, tomatoes, zapallitos (little round marrow-like things), runner beans, and we will have oregano when I just figure out where I put that packet of seeds down yesterday. At the moment the crop making the most progress is the runner beans. Those seeds were imported possibly not entirely legally, so if you see any news stories about giant runner beans taking over the southern hemisphere, remember you heard it here first; but don’t tell anyone it was me.