Author: Hazel Frost

And here we are in San Francisco. Our furniture arrived here last Saturday, and we came across on Monday. The two day delay was a good move; the young people from the church here came in over the weekend and put our furniture together before we arrived! At the moment we are pretty much camping out in the house as we are still waiting for hot water, and gas, and a cooker, and phone-line, and internet. Yesterday we had our first asado (BBQ) with fourteen of us round the table. This afternoon one of our neighbours helped us to connect some more electric light fittings, so now we have light almost throughout the house. At the moment we are in the house of another of the neighbours, piggy backing on their Wifi system.
Our cooker should be arriving on Wednesday. Most of it is already in San Francisco, but we managed to leave the top part – i.e. the useful bit with the gas-rings – behind in Cordoba. That would have been OK, because I was going to Cordoba anyway on Saturday to teach a seminar, so I arranged that someone would bring it from the house where we had stored it on the other side of the city, to another house nearer the church, so I could collect it after the seminar. So, when the class finished, we went to the house and rang the door bell. First there was no answer, so we rang again. After a while, the youngest (teenage) son came out and opened the door, wearing his underwear and a towel. As he came to the gate, the door slammed shut behind him. In the manner of normal teenage males, he knew nothing about our cooker, nor the location of his parents, nor how he was going to get back into the house without a key. We tried to phone mother’s mobile, but it wasn’t being answered, so we loaded him into the car complete with towel, and trundled back to the church. Here we found someone who had his sister’s mobile number, so they phoned her, and thus found out that his mother was at this moment on her way back to the house. So we went back to the house. Sure enough female parent arrived, and informed us that the cooker had in fact not been brought across from its original location, and we would have to go and collect it. So we set off again across the city. On arrival, we found the house apparently occupied, except that there was no answer at the door. So we mounted an unsuccessful piece of research to try and make contact with the occupants. Two hours later, we gave up on the attempt, it being ten-thirty at night and the kid wailing on the back seat, and the increasing thunder and lightening indicating dramatic storm approaching; and set off back for San Francisco sans cooker. A fairly “direct” phone call from Martin extracted a promise that it will be brought without fail to San Francisco by the people coming to the church meeting on Wednesday.

In Argentina at the moment there is a mobile phone company called Personal, who are running a TV advertising campaign about a baby where everyone who looks at him becomes pregnant. He looks a bit like ours; no hair, cute smile. For the last few days every time we go out, various people are patting their abdomen, covering their eyes, and cracking jokes about being pregnant. Here’s the advert:
Mobile phone advert

Internet access is somewhat sporadic around here. Actually electricity is fairly sporadic around here, so it is probably a miracle that we have internet at all. So, if you are writing interesting stuff on your blog and I’m not reading it, then send me a copy by email. And if you’ve sent me a mail and I didn’t reply yet please be patient.
Hospital appointment went well yesterday, the doctor was more enthuseastic than last week, and the stitches have been removed. He still has to wear the imobilizer, and keep resting and icing it for a couple of weeks and then they are going to send him to a physio-terrorist for some cruel and unusual punishment. The good news is that our house in San Francisco is nearly ready, and we are hoping to move into it this weekend, with the help of some willing slaves from the church who have offered to shift furniture for us.

Our kid goes around in bare feet, I do try and put socks on him sometimes just to make people think that I’m not a terrible mother, but he takes them off in three seconds, so I am fast gaining a reputation as a terrible mother. Lots of people tell me that I will make him ill. I haven’t yet found anyone who can explain the mechanism by which viruses enter through the feet and travel to the nose and throat, but I am assured it is so. This week two people have told me that if I don’t put shoes on him soon, then he will never learn to walk. Apparently shoes prepare the feet to be walked on. Yesterday someone told me that if I don’t put shoes on him soon then his feet will grow enormous. I’m not sure there’s an answer to that, I think I’ll just get used to being a terrible mother.

We are compiling a collection of T-shirt slogans written in English seen on people who presumably don’t know what they are wearing. Yesterday was our favourite so far. In the hospital, a little old white-haired lady, 85 if she was a day, leaning on someone’s arm; wearing a fleece jacket, emblazoned accross the back with “street rebel pitbull”. Wished we’d had a camera.

Martin had his operation yesterday, and we have moved house again. He had to be at the hospital at 7 in the morning yesterday, so Joni and I booked him in and then we went off to the cafe for breakfast while they were chopping him up. We were allowed in to see him in the recovery area by lunch-time, and we were all home in the middle of the afternoon. He is supposed to rest it for the next two weeks, and they want to see him this Tuesday. Hence we are grounded in Cordoba which we hadn’t planned. I’m trying to figure out what we should do about Joni’s birthday on Monday, because we had planned to celebrate it in San Francisco, only we won’t be there. At the moment we are thinking we would still like to celebrate with the folk at San Fran, so we would just have to postpone it a bit. We also found ourselves homeless, having not planned to be in Cordoba after last Wednesday, so we are staying at the YWAM house for now (YWAM being another mission org). YWAM are fairly newly establishing themselves in Cordoba, there’s a team of six living in the house with various other hangers on at different times. The neighbourhood here is “interesting”. YWAM run a kids club sometimes here at the house, which we went to last night. The plan was to present the story of the “Good Samaritan” in fairly traditional Sunday School style; i.e.”don’t walk by if you see someone in need”. What actually happened was an emergency piece of improvised discussion on how you might take a stand and be different when it is your friends/ family who would have robbed the guy in the first place!

Things have been somewhat tense in Cordoba of late. Depending on one’s political allegiance, the explanation is that the provincial government have overspent, or that the national government is withholding money belonging to the province; either way the net result is that Cordoba has run out of money. Trips to town involve dodging demonstrations and riot-police, winding around road-blocks and crash barriers, sometimes finding that the shops have closed anyway, and then trying to figure out where the bus home might have been re-located to this time. Yesterday we heard that some sort of agreement might have been reached, so there is hope that progress might yet be made.
On Tuesday Joni and I went to the children’s home in San Marcos. We nearly didn’t go, we didn’t decide until late on Monday and it felt like a lot of hassle at short notice, but the opportunity came up so we took it. In the end it was a really nice day, catching up with the kids and the adults. One of the adolescents said “Hazel trajó la alegría” (Hazel brought joy!). Joni spent the day in the middle of a mêlée making mud pies; he came home exhausted and it took me ages to clean the mud out of his nose. There is a part of me that regrets that we haven’t gone to live in San Marcos, but we had two full-time job offers 400 kms apart so it is just a feature of life that saying yes to one of them would mean saying no to the other. I played with the idea of building in a program of visits to San Marcos from San Francisco, but the distance is too far really to develop anything meaningful, and I also believe in principle that mission partners need to be working more strongly in the communities where we are living rather than flitting in and out of places like a flock of seagulls, but I am already working on another blog about that subject.

The saga of Martin’s latest mishap rumbles on. He went for a scan yesterday which revealed that the tendon which allows normal folk to bend at the knee is no longer attached, which explains why his leg no longer works. The plan is that tomorrow they will have him in for day surgery to reattach the tendon. Our distrust of our insurance company (it’s justified; they’re rubbish) is sufficient that we are organising ourselves to pay up front via Visa (hooray for Visa) and to claim it back whenever the insurers decide to pay up some (considerable) time after the event. The insurer have embarked on their usual round of not-returning phone calls, while emailing us their usual stack of irrelevant forms “Write the numbers of your inbound and outbound flights”, while requiring us to prove that this wasn’t an existing condition “Well, I did used to be able to walk normally but unfortunately I don’t any video to demonstrate…” Luckily this surgery is only a fraction of the cost of Martin’s previous mis-adventure so we are able to circumvent the insurer with only a few minor squeaks from our bank. Meanwhile my job today is to purchase two biodegradable bone anchors in this season’s colours. I think I have located a source, but we need to go and talk to the company this afternoon.

Bus journey from Salta. Let’s not go too closely into that. The one consolation was that there was another small (female) person at the back of the bus making as much noise as our small (male) person was making at the front of it. Pity the poor passengers in the middle who thought they might catch a wink or two of sleep.
Arrived in Cordoba. Our Argentinean-qualitycontrol pushchair had been dying since England, and now it gave up the ghost completely in the bus station, so we couldn’t fold it up to put it into a taxi with all our stuff. So we had to take two taxis between us.

I arrived at the Right place, complete with baby and most of luggage. Thought I’d wait outside for Martin to arrive with the rest of the luggage. Martin took his taxi to the Wrong place, rang the door bell, was told he was in the Wrong place, so he rang the Right place, where they thought I hadn’t arrived because I was still waiting outside for Martin to arrive. So I’m now technically missing, even though I’m actually in the Right place. Chaos reigns. People in the Right place eventually realised I was waiting outside, and a few minutes later Martin turns up too. We’ve arrived.

Reunite ourselves with our car, and decide to take it for a test, and buy a replacement pushchair; see above. There is an interesting pile of books been left on the back-seat. At some stage we need to mount a piece of research to find out whose they are and whether they want them back. We decide to leave this till later. Driving in Cordoba is always an interesting experience, especially after four months in England, and probably heightened further by not having any sleep; see above. Successfully negotiated the usual hazards… horses, motorcycles on the wrong side of the road, the odd dead dog, we manage to purchase a pushchair. Prices have gone up, this one had better last or that kid’s going to find himself sold into slavery.

Afternoon, Martin goes to the prison to catch up with his friend. I take Joni for a walk. Mobile phones not allowed in prison, but I persuade Martin to take the house number written on a piece of paper. I receive a phone call. Martin is on his way to hospital accompanied by three police-men. Nothing to do with the prison, he was on his way home and he slipped on the pavement. Good job he didn’t try and cross the road; who knows what he’d have done. I take the car and our friends to meet him at the hospital. We arrive before he does. After a few minutes Martin arrives in wheelchair accompanied by policeman. Hand him over to hospital. They strip him, poke him and x-ray him. X-ray clear; probably knee ligaments. Rest, ice, hopping around on crutches. He’s a terrible patient, but at least he hasn’t broken his neck this time. Things could get better.

On the positive side, we’re being jolly well looked after by the friends we are staying with, just had a great asado (BBQ) for lunch. And our favourite internet cafe has gone Wifi, so I am typing this on my own laptop, with a coffee on the side. And we’re hoping to get to San Francisco on Wednesday.

Hey, what’s going on? Well, we ran around a lot in England and generally had far too much fun. We were sort of prepared to come back to Argentina, but we weren’t really prepared at all actually to be back here if that difference makes any sense. We got off the plane and thought “flip, now where are we?” and then we all caught some stomach bug for a few days, and then we went into suspended animation for a few more days. So two weeks later, we’re still in Salta, which wasn’t the plan, as far as there was ever a plan. But now we’re all fit, rested, eaten well, done some walking, and enjoying the coffee shops in Salta, had some good talks with our friends here, and we’re taking the night-bus to Cordoba tonight. Meanwhile, while we were vegging, our luggage seems to have been busily doing that magic expanding thing, where the same stuff that used to fit into the same bags that we packed a couple of weeks ago doesn’t fit any more. Must be something in the air.