Author: Hazel Frost

It’s been a bitty couple of weeks. We’ve been busily chasing our tails, and it’s been too hot to exist, let alone to indulge in gratuitous tail-chasing.

Dates have been fixed and air-tickets purchased for our trip to Europe later this year. Some things have to be organised in advance, even in Argentina.

Now we’re trying to leave some things in place for when we return here in August. This is proving to be slightly complicated, not least because we have two different job offers to come back to. One is a situation filled with potential; and an equally abundant range of problems. The other may not be so controversial… or it might just be that we don’t know what the issues are yet. Since they are four hundred kilometres apart, the one sure thing is that we won’t be accepting both of them.

Meanwhile, normal life rolls along. I was preaching last Sunday, so I spent most of my free time musing thorny questions, like why Jesus seems to have set out deliberately to antagonise the Pharisees, and what is the likelihood that we would have recognised him had we been in their shoes.

We took a day out with our friends Ana and Oscar, and went touristing to the Jesuit estancia of Santa Catalina, an isolated village in the province (photos above). Oscar’s family is from Santa Catalina, and the place looks as though it hasn’t changed a great deal since the time of the Jesuits, complete with some of Oscar’s relatives still working in the village.

Joni is discovering that the world is full of yummy things to eat other than milk and his fingers. So far his favourites include ice-cream and his socks. Strangely, the weaning section in the baby book doesn’t mention either of those.

The piglet in the pushchair or the lamb on the fire?

We went to San Francisco for new year, a small city about 200 kms from here. Our church has been supporting a small congregation in San Francisco, and we have become good friends with one of the families who we like to visit when we can.

The plan for New Year was to roast a piglet, so the day before, the animal was collected from the neighbour’s freezer. When it was unwrapped however, it turned out to be a lamb. So we debated briefly about putting an apple into Joni’s mouth, but decided to stick with the lamb. Here we see one of several methods of cooking a lamb. The main fire is built on the top, and then as the embers are produced, they are shoveled underneath, so the meat cooks slowly from both sides.

Joni who had the narrow escape, is just up to the six kilo mark, so he would have made a fine substitute. This means he has more than doubled his birth-weight in three months. Martin has had serious words with him about not making a habit of it.

Merry Christmas all. Here’s what we’ve been doing the last few days…
Since Christmas doesn’t start in October here, our first event was last Monday, when we celebrated with the guys in the prison. I realised how famous Martin has become in the prison, when I was walking through the corridor with Joni, watching the guards pointing him out to each other as “son of Frost”. We had a service, with some speeches given by sundry invitees, followed by sharing a large cake. It was a good atmosphere, and Joni was in his element being passed around between the infamous of Cordoba.

The same evening found us on a bus to San Marcos where we spent a few days sharing a cabaña with the family of our friend and team-leader, Priscilla, affectionately known as La Jefa (the Boss). We had some good working/not-working time; went to the childrens’ home a couple of times, and bounced a few ideas around. Joni had his first dip, which he responded well to, after the original surprise; he’s used to a slightly different bath-time routine….

Christmas happens on the 24th here, which we spent with our friends Ana and Oscar, sharing food and fellowship before heading outside to watch the fireworks at midnight. I really like the uncomplicated nature of Christmas in Argentina, although as an English person I also feel cheated that nothing happens on the 25th; it’s just another bank holiday like any other.

This year the 25th began even less auspiciously than usual, with the discovery that we had a burst pipe leaking water down the kitchen wall. The small consolation was that clambering onto the roof to locate the stop-cock was probably slightly more interesting than watching the East-Enders special which is apparently what half of the UK population were actually doing. Our second discovery was that there was no food in the house because we’d taken it all to Ana and Oscar’s the day before. Luckily, eating chocolate for breakfast on Christmas morning is an age old family tradition. Deciding that the day needed some improvement, we took the car out for a random drive into the back of beyond, and came across this rather cool range of mountains. Ambitiously named Los Gigantes, (The Giants), they aren’t exactly Everest or even Aconcagua, but at 2,300 metres, to us Europeans they are a very respectable height.

Unlike most mountains in Europe, we were the only people there. And just a couple of kilometres away we found a little outpost selling the scrumiest empanadas (think Cornish pasty). Now I’m coveting a serious baby-carrier rucksack so we can go for a proper walk another time.

Domestic story coming up, would apologise but, hey…
There are a lot of good reasons for using cloth nappies over disposables, price being one; here’s a few more…

• 4 % of the world’s domestic waste is disposable nappies.
• Every disposable nappy that has ever existed still does.
• If William the Conquerer had introduced disposable nappies in 1066, estimates suggest that the first ones would be decomposing sometime now.
• Disposable nappies are made from petroleum by-products.
  – We assume that disposable nappies are safe for babies. Assume is all we can do, because by and large the long-term research hasn’t been done.
• Most disposable nappies are made by organisations who I would rather not give my money to; if I would not do certain things in my personal life, then it seems hypocritical to pay a corporation to do essentially the same things on my behalf.

When I made this clear decision several years ago, I hadn’t figured that I would be giving birth in Argentina. Ho hum.

Searching UK websites for “cloth nappies” brings 305,000 hits, increasing daily… cloth nappies have made a real come-back in the UK.
Searching Argentinian websites for same brings a handful of hits, mostly well out of date. The one interesting thing I found out was that there had been a real attempt to re-establish cloth nappies during the 2001 economic crisis, when the cost of disposables had gone up 150% in six months, but even in those circumstances, the attempt was unsuccessful. I haven’t got my head round this really, but the sociology of it does interest me.

The one drawback of cloth nappies is the inconvenience of having to wash the things. It has been suggested that the reason for their lack of popularity here is therefore related to higher rates of poverty and therefore lower rates of washing-machine ownership. Except for three things… One, most people in reasonably paid employment do have washing machines, which isn’t everyone, but there are probably still several million washing machines in regular use here…. Two, the last economic crisis is credited with decimating the middle class, the very people most likely to own such commodities; stories abound of people who found that their fur coats were worthless when they couldn’t afford to buy food…. Three, the owners of the posh 4x4s towing jet-skis who overtake us on the motorway not only own state of the art appliances, but they also pay other people to load and unload their washing machines for them… inconvenience factor eliminated completely. So, I don’t know what the real issue is, and in any case it didn’t solve my problem.

So, I ordered some stuff from the UK, and got a friend to export it by post. Except that the post here isn’t that good either, thus only some of it arrived; enough to keep us going as long as we did the washing every day, a regime that was never going to last very long. So then I made some. That was arduous. My sewing teacher at school used to say “haven’t you got a violin lesson to go to?” on the rare occasions that I showed up to her class. I made a few. And I ordered some more waterproof wraps from England which actually arrived. And then, I received an email introducing me to a lady near the city of Buenos Aires, who, having made cloth nappies for her own baby, is now beginning to produce them commercially in a micro-enterprise sort of way. So I arranged to go and meet her last week while we were in BA.

Picture hot sweaty city bus full of hot sweaty standing passengers. Stops every two blocks. The trip takes three hours each way, and we saw the first blade of grass at the two hour mark. At the other end I found a rather cool alternative community, people building their own houses out of wattle and daub, growing vegetables in a communal garden, wrapping their babies in home-made nappies… Marvellous. So I bought a batch of those, and a couple more waterproof wraps for good measure.

Meanwhile, the outstanding original consignment from England also arrived through the post having taken a round-the-world mystery tour. So now we have nappies and waterproof covers in a full range of shapes, sizes, colours and designs. Personally I’m happy with the ones made here by Marcela, and now I know where to go when we need more. And through the contact that we made, she has now received an invitation to sell them through a shop in La Plata, and we are also advertising them in San Marcos, a local magnet for hippies and “alternative” types. Not sure Billy Graham would think that’s a good result for a day’s work, but my standards are a bit lower and I count it as a small victory.

We had Joni’s photos done for his UK passport so we can take him to meet the family next year. Passport photo rules say he has to have his eyes open, so we had to do mean things to him in the shop to wake him up, gathering ourselves an audience in the process. Then the rules say that no-one else has to be visible, so we were trying to contort the pair of us so that we could hold him up to the background cloth without being seen, only of course he can’t hold his own head up yet so it didn’t work too well. Eventually we took the background cloth thing off its runners and laid it on the counter, and put the baby on top of it, and then the guy taking the photo stood on a stool and looked down on his face.
Hopefully it will good enough for the passport people, although to be honest it all seems like rather a waste of hassle given that within a few weeks he won’t look anything like his passport anyway. Our friend Ben says “it would be more of a worry if it did (look like him); how many people do you know who look like their passport photo?” Still we provided some amusement for the general public of Cordoba; service to the community and all that. Next job is to take all the paper-work to the British consulate in Buenos Aires, and see if we can swop it for a passport.

On a different tack, we have solved the mystery of Joni’s missing red blood cells that I mentioned a couple of blogs ago. They tested all three of us for a bunch of possibilities, and discovered that both Martin and Joni have pherocytosis (it’s ferocitosis in Spanish, took me ages to figure out why I wasn’t getting any hits in English… stupid spelling). In the sort of terminology that I can understand, it is a hereditary condition characterised by a defect in the wall of some red blood cells causing them to be sphere shaped rather than egg-timer shaped, and therefore less elastic and more easily broken. There are some potential complications in a small percentage of cases, but the doctor says that more often than not, the first a person knows about it is when their offspring shows up as being anaemic; as with Martin and Joni.

The Hospital Privado, not being enormous, has a combined hematology and oncology department. There can be fewer things more symptomatic of the injustice of this world than the sight of little kids having chemo. We are really grateful that while our kid may not yet have hair, he is healthy, chubby and currently asleep.

This quote is dedicated to all parents of small children everywhere….
“Methought I heard a voice cry “Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep,” the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast—
Still it cried “Sleep no more!” to all the house:
“Glamis hath murder’d sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more; Macbeth shall sleep no more.”
Macbeth, Act 2 Scene 2

We carried these hammocks here with us from England and we hadn’t really had the use of them. But now we’ve discovered that Joni likes being swung, so we dug the hammock out. Except he didn’t like going in it on his own, so somebody had to sacrifice themselves to accompany him.

Daddy was looking forward to a good theological discussion, but settled for a compromise and an exegesis of “The Wheels on the bus”… “Now this story tells us that at one time the UK had public transport. Notice that each stanza finishes with the line all day long which tells us how long it took to get anywhere…”

We’re doing rather well for presents at the moment. This rather posh baby-carrier is thanks to some fantastic friends. It is fully adjustable in a zillion directions, holds him securely in a good position, and can be worn facing in or out. (Now why aren’t they paying me for this advert?) In fact it even works on…

… the bike! Joni thinks it’s great too; he even fell asleep in it as we were peddling home from the post-office the other day (for the record we should clarify that mummy was doing all the peddling). Look closely and notice his stripey trousers, sent by granny and grandad from England. Now all we need is a generous benefactor to offer to do the 4 o’clock in the morning shift…

This week’s piece of good life-advice is for mummy: “Always organise the bath before you remove the nappy”. Now he’s learning to roll, he is no longer safe to be left on the changing mat (tendency to end up in the sink!), and hoiking a squalling, squirming, poo-coated creature under one arm while trying to fill the bath, find towels etc with the other hand is not an experience that either party would be rushing to repeat.

We had Joni’s one-month checkup yesterday. He now weighs in at just over 4 kilos and he responded very well to all the poking and prodding. Luckily he likes human contact in just about any form, although he wasn’t entirely pleased with the lady taking blood out of his heel. Next week we have to go back for another blood test, as his hemoglobin levels seem to have fallen quite rapidly. Mummy and daddy are trying to decide how concerned we ought to be at this stage, given that baby appears to be healthy in every respect, but we’re not medics, so we’ll see what they say next week.

I improvised us a sling using a single bed sheet, mostly for the times when he is grizzling but doesn’t appear to want anything. It’s not Joni’s favourite mode of transport, but in the scale of things he likes it better than being abandoned to whinge in his cot. This is the view I have of him when I cross my eyes and look down my nose…

Here we are cleaning the bathroom together… To be honest he’s not a great asset to the cleaning process. But he is quite useful as a fashion accessory to hide my “not quite yet back to pre-pregnancy” stomach.

Some lovely friends sent us some money for Joni, so we had fun shopping for presents. This is his favourite, a cot mobile with beany-animals, which spins around and plays a truly dire version of Frere Jacques. Joni loves it. Martin is hoping that his musical tastes might improve as he gets older. He played him Beethoven’s Eroica the other day to try and help the refining process along a bit…

And this is a multi-sensory baby gym type affair including a textured mat, and things hanging over the top of it. He’s just getting the idea that a good swipe at one of the hanging rattles makes for a satisfying noise. We’re hoping that he might see this as an interesting environment for practising his skills, as an alternative to swiping the contents of the bathroom work-surface onto the floor, and rolling himself into the sink…