Author: Hazel Frost

Considering how many more talented, qualified, envisioned, holier, spirit filled, inspired ideal textbook mission candidates have come and gone in the last decade, we are somewhat amazed, and more than a little chuffed to realise that this week marks our tenth anniversary of landing in Argentina.  Late November 2005 we left the UK in minus six degree biting hail, and a few hours later found ourselves in a thirty five degree swamp of Buenos Aires. 

If folk in the mission office in blighty back then had been asked to bet on which new members of our cohort would still be there ten years later, I am fairly sure that nobody would have had their money on us.  We wish we had been better prepared, we wish we had been better supported, we wish a whole bunch of other things.  And at the same time, we are so glad that we had no idea what was going to happen or we might have been on the next plane back to London.  We have been stretched and challenged in ways that we could never have dreamed, and God continues to be good in ways that we frequently don’t understand. 

Here are a few back photos from random points along the journey…

Thanks to everyone who has continued to walk with us, we hope you will join us in raising a glass to the next bit of the adventure. 

I went to collect Danny from school on Friday and discovered him pretending to clean the floor with a toy iron.  It’s a fair mistake to make.  When would any child of mine have ever seen an iron, let alone one in action…?

On Tuesday he took a toy animal to school and got into trouble for messing around with it during assembly.  So on Wednesday when he thought he was going to take a toy alien, I said no.  “Well I’m not going to school then”, he said.  Hey, you know what kiddo?  When we got to school, he staged a little one-boy sit in in the corridor outside the classroom.  His teacher and I tried to argue with him, but he wasn’t moving anywhere.  Right before I thought of building a brick wall around him like Henry the green engine (Thomas the Tank engine link here) I gave him a choice; “Danny if you’re not going to come into the classroom then we’ll need to go and talk to (the head)”.  “I’ll go and talk to (the head) then” he said, and off he marched.  She’s a nice lady, received him with a straight face, dismissed me with a wink, and apparently when they were done Danny went off to his classroom and was good as gold all morning. 

Joni’s class were responsible for the “acto” on Friday morning – think equivalent of school assembly.  I asked him what it was about.  “I don’t know… some war” he said, not very enthusiastically.  I should probably have guessed that.  In four years in the school system one of the things we are very sure about is that the most important dates are wars, and all true heroes are soldiers.  This year for the first time they did read some work by an Argentinean writer, Maria Elena Walsh, but she was in no way promoted as a hero, and we’re still waiting to discover the names of any national artists, sculptors, musicians. scientists, and in particular any non-military agents of social change.  (Anyone know who abolished slavery in Argentina?).   It’s a strange and narrow patriotism, which is sad in a country with so much that could be celebrated – not least the fact that slavery was effectively abolished twenty years earlier here than in the UK.   

Fortunately school isn’t the only place where people learn things, as Joni vividly demonstrated by getting to grips with the strimmer and determinedly cutting back the jungle in the front garden on Saturday morning.  As far as I’m concerned, that’s true heroism.   

Obviously! 

Martin’s in Peru this week on a Latin Link leadership workshop, so I’m holding the domestic fort.  Either or both of us may need therapy by the end of the week, but at the moment it’s going quite calmly, at this end anyway, I haven’t heard his story yet. 

Meanwhile Joni is enjoying picking the first crop of peaches off the little tree which we planted last year.  Verdict, a bit insecty but quite tasty.  We may need to figure out how to improve the bug situation for next year. 

We spent the weekend on camping with some of the older scouts in Monte Redondo, a bit of woodland about 12 kms cycle ride away. There’s a bunch more photos up on facebook.  The Scout page is at Daniel Ñañez, or on my page. 

     

Remembering that the Scout movement grew out twenty boys on a camp led by an old soldier with a chronic smoking addiction, this guy could go far;

At church last night I was preaching on being members of the body of Christ.  Something similar to what I said will be up under the sermons tab when I get round to putting it there. 

Danny was in trouble at school today;

• Me “That wasn’t very good, getting sent to the  head”
• He “But I didn’t want to come in from the patio”

Truly fantastic weekend despite non-stop rain, on an outing with Scout leaders team to visit the campsite where we’ll be taking the kids for summer camp.  The site is great, the scenery fantastic, and the guy who manages it was really helpful too, well set up with information, and he didn’t even charge us for the overnight stay.

We did a couple of walks exploring the area, had a good barbecue in the evening, and some great spontaneous team-building discussion, which was like refreshing rain to my soul, and probably the most important thing that happened even though it wasn’t the bit that we had planned. 

 

   

This week I have been twice to the town council chasing the letters and folders that we have been repeatedly submitting in order to try and secure a grant for our fencing.  Yesterday we had the interesting experience of being told that there is no record of us ever having handed anything in, despite the fact that we have a heap of bits of paper with the official date-stamps on, which is what they return to you when you present something at the front desk.  So now we’re trying a three-pronged approach, submit another copy at the front desk, go in through a side door through another contact we have managed to make, and also try and find out if there is any known reason why our stuff might be being “lost”.  Politics here is complicated and I am reminded that I don’t understand it. 

Yesterday I got a parking ticket for the first time.  A couple of years ago they set up a metred parking scheme in the town centre.  We normally avoid it by going by bike, or parking a couple of blocks away, but yesterday I parked in the wrong zone for half an hour and got myself a ticket.  It was a fair cop, so I went to pay it without complaint like a good upright citizen.  It cost me eight pesos.  To put this into context, a kilo of bread costs 15, our monthly electricity bill around 300, and a packet of chewing gum six.  The real punishment was having to stand in the predictably long line in order to pay the thing; especially since the electricity went down and the computers went off when I was two people from the front.  I’m not advocating a major price hike in this land of much inflation, but maybe enough to pay the utility bills would at least keep the queue moving. 

It’s hot and I’m tired.  It’s a fair sign that things are getting close to a limit when you find yourself looking forward to a new episode of traffic cops for mindless entertainment.  (Note to the controller of the BBC; stop blocking proxy servers, and charge your overseas viewers a licence fee instead; we’d happily pay you if you’d agree to take our money.  You know it makes sense.) 

When I first started writing a blog, the idea was to make it bilingual.  Then I ran out of oomph to keep up with the translating, so it went English for a few years.  Then I started posting links to it on Facebook, which means that we have come back full circle, thanks to automatic, albeit not technically brilliant, translations. 

In case the BBC didn’t get round to mentioning it, the first round of last weekend’s presidential elections was won by the pro-Kirchner (i.e. friend of the current president) candidate Scioli, but not by a big enough margin, so we are gearing up for a second round.  The political map so far shows the provinces of the far north and south as mono-coloured pro-government, while the middle of the country is a mish-mash of different colours for various opposition parties.  So I guess what could usefully happen next is for the opposition parties to unite behind the one candidate.  Here in San Francisco the biggest opposition candidate Macri won a comfortable victory, while Scioli trailed in third.  I don’t understand enough about Argentinean politics to provide much in-depth analysis but here are a couple of things that folk are passing around on facebook at the moment;

(In English; Scioli being the puppet, “I am going to be president with faith, with hope, with optimism, with sport, with tourism, with joy… and with more independence than ever”).

Or this one, on the difficulties of presenting a political agenda when your predecessor has spent the previous years trying to convince the electorate that there are no problems left to solve;

(In English; Great program of D. Scioli; I am going to reduce the inflation that doesn’t exist, pay the foreign debt that we don’t have, and combat the poverty that isn’t there). 

The other rumour passing around is that if Scioli wins, he will shortly be assassinated by his own party in order to be replaced by one Anibal Fernandez who is generally held to be a Lewd Fellow of the Baser Sort.  I honestly couldn’t begin to pretend to unravel that as a conspiracy theory, but just in case, remember, you heard it here first. 

I left Joni playing in the plaza with a couple of other kids while I took Danny to his little music group.  It reminded me of the news story we saw while we were in the UK this year, of the mother who got arrested for letting her kid go to the park while she was at work.  Apart from the useful feature that I didn’t get arrested, the main differences in the story were that her kid had a mobile phone whereas mine certainly doesn’t, and if her kid hadn’t been kidnapped by the authorities, she would have still been in the park when mum got back, whereas mine had left me a note on the kitchen table;

I was right chuffed; it’s the first time he’s ever left me a note (should also add that it’s the first time he’s ever not been there when I’ve got back as well, just in case any social workers are reading).  In one hit I knew where to find him, and I also knew how many people I’m catering for tea and breakfast!  I have no idea what the relevant stats are; I don’t think Argentina is particularly more or less safe than the UK, but folk round here generally seem to be a bit less bonkers about it. 

In no particular order.

Prepare Sunday school, teach English, prepare house for visitors, receive visitors, do San Francisco tour with same, take three kids to three different schools, meet with psychologist, cook food, take child to other child’s birthday party, call in at bus station and write down timetable, butcher, baker, greengrocer, fishmonger, stationer, put together dossier on vandalism we are currently suffering at Scouts in the hope that the municipality might be interested, cut a cardboard box into a castle for a soft toy to sleep in, clean the house, battle with paperwork, take kids to the plaza, have a meeting at secondary school, teach some more English, participate in craft event at infant school, go to dentist, prep for a meeting on Sunday, do homework with kids, go to the teen hostel where no-one is quite sure who phoned me or why they might have asked me to come, respond to a bunch of emails, teach English to an autistic guy who needs a friend more than he needs to learn English, try and read some theology, organise Scout leaders’ meeting, take child’s bike to be fixed, prepare talk on Halloween for kids’ club… anyone know which Disney cartoon it is where the girl has to disguise herself as a boy and there’s a song she sings into the mirror about wishing she could be known?

It’s a strange one this lifestyle.

Said Teen to Boyfriend, “When you were looking after goats in Colombia, did you ever imagine that one day you’d be sitting round the table here with us?”  Of course not, but he used to watch the aeroplanes overhead and dream of the day when he would go on one.  So I said to Teen “how about you, when you were a little kid in the children’s home in the hills, did you ever imagine that one day you’d be sitting here?”  There was a long pause… “I hadn’t thought of that” she said. 

I was structuring the latest sermon (just uploaded it to the sermons tab) in my head while simultaneously building a Thomas train track for one boy, and supervising the other clipping together his beginner’s electric train set.  It is still a tough discipline not to give in to the temptation to write it all out, but it definitely goes better when I don’t.  The feedback was that it was “simple but challenging”.  I guess doing the prep in the midst of family life does avoid any tendency to ivory tower academicism; if your theology doesn’t have anything to say at four o clock on a Saturday afternoon, or nine thirty seven on a Tuesday morning, then one might be tempted to ask whether it has any use at all. 

Monday morning I had a meeting with one of the mothers for whom I still have an outstanding possible job offer, depending on the health-care provider agreeing to provide the funds at some point in an indeterminate future.  I presented my paperwork ages ago, the provider claimed that they hadn’t received it, so last week I went in and confronted in the politest possible sense the person into whose hands I had personally delivered the folder.  They rooted through a few piles of paperwork and located it.  Then they presented me with another heap of forms, but when I glanced at them it was fairly clear that they needed to be filled in by the mother.  So the staff member asked if I would contact the mother to ask her to come and fill them in. 

She went to the healthcare provider on Friday, where again they claimed that I hadn’t sent in my paperwork, and when we demonstrated again that this was not the case, they gave her the second heap of forms and told her that she and I needed to complete them together.  So I spent Monday morning in her house.  We did what we could, but this is the most comprehensive health-check I have ever seen; questions about liver, heart, brain, and every other possible bodily function including some I hadn’t heard of.  “But I’m only asking for a support worker for school, and I’ve presented everything they could possibly want to prove that she needs it” wailed the mother.  She’s barely literate; she had to go away and look up her daughter’s date of birth, and I did most of the writing for her. 

This is just clearly an injustice, and we are at the point here where not to name the injustice for fear of being “culturally insensitive” would mean to deny the injustice, to pretend it’s not happening, and in doing so we stand with the oppressor against the victim.   So it’s injustice and I’m naming it.  But we still have a whole lot of paperwork to do. 

We got Joni and his bike safely to the other side of the city so he could put it through its paces on the bike track. 

Looking good, especially with the new gear that we had gathered for him with granny’s birthday money.  There was a bit of a sulk because he doesn’t yet know his way round the gears;

But apart from that he did great 

Danny meanwhile filled up the rest of my data card with shots of a Danny’s-eye view of the world:

Continue in similar vein for another two hundred shots! 

  

It was a toss up who would win, and it took him five days, but today Joni has managed to tame the new bike that we gave him for his birthday on Tuesday.  We even took him and it back to the shop to ask if Charlie would recommend we change it, but as Charlie pointed it, the size down would fit him today, and next year he’d be needing another bike.  Joni was heard muttering “should have had it for Christmas, Santa would know what size I am…”  So we put some time into practising starting and stopping without falling off, and now Joni is a lot happier, and I am satisfied that he is safe to take it out into traffic. 

Fifteen friends came for a party on Friday evening.  He wanted a Tron theme, so we played with coloured torches and sparklers out in the plaza, as well as the obligatory bouncy castle. 

   

I made two chocolate ring cakes, decorated them into Tron disks and joined them together to make an eight. 

   

Cake was complemented by the usual party array, and plenty of fat salt and sugar was consumed by all. 

   

And all that was left was the clearing up.