Category: Uncategorised

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.

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.