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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.

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!