Uncategorised – Page 51 – Martin & Hazel Frost

Case Study

When I was at All Nations (hesitate to say “studying”, although by all accounts I did more studying than my beloved by virtue of the fact that I actually wrote an essay or two…), on Wednesday mornings, we used to have a session known as CiM, “Contemporary Issues in Mission”. This was basically a “choose your own adventure” activity, where a case study would be presented, and students invited to come up with responses and solutions. A typical case-study would look something like this…
Case Study

A certain organisation, henceforth known as Mission-in-action, runs a short-term programme to place (mostly) young volunteers to work with national projects for a few months at a time. Over recent years the programme has grown, matured, and gained recognition and status both in the sending, and receiving countries.

Recently, a disturbing pattern appears to be emerging from a few projects, challenging Mission-in-action to respond, and maybe to rethink their modus operandi.

In general projects have tended to be fairly small scale, existing operations, characterised by a dynamic national leader, with experience, track record, a positive attitude to Westerners, and vision to move forward. As part of Mission-in-action’s relationship with the national leader, volunteers are seconded to the project to fulfill specific roles for an agreed period.

Over time, in some projects, relationships with the national leader have subtly changed for the worse, leading to a perception that the concepts of “partnership” and “project”, may have been given a lower priority than the personal ambition of the project leader. This has manifested itself in a variety of ways;volunteers feeling as though they are being exploited, in being asked to do more and more; or the prioritising of “fundraising” appearing to become the most important activity of the project, with volunteers being put under pressure to raise funds from their own friends and family. In some cases, this had resulted in relationship breakdown, and Mission-in-action declaring a moratorium on providing resources for a particular project or leader.

It has been suggested that there may be some parallels between a Western mission organisation finding themselves in a strained relationship with a national leader who has been enabled to construct themselves an empire; and a Western Government deciding to go to war against the dictator that they helped to put into power; “created by the CIA, wanted by the FBI”.

How could these situations have been prevented?
How should they be responded to?

Discuss with the person next to you, and be prepared to share your results by coffee time.

Democratic process

Two hypothetical scenarios…

I hear the words “the exec has decided”, and I know that whoever decided, it wasn’t the exec, since I’m on the exec and it’s the first I’ve heard of it.

or…

I sit through a zillion meetings in order that “the exec” can truly decide.

At what point does honesty step aside for the sake of ones quality of life?
How far do we really believe in democratic process?

We have just got back from our team conference in Buenos Aires, which was the best one I have been to so far. There were good people, we weren’t self-catering, we did a relaxed trip out to Tigre (on the delta of the BA coastline), there was nothing truly pointless on the programme, and I’m not pregnant! I accept it wasn’t the fault of the organisers that I was pregnant last year, but it does somewhat interfere with one’s enthuseasm for wading through relentless hours of pointless information.

Project Visit

Too busy to blog… ironies of life.
This week we went to San Marcos, and to San Francisco, and we’re about to go off to Buenos Aires for our annual team conference. In between, there have been trips to town, church meetings, various visitors both expected and otherwise, prison visiting, sundry appointments, cleaning, shopping, cooking, washing, entertaining Joni, and a man knocking a large hole into our kitchen wall in order to repair our burst hot-water pipe. He also fixed my oven; hooray hooray hooray. So I made chocolate brownies yesterday in celebration.

On Wednesday we went to look at the work that we have been offered in San Francisco. The road was full of trucks so it was slow going; three hours each way from Cordoba. We started with a meeting in the prison where the sub-directora wasn’t exactly delighted to see us; “ice-maiden” would be a fair description. Fortunately, another guy came along, whom I recognised as being the chief of security from one of the Cordoba prisons, now apparently transferred to San Francisco. When we started explaining about the ministry that Martin is involved with, the guy interrupted to say how well known and respected this ministry is in Cordoba, and the ice began to thaw.

We had lunch with some people on the leadership of the church; small baptist congregation, partners to the church in Cordoba. Then we went to visit the Rios family, who are good friends of ours. They have five kids who like playing with Joni.

Later, we went out to the village where we would probably be based. More of a hamlet than a village really. Surrounded by plantations, it takes five minutes to circumnavigate in a vehicle, and only slightly longer on foot. Although it is less than twenty kilometres from San Francisco, Quebracho Herreda seems to be a forgotten back-water with very few services or opportunities for its population and we managed to ascertain that there are no Christian activities going on at all. The idea of the project would be to work with families and kids with special educational needs. Many kids don’t go to school, others travel for hours in order to go to special schools in San Francisco, and still others attend the village school where the staff have neither resources nor understanding to respond adequately to individual requirements.

Ironically, the two most glaring needs that I could identify from a first visit are two things that I have always said I wouldn’t be getting involved with in Argentina! The first would be some sort of micro-enterprise project; high-tech farming techniques on huge plantations means that today there is little need for a low-skilled village workforce. The second would be to set up a Scout troop or something similar to provide some sort of structured activity to the pack of young kids hanging out in the plaza.

We probably won’t make any decisions until we are back in the UK and can put some distance between ourselves and the options, but there is certainly plenty to think about in the meantime.

Funeral

We spent this weekend at a funeral. Kid’s funerals are emotional affairs, although it has been a very long road for this child and his family so the funeral was also coloured more by a sense of peace than injustice.
It’s the first time I’ve been involved in a funeral in Argentina, so part of me was dedicated to observing with outsider’s eyes to figure out what was happening and where I should put myself within that. From first impressions I am impressed by the way Argentina handles death. The theme here is “accompanying the body”, from the moment of death till the burial, which happens quite quickly, usually within 24 hours. The body is laid out in an open coffin in a place of the family’s choosing, sometimes a funeral parlour, sometimes the person’s own home, and friends and family come and go. At an appointed time the coffin is sealed and a vehicle comes to lead the procession to the cemetery, where the burial takes place following a simple ceremony, and the grave is filled in.

While I’m sure that the practice of “accompanying the body” owes its origins to folk-catholicism and the cult of the dead, the net effect seems generally to be a good one. Adults sit quietly with the parents, stand around and chat, send out for biscuits and hand them round. Children look, prod, ask child-like questions and, satisfied with the answers, go back to their game. The coffin in the middle is clearly the focal point, yet without receiving a huge amount of attention. Although Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians, refers to death as the last enemy to be destroyed, for now at least, dying is a natural consequence of living, and it seems to me that Argentina has found a healthy way of responding honestly to this reality.

Bits

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.

New year

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.

Christmas 2007

Merry Christmas all. Here’s what we’ve been doing the last few days…
Christmas service in San Martín prison

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.

Martin and Joni in the pool 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.

Mountains at Los Gigantes 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.

Martin and Joni at Los Gigantes 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 stuff

Domestic story coming up, would apologise but, hey…
Joni modelling cloth nappy

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.

Notes from the Big City

Here we are in Buenos Aires, doing Joni’s paperwork. Now he has an English birth certificate and a passport, and we’re heading back to Cordoba on the night-bus in a couple of hours. We discovered on the night-bus coming here that we could all have a reasonable trip if Joni slept in the footwell; I just had to remember not to stand on him. We continue to be jolly grateful that babies in Argentina can be breast-fed more or less wherever is convenient; our favourite places so far have been the foyer of the British embassy, and the steps to Harrods; what a fantastic culture.
As always we have made the most of the trip and enjoyed visiting people and fitted in a bit of touristing here and there. Sunday afternoon we went on a long explore, taking in the nature reserve, which is the one oasis of relative calm in Buenos Aires. On route we went to see the latest phase at Puerto Madero, where the old port buildings have been redeveloped into shops, flats and restaurants, “Docklands”-style. I’m not a city-scape connoisseur, but I was impressed by the way in which they had used the character-filled old red-brick dock buildings to recreate Stevenage, through the addition of grubby concrete verandas and balconies.

One experience that we had promised ourselves was a trip to the Indian Restaurant. There are two Indian restaurants in Argentina, both in Buenos Aires, and Indian food is one of the tastes we have been missing from England, curry being our national dish and all. It wasn’t cheap, but it was definitely worth it. The proprietor is from Jaipur, but he has been in Argentina for about twenty years. He wins an award for the best quote we have heard in a while… “Argentinian taste in food is very primitive: Ten thousand years ago, man was throwing meat on a fire, and here there hasn’t been much evolution since then.” Actually we like the food here, but we will also look forward to another fine curry when we’re next down this way.

Passport Photo

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.