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Halfway through January already!  Here are a couple of updates on recent stories for people who have been following via blog or newsletter or both. 

We won one fight; our Scouts have been given use of the municipal bus for our summer camp in February.  That has been an ongoing saga since the local council agreed to provide the bus way back last July, and then out of the blue at the start of December tried to withdraw the offer by claiming that it was never made.  For a month we attended the council offices almost every day, and were passed from pillar to post, fobbed off with promises of meetings and phone calls, which mostly didn’t happen.  So finding ourselves in January and no further forward, I took charge of things and decided to finish the job once and for all.  We had nothing to lose, and even a big fat no would be progress in that it would be a proper answer that we could move on from.  So I rolled up my sleeves and went to war and after two fairly frank meetings, we had a bus.  So now we are finishing raising the funds.  Tonight we have a folk evening, known as a peña in Argentina, so we have been hard at work all morning, and will continue working hard until the wee small hours tomorrow, hopefully with a goodly haul as a result. 

Teen’s paperwork is still an ongoing battle, to the extent that we couldn’t even register the baby.  Teen is missing from the care system but at least she does have an ID card albeit out of date, whereas Baby doesn’t officially exist at all and won’t exist until either Teen’s situation is progressed or Boyfriend regularises his immigration status – he has temporary residency which ran out last June and apparently renders him incapable of fathering a child (go figure!).  He won’t be able to move his case on until March because the relevant office is on holiday till then.  Meanwhile Teen is making progress, Baby is thriving and has put on 300 grams this week.  I suspect we need to be driving a difficult balance between applauding Teen’s progress and pushing her to do more; together with knowing when to get involved because they need our involvement, versus when to stand back and let them figure things out for themselves because they need to do that too.  Good news is that Teen has mentioned that she would like to go back to school this year, we weren’t even broaching the subject at this stage so we were surprised and thrilled to hear it.  So over the next month or so we need to be thinking together and finding out what sort of support might be available to facilitate that. 

 

An unmarried teenage girl of uncertain parentage gives birth in poverty and his own compatriots did not receive him.  It has been an interesting Christmas in our house. 

Foster Teen’s baby, Lian Piñero Zambrano made his appearance nearly a whole month ahead of schedule, on the morning of the 23rd of December.  Mum and baby were discharged on the 24th.  I questioned this at the time as it seemed to me that he wasn’t feeding properly, but the public hospital were keen to send everyone home for Christmas so home we went.  Sure enough on Saturday 26th he was readmitted to hospital suffering from dehydration and having lost a significant amount of weight.  Since then he has been in the neonatal unit where they have been getting his weight back up, and working with baby and new mum to improve his feeding. 

Fortunately Christmas in Argentina is a simple affair.  Half an hour’s buzz round the shops on the morning of the 24th gathered me enough loot for presents for all children.  For the main celebration we get together with friends and throw some meat on a fire.  Martin bought meat and drinks while I rooted around the house and located enough ingredients for a couple of salads, and the kids and I made a cake to share for dessert.  

   

 

Since then the week has been filled with zipping backwards and forwards by bike to the hospital several times a day and trying to coincide with times that they need someone to look like a “responsible adult” to meet with social worker, psychologist, psychiatrist, paediatrician…  Sometimes this is tricky when meetings don’t occur at scheduled times.  Technically Teen is still the responsibility of the Province of Cordoba, who appear to have mostly washed their hands of her since losing her paperwork, but without giving us any legal basis for doing anything on her behalf, and particularly not enabling us to claim any of the benefits that she should be entitled to, neither for herself, nor baby Lian who by accident of birth also finds himself without legal status.  So it lands to a couple of not-particularly-wise people from a far off land in the east to provide not myrrh and frankincense, but food and shelter for those who find themselves excluded in their own land. 

“He came to his own, but his own did not receive him.” 

At the moment they are talking about sending him home on Monday, so we celebrated New Year with another hospital visit, and then went home and put together another cake with the chocolate numbers that I had made using some funky new number moulds. Simple pleasures.  Happy New Year.

For those of you who live in the northern hemisphere, just imagine for a moment what would happen if you combine the manic winter weeks leading up to Christmas, with the manic summer weeks leading up to the end of the academic year.  Now you have some idea of what December looks like in Argentina.  Tis  the season where mental health services burst at the seams, and not because Cameron’s Government has closed the beds. 

This is a summary of the last week:

Kicking off the end of year events we had the swimming club’s annual display:

   

Next, Danny’s school year performed their end of term production. “Murga” is a traditional Argentinean style of music and dancing.  It is a lot of fun and quite raucous – about right for Danny, and he loved his hat:

 

Then Danny’s little music club held their concert in a local club hall.  Danny was an enthusiastic performer on his wood blocks:

The following day, Joni was away overnight on his end of year cycling camp, the first time he has ever been on a camp without me as Scout leader:

 

Simultaneously Danny and I were off running the end of year “Pan con Leche” kids’ club event; silly games in a plaza followed by a pizza making competition:

That took us to the weekend, which was filled with Scout activities.  On Saturday we marched four miles to meet with the other groups for the district end of year camp fire.  Each group had to bring a banner with a theme of Peace:

 

“When the power of love is greater than the love of power, then the world will know peace”

On Sunday the leaders had a meeting with the newly installed Bishop-  That was an interesting experience for me, being the only non-Catholic leader in the region.  The overarching assumption was to talk about Scouts as inherently Catholic, although one person did mention that this wasn’t necessarily the case!  Then we went for mass together afterwards, always a nice change for me, I’m starting to get to grips with the liturgy in Spanish, can do the Lords Prayer, now trying to learn the creed. 

   

On Monday we had visitors from Cordoba, a previous foster family of the Teen, who have recently adopted a two year old with significant disabilities and medical needs.  They came for lunch, for which I made a lot of pizza, and then took Teen out for the afternoon.  In the evening I was representing the Scouts as a witness to the handover and swearing in ceremony for the new city mayor and councillors.  It was interesting from a cultural/phenomenological point of view, I’m fairly sure I was the only foreigner but we’ve been around long enough now to bump into a variety of friends and acquaintances. 

   

Today is a bank holiday for the 8th of December and the first day for ages when we haven’t had any commitments.  In line with Argentinean 8th of December tradition, the boys and I put up our Christmas tree and nativity this morning:

Santa was swiftly borrowed from the tree and set off on a round of the train track.  Shortly afterwards I found myself cutting out a net of a 2 cm cube having been informed that Santa needed a present to take on the train with him.  And shortly after that, I found myself being detailed to sew up a miniature red draw-string bag for Santa to keep his presents in:

And that’s December a mere eight days in.  Possibly plans for this afternoon include setting up the paddling pool.  Or finding a cool cave to go to sleep in for the next month. 

Advent calendars are one of the few traditions that we have exported from the UK.  It gives us a nice way of reading the Christmas story in 25 bits every year, and you might be horrified at how many church kids here couldn’t retell the Christmas story because they never hear it, even in church.  And it also helps the kids not to go mad with excitement on the 1st (2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th…) of December because we have a graphic representation of just how many days there are still to go. 

Here is this year’s creation:

  

Each pocket has a bible-verse card, and three home-made chocolates, one each for the young-people of the household. 

Note to self (and anyone else stupid enough to need the advice); an ambitious project involving melting chocolate and lots of sewing would normally need to be started before the 1st of December, unless you are either very skilled or have the entire day to yourself, neither of which was remotely true in my case. 

The other English tradition very important to the boys in my household…

…watching Dr Who and hiding from the scary bits! 

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.