Category: Uncategorised

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. 

• Danny says "I want a Somali…" 
• A what? 
• "A Somali!" 
• You what? 
• "That one, I want that one!" 
• Ah, you’d like me to pass you a slice of salami? 
• "Yes, a Somali…"

Here’s one of the best recipes I know.  Take one cup of sugar, half a cup of oil, two eggs, and a quarter of a bag of SR flour.  Beat it with a fork.  Add a bit of milk if it looks like it needs it.  Now you have the makings of the most boring sponge cake in the world.  But here comes the fun part.  Because this one will take absolutely anything you want to throw into it.   This morning I dumped in a bowl of left over porridge, a chopped pear and a spoon of cinnamon.  Other times it’s had banana, nuts, chocolate, raisins, vanilla, pineapple, a myriad of leftovers, half a roast dinner… OK maybe not the roast; I normally dump that into a pie case with a heap of vegetables, as I did for lunch today in fact. 

Meanwhile Joni handed me a cork that he had found.  “Look Mummy, that’s got to be from a good wine to have a cork like that…”  Child you’re seven years old (OK a week off eight, but even so.)  He was right too! 

 

One of the things that I have to do every time we’re in England is go for a trawl around a few charity shops.  My egalitarian wardrobe mostly costs around three pounds an item.  I have a little image of sweet retired ladies tagging items, with absolutely no idea of the difference in the original prices between the supermarket garments (Tesco and Asda, probably 50p less to buy new than second hand), compared with sportswear brands (Reebok, Salomon, lots of money), compared with designer wear (er… I don’t know any names but I think we’ve got the idea). 

I was thinking maybe it was time that the charity shop sector sophisticated up.  And then I figured that maybe they have.  Certainly they are more closely reflecting the original pricing structure when the clothes left the factories (next door to each other), before someone in the middle invented prices according to brand, and a whole bunch of lemmings thought it was worth paying for the labels.  (We were watching some trash TV the other day in which someone did a bunch of function comparison tests on a pair of Levi jeans vs a generic ten pound pair and discovered that the only difference was in the price tag).  In any case, I’d rather pay three quid to my local hospice than two pounds fifty to Mr Tesco.  So I’m looking at my electric eclectic three pound multi-label wardrobe and smiling. 

Nifty little link needs writing here but I haven’t yet thought of it.  So, changing the subject…  Speaking of aeroplanes… 

How about this for a mission strategy?  Take two struggling church congregations from either side of the world.  Put them in touch with each other.  Encourage them to share their joys and sorrows and to pray for each other. 

That wasn’t my idea.  But I’m loving it for it’s breath-taking simplicity and wisdom.  So we’re working on making it happen.  Being supported by a largish number of smallish UK churches has brought its own challenges.  We have also said many times that the people who we have ended up working with in Argentina would never have had access to receive “overseas missionaries” unless we had accidentally stumbled across them while looking for something else.  So wouldn’t it be great to bring both sides of our wonderfully motley bunch together. 

I like the idea that on both sides it raises awareness of mission, it answers the challenge of how we might be small but we can still do stuff, and also that it puts everyone on the same footing; scrap the “rich to poor”, “west to the rest”, “givers and receivers” and all that rubbish.  We all have needs, and we all can give.  Mission suffers from self-contradictory sillinesses; as mission organisations we say we recognise the interdependence of the global church, and yet at the same time we seem to want to make a goal of independence for the national church with which we are working.  In the end, we all need each other and we’re all dependent on a Big God, so let’s get over it and in doing so, hopefully find ways to encourage each other as fellow human beings and followers of him. 

“Give me your pastries and puddings; Give me your chocolate and cake!  For I am the Rat of the Highway, the highway, the highway – Yes, I am the Rat of the Highway and whatever I want I take”.   

– The Highway Rat, by Donaldson and Scheffler, one of Danny’s all time favourite books. 

Here’s a thing about cookies that I’m thinking about at the moment… 

I like that.  I want to add not all bankers, not just bankers, anyone who is making shed loads of money at the expense of ordinary people, and (probably more importantly) not paying the corresponding amount of tax on same, vis. 23 billion pounds missing to the UK economy from 700 named companies.  And then the other side of the coin, the propaganda machine run jointly between politicians looking to pass the buck, and overpaid owners of tax-avoiding media corporations playing the fears of their readership by selling an easy story. 

I continually feel like I’m nibbling at the edges and not having enough impact on the real issues of justice and injustice.  And as for unknotting the macramé between culture and injustice…  There’s a blog in there but it keeps threatening to turn into a book and I don’t have time to write one of those for the next umpty years and I will probably never be able to afford to do a PhD. 

Meanwhile on small injustices closer to home, I received a phone call from the Teen hostel yesterday morning to tell me off for a whole bunch of things and to tell Teen off for a whole bunch of other things, none of which appear to be justified.  So we went to the hostel yesterday afternoon, which turned into a repeat of the same unhelpful conversation that we had already had by phone.  So I tracked down the psychologist this morning.  She is helpful, and she attends the hostel but she’s not employed by them, so she’s inside but outside, and she promised to kick ass in the nicest possible sense on our behalf.  The interesting part once I stopped being annoyed, was reflecting on how I found myself absolutely coming out in defence of Teen and what I perceived to be injustice directed at her.  Until now it has normally been us seeking outside support to deal with her colourful behaviours.  So that’s good, apart from the injustice part. 

This afternoon I set off to locate our favourite / least favourite bag lady.  She comes and annoys me, so I give her things to stop her from annoying me.  And then I’m annoyed because she comes back and wants me to give her more things to stop her from annoying me.  I am challenged to move this relationship onto a different footing by getting to know her.  This might be tricky because I think she’s used to the world being annoyed with her and she knows how to make that work.  I found where I think she is currently staying, but either she wasn’t there or wasn’t answering.  So I plan to go back another day and take cookies. 

I took the dog for a walk this morning dodging the piles of rubbish rotting in the streets, and trying not to breathe in the stench of the putrid canal shining an impossibly lurid chemical blue-green.  It reminded me that being here is a choice, and even though we are absolutely convinced that we are in the right place, it is still a choice that sometimes we have to make to ourselves every day, or even several times a day. 

We did have a lot of fun in the UK.   On our previous UK trip we nearly killed ourselves trying to get through an impossible schedule of visits and meetings, so this time we erred on the side of anti-social and did lots of fun stuff with the kids and cousins.  Bike rides, beaches, walks, blackberry picking, the zoo, London, crabbing, camping, goofing around… 

Not all grass is greener though; there are different things that disturb me every time we visit the UK too.  Not least the fact that I can no longer remember who has right of way on a roundabout.  We also did our very best to counteract the tendency to risk-averse parenting.  I’m not a great crystal-ball gazer, but I do wonder what might happen when the generation who are being carefully prevented from ever confronting a risk in the playground suddenly find themselves running a country.  Especially since a significant proportion of same will also hold an unchallenged belief that they are the centre of the universe.  It might be an unfashionable viewpoint, but one might hope that this generation’s immigrants stick around in sufficient numbers to provide an alternative discourse. 

Meanwhile, we left the UK on Sunday, landed in Buenos Aires airport on Monday, and San Francisco bus station on Tuesday.  Transitioning may therefore be improved by catching up on sleep.  And we also landed straight into some heavy issues involving teen, not least the prospect of me sitting in a queue in the social security office for four hours or more one day in the imminent future.  

But there are plenty of things that we do love about life here too, like the view from my dining room over the well-kept plaza, and our sweet elderly neighbour who looked after our house and dog, and seeing Teen transition back to life after extracting her from the hostel. 

We were sitting waiting in the corridor at the hostel yesterday, and I asked Danny “Do you want to see (teen) ?”  And he said “No!”  I was just racking my brains for possible appropriate responses, when he continued “I don’t want to see her, I want to collect her”.   So we did. 

London through the eyes of the kids;

Danny’s delight at leaping onto yet another escalator as we changed up and down levels on the underground.  “Get ready for another big jump!” 

The British Museum.  Joni wanted to go and see the mummies, but he really preferred discovering the exhibitions of clocks, and Mesopotamian writing.  Danny found a case of little clay figures in ancient Mesopotamia; “Look!  It’s the gingerbread man”  much to the amusement of a lady quietly taking notes nearby. 

Tower bridge.  To see Tower Bridge opening has long been a humble ambition on my bucket list.  We arrived at the tail-end of one lift, but since there was another one due in two hours we hopped onto a boat up and down the Thames to see a few other bridges and occupy the time.  With spectacular unplanned fortitude we managed a ring-side view of the bridge lift from the boat as we were heading back to land. 

Small melt-down as Danny’s calorie count dropped into overdraft “I don’t want chips; I said I wanted chips”.  Break the habit of a life-time to dive into a handy McDonalds, happy to discover that they appear to be rather improved in the decade or so since my last visit.  And head for Kings Cross and a train home. 

The computer programmer;

The woman asks her computer programmer husband to go to the supermarket;

“Get three pints of milk, and if they have eggs get twelve”. 

The computer programmer comes back with twelve pints of milk.

“They had eggs”  

The computer programmer’s son;

Waiting in the entrance to the swimming pool;

“Oh look Joni, they have goggles here, I’m OK to buy you some of these if you want”

“No thanks, it’s not a lesson”

Ten minutes later in the pool;

“Oohh, I wish I had some goggles”

“Well I did just offer to buy you some”

“But I thought you just meant to take back to Argentina, I didn’t know you meant for me to use them in here” 

The computer programmer’s other son;

Suddenly realised that he couldn’t see me;

“where’s mummy?”

(Aunt) “Look there she is swimming.  She’s a good swimmer isn’t she?  Maybe you’ll be able to swim like that when you’re a big boy”

“But mummy isn’t a boy…”

We’re back in small town UK.  Landed on Friday.  Enjoying some family time, and started the first set of meetings today.  We’re hosting open house at St Mary’s church hall in Baldock this Saturday at 3.  You’re all welcome to join us for tea and coffee and to find out more about what’s happening in Argentina.