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… and that was a fast turn around.  Owing to a last minute (even by Argentinean standards) change of plan, within twelve hours, I came in from Scout camp;

showered, dumped a load into the washing machine, made two cakes, organised someone to look after the dog, a different someone to look after the fish, repacked for the family, went to bed for a couple of hours, and left again in the direction of the province of Salta and the annual Latin Link team conference. 

Coronel Moldes village in Salta province provides an idyllic backdrop for team meetings;

Our team is very well established having gone through the whole forming-storming-norming process through our various encounters.  Good outcomes; I made my exit from the team exec after eight years, and instead I now get to produce the monthly prayer diary.  Martin makes his debut on the exec, together with folk who I believe have the potential to be a highly effective diverse and robust team.  We also enjoyed some fun together, one afternoon “helping” (ahem) the fishermen on the nearby reservoir;

 

A trip out to the exquisite rock formations in the mountains around Cafayate;

Joni rearranging the rocks for the confusion of future archaeologists.

and on the last evening, a few of us stomped up the San Bernado hill overlooking the city of Salta.

 

Now we’re back in San Francisco where we are now halfway through a slightly more relaxing four day turn around until we leave for the UK via the bus to Buenos Aires tomorrow night. 

Teen had her 16th birthday yesterday.  In Argentina girls historically came of age at 15.  Even though today legal adulthood begins at 18, the all-important birthday party is still the 15th.  However, a year ago Teen was still living in the Residencia (hostel), which means that she didn’t get to enjoy her full compliment of traditions.  In particular the one that she really want to make up on was:

 

friends and family painting the public road in front of the birthday girl’s house.

In the UK this would probably have you clapped in irons under the anti-terrorism act.  In Argentina, this is a perfectly normal, socially acceptable, tradition associated with coming of age.  The road painting event is really a pre-party party.  There were around fifteen teenagers hanging out on the road in front of our house, listening to music (also fully socially acceptable), sharing snacks and drinks, and chipping in with the artwork.  The finished product looks like this:

 

It will continue to adorn the road with ne’er an asbo in sight until the passing of seasons and traffic finally wear away the bright colours of the permanent paint. 

Road painting led into cooking, as she and her friends put sausages in the oven for a “choripaneado” – big juicy sausages, slapped into impossible-to-get your-mouth-round french bread sandwiches, with salad and dressings.  I received a request for a cake in the colours of “River”, her favourite football team, (one of the big two in Argentina).  The teenagers really liked it.  And it tasted good (shameless self promotion): 

 

Teen is lovely to give presents to.  Watching her take pictures of her presents and then sending the photos via mobile phone to her friends reminded me that she is still adapting to the novelty of having stuff to call her own.  Everyone had a nice day, and even two of her teachers unexpectedly called in with a little gift.  

Happy Father’s Day to all dads out there. 

We had a bit of a low-key Sunday, punctuated by regular coffee.  Martin went off to preach this morning.  The kids flapped around in their pyjamas and made Lego models.  I put a roast dinner in the oven and created a dessert.  This is a “torta de alfajor”, I can’t imagine how I would begin to translate that.  Torta is cake.  Alfajores are round sandwich biscuit type affairs, but they aren’t really like anything I have ever eaten in Europe.  And a torta de alfajor would therefore be a cake which is a bit like a sandwich biscuit but not really.  I guess.  Whatever.  It was a bit of an experiment from a passed-on-verbally recipe, which worked just fine and everyone had two helpings. 

Now we’re about to heat some more coffee, and then go to church, where I am scheduled to be producing some Fathers Day craft with the Sunday school children. 

We spent the weekend making locro.  This is a long process, starting with chopping pumpkin and pigs innards from nine till six on Saturday and starting again at six on Sunday morning to make the fire to cook it all on.  We made two hundred and fifty portions and a healthy profit. 

On Sunday evenings at church another girl and I share the kids’ class.  Normally we are relatively organised about who is going to do what – relatively not in the UK sense of having a three month schedule, but in the Argentina sense of having had a conversation by text message at least a few hours before the event.   Since I spent the weekend making locro, we didn’t get to talk, and I assumed she was organising the class.  The bit I didn’t know was that she went away for the weekend and assumed that I was organising it.  If either of us had turned up to church with a working brain cell, we could have exchanged that useful piece of information at the start of the service, but, well, it had been a long weekend, so in the event I had the space of time between the preacher arriving at the lectern and me arriving in the Sunday school area – approximately ten seconds, in order to plan the class. 

Take one sheet of scrap paper and cut a capital I shape out of it:

Fold it along the red lines and you will be able to make a house with an apex roof… realise that houses in the ancient near east wouldn’t have had apex roofs and omit the central fold for a house with a flat roof. 

Take another sheet of scrap paper and cut it into strips maybe six centimetres width.  Give each child a strip and show them how to make a chain of paper people holding hands:

While they are making theirs, you can make your own set of six people.  Cut one man off the end and make it into a Jesus figure.  Cut another man off and lie him down on a square of paper of approximately the same height.  Turn the other four people into the man’s friends. 

Now you have everything you need to play Mark 2.  The kids enjoyed using their chains of people to be the crowd stopping the man and his friends from getting through, and the bit where we cut a hole in the roof of the house and dropped the disabled man through it to land at Jesus’ feet.  In fact they carried on playing with the figures for a goodly while after we’d finished talking about the story.  Danny drew chocolate buttons and chocolate trousers on his – Mark 2 meets the gingerbread man. 

Every month our Latin Link southern cone team sends out a prayer calendar which we are all asked to contribute to.  I think this is a really good initiative, for ensuring good prayer support, and keeping up in a bite-sized way with what other people are up to.  The only real difficulty is that the new month seems to come round so quickly, and a lot of the time we are just busy getting on with getting on which makes it hard to dream up “key dates” or “special events” for folk to get excited about.  So, here’s a brief round up what we’re up to. 

Danny remains in plaster.  We went for an appointment the other day which reveals that the bones have shifted prior to healing, so the arm will have a new bend in it.  The traumatologist thinks that the extra bend will become less pronounced over the next couple of years as he grows, so they aren’t growing to re-break him at this stage, but the plaster remains for another week. 

I preached on Luke 24 on Sunday, my notes are up under the sermons tab.  The notes are but a rough approximation of what I actually said, since I didn’t look at them until the bit in the middle of the conclusion where I forgot where I was supposed to be going. 

The Teen is currently excluded from school for two days for fighting.  I went to the school for a meeting yesterday and another one today.  She’s gone to work with her boyfriend today, which she would almost definitely prefer as a full-time option than school.  The complicating feature would be finding someone willing to employ an unqualified fifteen year old with a range of personal issues; we don’t really have anything like supported employment here, either you are a competent member of staff or someone else will be found to take your place. 

The Scouts held a “Feria Americana” (jumble sale) on Saturday to raise some much needed funds, and a parents’ work-party on Sunday to do some much-needed maintenance and improvements on the railway shed where we are based.  This weekend we are cooking locro – stew based on maiz and bits of pig and cow offcuts.  We are hoping to sell 200 portions for Sunday lunchtime. 

I’m gathering more paperwork for yet another job offer that may or may not go anywhere.  The previous job I was offered has gone to a tribunal, but no-one knows when that may ever be decided.  This new offer probably won’t happen till August even if all parties agree to agree, because although the school are desperate for the kid to have a one-to-one support, so far she doesn’t have a certificate of disability.  This is a bit like being “statemented” in the UK – without it, you’re unlikely to persuade anyone to fund anything.  Her assessment is in August, and in the meantime we need to persuade her health-care provider to agree in theory that if she is successful in obtaining the certificate of disability, then they will fund the necessary support, and secondly that they will accept me as a person appropriate to provide that support.  

Joni is doing well and having lots of fun playing with negative numbers!  Martin is working on websites and enjoying playing with negative numbers with Joni.  Sergio is here for a few days doing useful jobs around the house, like replacing door handles.  I never ever had to replace my door handles in the UK, but it seems to be a fact of life in Argentina that door locks and handles just will all need replacing on a ridiculously regular basis. 

And here we are in June. 

 

There were 25 three to eight year olds in the house.  We hired a bouncy castle for the back garden.  Fortunately, despite threatening all day, it didn’t actually rain.  I set the rest of the house up like a UK-style nursery classroom with simultaneous activities going on in different stations, and the kids meandered freely between them, which avoided having to try and herd them like cats to participate in organised group games.

 

I loved the train corner, it was continually occupied by varying numbers of little boys all playing happily next to each other without interacting in the slightest, it was the quietest place in the house! 

Note to self, omit painting table next time.  Blue paint can go a long long way. 

I had been given my marching orders for a Mike the Knight cake.  Cunningly the oven door went away for fixing and didn’t come back, so I made the sponge cake in the microwave which I never tried before, but luckily seems to work.  Joni helped to decorate the cookie-monster buns.  I’m not sure if they are supposed to be attacking or defending the castle, but I saw them in someone else’s blog and I thought they would be fun to add a splash of colour. 

 

Days in general start at 06.25 I take the dog out for a walk, back in time to ensure that Joni has everything he needs for school, and to give Teen a lift to the secondary school, she walks home later, but we’d all have to get up even earlier if she walked there in the mornings, and I do find it quite beneficial to have that ten minutes together in the car. 

Home again, time to wake Danny up and have some breakfast together, then take him to school on the back of the bike.  This is our normal Monday-Friday getting everyone out to school routine.  Beyond nine o’clock, different things happen according to whatever other commitments might be in the offing.  Today I have English lessons, so having dropped Danny off, I continue on the bike to an English conversation client, who I meet in his family’s office, and then on to the next one, an elderly lady who I meet in a cafe.

English done, I continue on the bike to the other end of town to see a man about a freezer.  The best use I have found for Facebook is local buying and selling pages.  Second hand freezers are fast sellers here; I’ve been chasing after any that have come up for the last couple of months  The guy knocks a lump off the asking price to take account of a minor repair needed, then he glances at my bike, and offers free delivery if I’m happy to wait till late afternoon.  For free, anytime you like. 

Swift detour to pick up fish from one shop and fruit and veg from another, and it’s home to start cooking lunch before the ravenous hoards arrive.    Oven on, and I have just started rubbing together a crumble topping towards dessert when they all appear in the front garden.  Danny is clutching right arm and whimpering in a possibly-broken sort of way.  So lunch is temporarily abandoned in favour of an expedition to A and E. 

This is going to be an interesting experience, because we have recently jettisoned the Seriously Rubbish UK-based emergency insurer (ask me privately if you want to know who to avoid) in favour of a local provider who should be covering us for all health care in Argentina, emergencies and otherwise.  And this is the first time we have used them in anger.  Our ongoing experience with Seriously Rubbish UK is that any attempt to access care would be initiated by several phone calls, and at least one argument each with the insurer by phone and whichever local clinic we were trying to use, followed by giving up the battle at that stage in favour of paying for treatment upfront, knowing that this would result in a protracted process later on in order to try and reclaim the expenses.  For something like the last eight years I have been personally convinced that we could do better than this, but I hadn’t managed to persuade Mission UK, to allow us to try it.  So today was the day when I realised that convinced as I am, we really have made a decision on the back of other peoples’ anecdotes.  I presented our new, shiny, written-in-Spanish local insurance card and held my breath.  And we were in.  Phone calls, zero.  Arguments, nil.  Money changed hands, not a whiff.  Couldn’t have asked for a friendlier service.

The duty doctor in A and E (in the singular – San Francisco is a small place) agreed that he was probably looking at a broken arm, but unfortunately the radiologist (also in the singular) had gone for lunch, so we could either wait or come back at 2 o’clock.  I made a non-medically-qualified decision that he wasn’t going to need surgery so it would be just fine to feed him, and we went home and finished making lunch.  At two thirty we were in radiography.  Quote of the afternoon “I’m not a skeleton, you can’t see my bones”.  The x-ray confirmed a green stick fracture, the duty doctor put a temporary bandage on and told us that the traumatologist will see us for plastering at five, after the swelling has gone down a bit.  So we went home and organised Joni’s homework.  At five, Danny and I went back to the clinic leaving Martin to post Joni off to swimming.  The traumatologist and four nurses put the arm into a cast (“But I didn’t want that”), and we were home by six-thirty. 

Quick phone call to apologise to the freezer-man that when I said we were going to be in all afternoon, I hadn’t reckoned on broken bones.  No problem, he is now on his way with the freezer.  I zip out to pick Joni up from swimming at seven.  A round of drinks and snacks for everyone.  Normally Martin would have a Bible study this evening but a fortuitous mix-up over times means that he is free, so I don’t have to take the kids to the Scout leaders’ meeting with me at eight.  Martin feeds them, I hop on the bike and lead the meeting (score; one camp, two fundraising events and a parents’ workshop).  Home just before ten to grab a quick bite to eat and an aluminium cup of red wine (beggars can’t be choosers).  Sometimes I’m not too sure what I’m supposed to be working towards in Argentina.  And then I wonder when I would ever have time to do it anyway.  Today’s notable achievements; one broken arm:-

and one second hand freezer:-

We didn’t vote.  I did briefly consider registering.  Then I realised that I really have crossed that ex-pat line where I live in a country when I can’t vote and don’t understand the politics, but I also no longer understand the politics in the other country where I would be eligible to vote.  I have tried to follow it on the news, but the main impressions that I have managed to glean are that UKIP are a bunch of fascists, the Greens have forgotten about being green, and everybody else is a clone army of posh gits arguing over the croquet lawn.  None of which seemed like a great basis for casting an informed vote. 

Scout camp last weekend was fun and frustrating in equal measures.  We went by bike to Josefina, a little village around 15 kms away from here.  The 11-18 ages in our Scout group have been going by bike to local camping destinations for the last couple of years.  Good for the environment, and the physical fitness of the kids, it also deals nicely with the fact that quite a few of ours don’t have access to any other forms of transport.  Having taken over the 11-15 group this year, I got to go by bike, hoorah, sleep in my own tent, hoorah, and cook every meal on a fire, hoorah.   When I went trawling around on the internet putting together ideas for activities, it amused me to discover that these days in the northern hemisphere, Scout groups talk about “survival camps” as being something special when the kids have to make their own fire and cook their own food on it.  To Argentinean Scouts, that’s just “going camping”!

   

The bit that is probably going to take me all year to figure out is how to relate to this group of kids.  They have a reputation for eating Scout leaders for breakfast, which is how I’ve ended up with them because they’ve munched through most of the rest of our adult contingent over the last couple of years, and no-one else wants to take them on.  I never planned to work with teens.  But I’m finding that it’s a similar set of skills I think to the ones we are developing in relationship with our Teen – maximise spending time with them, lots of close-watching of reactions and interactions, figuring out when to ignore and when to be robust, and learning to pick the right moment to capitalise on receptivity to any attempted intervention. 

“What was that you were saying to me last night?”  Asked the Teen the next morning.  “I was saying that although we don’t love the idea that you stay at your boyfriend’s house over the weekend, we understand that whatever you do at night time you could just as easily do at three o’clock in the afternoon, and we’d rather you didn’t have to lie to us.  However, what I was saying last night is that you absolutely cannot stay at his house in the week, because you have to be awake enough to go to school, and he has to be in a fit state to go to work, and I don’t won’t to have to go and collect you in the middle of the night, and I definitely don’t want to find you not here when I come to get you up in the morning”. 

There was a long silence.  And then she said “So what you’re saying is that we need to work hard and stay firm in the week, and go out and have fun at the weekend?”  “Exactly”.  And on her face in that second I understood my mistake in assuming that what she has been putting up till now is simple resistance. Astonishing as it may sound, as a kid who life has “happened to”, I am convinced that she had never grasped even so much as the existence of the concept of work-play and responsibilities, let alone understood what we thought we were asking her to buy into. 

Danny’s class wrote a collaborative story this week, so this morning there was a workshop involving parents to come and do some artwork to go with their story.  The story involved a rat, a bunny a fairy, and some cheese.  Everyone else did drawing and colouring, and cutting and sticking around themes of rats, bunnies, fairies and cheese.  Danny’s picture had Father Christmas, three little pigs, a wolf, a reindeer, some ice-cream, jelly, sandwiches, a birthday cake, a car, a train on a track running through the middle, and then he had a little fit because I said I wasn’t sure if we should draw a machine gun.  Taking a positive view, I was impressed that he knows the Spanish for wolf! 

6.30 Wednesday morning we had a film crew in our house.  The secondary school have a media project on called “Camino a la escuela” (route to school) and they are filming ten students from waking up to arriving at school, and then carrying out interviews of family members talking about attitudes to education.  They thought Teen would make an interesting story, so at 6.30 there they were in order to film us “looking natural”.  Normally at 6.30 in the morning Martin would be wearing his pants and I would be wrapped in a towel, so we had to get up early enough to avoid looking quite so natural.  A nice practical illustration of how the presence of an anthropologist changes the story that the anthropologist wants to tell. 

Spent yesterday afternoon taming the Scouts.  This year I have moved up from the 7-11 cub age range to the 11-15 Scouts, who in our group are a particularly uncivilised rabble.  I was surprised at how enthusiastically they got into the idea of constructing tables.  My aim is quite simply for them to start and finish a project, which hopefully might give them enough of a boost to their self-worth to start and finish another one without quite so much pushing and shoving and hitting each other. 

Currently putting the finishing touches to a sermon around Joel 2 and wishing I had taken notes back in 1989 when I sat through three days of Martin Goldsmith teaching on Joel.  Sadly at the time I had no idea what he was talking about, but I expect it was probably brilliant.  Education is wasted on the young.