Martin & Hazel Frost

One.  I actually managed to spend half a morning behind my computer, sans bratlings for the first time in goodness knows how long, and without any other interruptions (it was raining which is always good for keeping doorstep salesmen, and others of doubtful reputation at bay; people in Argentina generally believe that rain might cause them to dissolve).  So my inbox is down to a mere 28 outstanding mails and there is light at the end of the tunnel. 

Two.  We have an Argentinean pope.  It’s not just his Argentinean-ness that causes me to cheer, although since Latin America is the continent with the highest proportion of Catholics one might argue that it was high time.  But by all accounts Bergoglio / Francis 1 seems like a darned good pick.  If you have been kidnapped by aliens for the last 24 hours and missed all the analysis, then check this out from the Independent newspaper, not normally given to excessively pro-church content. Alternatively this endorsement by Anglican Bishop of Argentina Greg Venables has been quoted on various websites (including his own Facebook page!) and we can personally vouch for Greg as a diamond geezer;

The Bishop of Argentina and former primate of the Anglican Church of the Southern Cone, the Most Rev. Gregory Venables, has praised the election of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio saying the Argentine Archbishop is a devout Christian and friend to Anglicans, who has stood in solidarity with the poor against government corruption and social engineering.
In a note released after the election of the new Pope, Francis I, on March 13 Bishop Venables wrote:
"Many are asking me what Jorge Bergoglio is really like. He is much more of a Christian, Christ centered and Spirit filled, than a mere churchman. He believes the Bible as it is written. I have been with him on many occasions and he always makes me sit next to him and invariably makes me take part and often do what he as Cardinal should have done. He is consistently humble and wise, outstandingly gifted yet a common man. He is no fool and speaks out very quietly yet clearly when necessary. He called me to have breakfast with him one morning and told me very clearly that the Ordinariate was quite unnecessary and that the church needs us as Anglicans. I consider this to be an inspired appointment not because he is a close and personal friend but because of who he is In Christ. Pray for him."

Be interesting to see what lies ahead for the Catholic church.  I might even become one.  That could make life interesting…  Sadly ecumenism hasn’t yet made it to San Francisco, but given that there is a thriving movement in Cordoba, I’m hoping it’s only a matter of time. 

This graphic caused me to giggle in a manner probably not entirely becoming…

  “I’ve been a Scout since I was very small…”  We found it while looking for some Scout-ly images to put on our advertising posters for this year’s recruitment campaign.  Needless to say it didn’t make the poster, but we all took a copy of it for “personal use”. 

This quote caused me to go “yes and how” in a wryly knowing sort of way thinking of some institutions that we know and love (?)… “Many people believe that although individuals might behave irrationally from time to time, companies that are run by professionals with boards will always operate rationally.  I never bought into this sentiment, and the more I interact with companies, the more I find that they are actually far less rational than individuals (and the more I am convinced that anyone who thinks that companies are rational has never attended a board meeting).” (from “The Honest Truth About Dishonesty” Dan Ariely)

And this thought caused me to go “yes yes yes” at various points over the weekend… Danny starts nursery tomorrow!  Don’t get me wrong, I love him, adore him even.  But I am also really OK with the idea of having a couple of hours a day where I don’t have to have eyes in the back of my head.  He has taken to calling himself a “good boy”; “bob boy” he says, which has no relation to morality (he’s not two yet, how could it?) and everything to do with when he thinks he’s doing something really clever… like turning the bidet up full so that the water hits the ceiling and then running out of the bathroom, or unpacking the plates from the crockery cupboard, or dragging his bedclothes around the house, or filling the dog’s water bowl up with anything he can find to drop into it, or, or, or…  Far be it for me to cramp the style of one clearly destined to great things, but the experimental phase surely is having its trying moments.  I haven’t quite figured out what I’m going to do with all this free time, but for day one I’m planning on cleaning the floor, following by marvelling at being able to drink a whole cup of coffee without anyone interrupting it. 

Anyone remember the spitting image song?

Hold a chicken in the air
Stick a deckchair up your nose
Buy a jumbo jet
And then bury all your clothes
Paint your left knee green
Then extract your wisdom teeth
Form a string quartet
And pretend your name is Keith
Skin yourself alive
Learn to speak Arapahoe
Climb inside a dog
And behead an eskimo
Eat a Renault Four with salami in your ears
Casserole your gran
Disembowel yourself with spears

Now you’ve heard it once
Your brain will spring a leak
And though you hate this song
You’ll be humming it for weeks…

I have been humming it all day… hopefully not for weeks or I might end up in a padded cell.  Sadly I am definitely not allowed to explain why or I really will be drummed out of the Brownies.  I might explain if you ask me offline.

It may just be that mild hysteria is setting in.  There were a total of seven children including mine trashing the house for most of the afternoon.  I finally shut the door on the last of the invaders while simultaneously posting my own into a bath at 8 o’clock.  We do have an open door policy in general, and I do like having kids in, if the truth be known.  When we first arrived here we used to get quite a lot of visits from the local primary aged kids; old enough to be out on their own, but young enough not to have learnt to hide their curiosity about how the English people live and whether they might have anything interesting in their house.  Once our novelty value faded it has been pretty quiet on the marauding children front for the last couple of years, but now of course Joni is at school, so there are a new crop of visitors coming to play with him.  In an ideal world it would probably be easier to referee if they arrived one at a time, but “this is my friend, and this is his brother, and that’s my brother, and that’s his friend…” and really where could I have drawn the line to say you’re in and you can wait outside?  So there we all were. 

Fortunately Joni’s getting better at helping to clear up.  And now they’re all asleep like little angels.  Until tomorrow.

I have come to the conclusion that I am definitely superstitious despite supposedly being a full-time-Christian-worker (whatever one of those might be).  So I fear if I tell you this then I may bring a bad outcome upon myself.  At the same time if I do tell you then you might pray.  The question is, will your prayer be effective enough to counter the negative effects of my superstition?  Well, don’t tell anyone I said anything, but there’s a guy in the University in Santa Fe who has taken all the paperwork (copies of, obviously) relating to my qualifications, and he thinks he might be able to help me.  He’s had it for the last two days and I didn’t get a response yet.  In fairness there is quite a lot of it and a third of it is in English, a third of it is the Spanish translations of the English and the other third are the certificates legalising the translations as genuine, so it might taken him a few days to figure out how it all relates to each other before he even gets as far as reading it.  It is so hard not to get excited about this even though I know from the many many experiences so far that the most likely conclusion is nothing at all.    So I’m drumming my finger nails on the desk and humming a little tune… hold a chicken in the air stick a deckchair up your nose….

I’m personally not a great fan of teaching English, not because I have anything against teaching English in principle, but because I find I don’t care very much whether people learn English or not, so I find it hard to give it my best.  That and the fact that most of the students I’ve worked with here have been kids sent under sufferance by their optimistic/desperate parents because they’ve got an exam next week and everyone’s hoping that I’m somehow going to perform the miracle that makes up for the fact that they spent the rest of the year at school flicking pencils and sending Facebook messages to their mates. 

But I’m coming round to thinking that I might try and do a bit this year, partly because I’m going to have time on my hands when Danny starts nursery (given that I haven’t managed to make any progress at all with my own bureaucratic mine-field).  And in the city here at least, teaching English does make reasonably good mission sense since teaching English is a good way of reaching the nominal/secular Catholics from the middle / professional classes who are the vast majority in San Francisco.  To quote Martin from a recent email… “The evangelical church here exists among the poorer parts of society and therefore the less educated. The Catholic church is much more middle class. Because of this, they tend to think that the Evangelical church lacks theology, is not thought through and is all based on emotionalism. They are so surprised to hear that the Evangelical church in England is mainly middle class. Unlike England, it is socially acceptable to discuss religion and most of my clients are practicing Catholics. So, I can do missionary work there and get paid for it.”

Martin works for the Instituto Londres (you can find the bones of a website here or slightly more filled in on Facebook)  This is very much a symbiotic relationship; it meant that to start with there was a ready made pool of potential clients, an advertising campaign underway and a physical space to work in, in exchange for the “kudos” of having a native language speaker on the staff list.  A couple of years down the line and he/we could very easily branch out on our own with some existing clients and probably enough contacts to gather a few more.  It might even pay better given that there wouldn’t be an institute taking its cut in the middle.  But, a couple of years down the line we have also discovered that we like the brand, we have friendship and loyalty to the other people involved, and it also cuts out a whole lot of hassle.   Firstly we can slide away from anyone who we don’t want to teach (like reluctant kids being dragged along by their desperate parents) by referring them the institute and that lets us off the hook of either having to take them on personally, or let them down by saying no.  Secondly it means that we aren’t responsible for setting prices or collecting money.  This is quite important here.  San Francisco has an average household income which is twice that of the rest of Argentina, and yet they also perceive us to be millionaires merely by the fact that we have English birth certificates.  Added to which, the Piamonteses (the dominant socio-ethnic group) are also the butt of many “Jewish/ Scottish” type jokes regarding tightfistedness, which all in all means that we have too many times been on the wrong side of a conversation in which members of the pony club are trying to persuade us that we really should be teaching their children English for free because we can afford to and classes are so expense you know darling,…  Yesterday was a case in point,  “But we could have a discount if we just did it privately?”  The real answer might have been “Actually I have no interest in teaching your kids, and as for a discount, not only have you never given me a penny off in your shop, but I’m lucky if I make it out of the door before you have made some just-short-of-barbed comment about los ingleses, so if anyone was going to get a discount it certainly wouldn’t be you”.  So the fact that I am able to say “Actually no, all our work goes through the instituto londres” might mean exactly the same thing in practice, but it sounds so much kinder. 

It has been an unremarkable week in the soya-growing backwaters of central Argentina. 

We managed to find out when school starts… sort of.  Technically I have to attend a parents’ meeting tomorrow, and then classes start properly on Wednesday.  But naturally the teachers are on strike tomorrow; this happens at the start of every academic year.  So there won’t be a parents’ meeting tomorrow.  It might be on Tuesday.  And classes might start on Wednesday.  Or Thursday or Friday.  I have every faith that they will start at some stage. 

We managed to collect the medical certificates that Joni needs to start school…. sort of.  He has a local-authority issued health book and before the start of every school year we have to get two pages filled in by the paediatrician; one to say that he is healthy, and another to say that he is fit to do sports.  I kind of thought that meant the same thing, but apparently not.  Then we have to get another page filled in by the dentist, and another one filled in by the optician.  All this involves going to the “centro de asistencia” (public clinic) very early in the morning in order to queue up and hopefully to be allocated a numbered ticket for today, otherwise you have to come back and do it all again tomorrow.  So we went at 5.30 on Monday morning.  This won us tickets for the paediatrician and the dentist, although sadly not the optician; apparently they were only giving out 20 numbers a day for the optician so with every school child in the city needing his signature that’s going to take a while.  The receptionist suggested that we leave it a few weeks and then try again.  Fortunately school will be fine about that, they’re used to it. 

Apart from that, it has been the usual round of running a household and entertaining two children for the last week of the summer holidays.  Cleaning, cooking, parks, plazas, and painting.  We did the supermarket run and discovered that stock cubes and Joni’s favourite soya drink have also disappeared… that’s ridiculous, we live in the middle of the biggest soya growing area in the country.   Joni and I made a chocolate cake with smarties on.  Joni and Martin finished the base for the train track and I revamped the utility area at the back of the garage to make a permanent space for it. 

So term is about to grind into action.  Danny starts nursery on the 11th of March (at least they won’t be on strike).  And I’ve just been asked about my involvement with disabled kiddo from the village this year.  I need to think about that.  I’d like to be involved with him, and with the special school, but school won’t be interested unless I can sort out my qualifications.  Which leaves the glorified taxi-driver’s role.  On one hand it gets me in.  On the other hand I’m effectively subsidising the Argentinean state who have a legal responsibility towards him.  And on the third hand (alien life form) there is the little issue that our car continues to drink fuel faster than we can put it in, so subsidising the Argentinean state also turns out to be rather expensive.  We need to fix the car.  I need to go and see the social worker, and the kid’s grandmother, and probably also the school.  So that’s this week taken care of. 

Male bonding: Joni and Daddy’s woodwork project to create a base for Joni’s Christmas train set.  Challenging gender stereotypes: when he was done with gluing and screwing, he came and made cookies in the kitchen with me.   He’s pretty versatile is our kid. 

I hadn’t been to our local supermarket for the last two months, but I fully expected it to be more or less as I had left it, given that I can go a year or more between trips to our local shop in the UK and very little changes beyond some light rearranging of the aisles.  So this morning was definitely a cultural experience. 

The first surprise was the price rises.  Ok so inflation here is officially 8%, but everyone including the IMF knows that 28% is closer to the mark, so of course it would make perfect sense that everything had gone up 5% in our absence.  I just wasn’t prepared for the reality to be quite that stark. 

And the other thing was the gaps on the shelves.  Policy here at the moment is for strict limits on imports, and the few products which do get through are subject to a 50% tax.   These measures are supposed to encourage an increase in local manufacturing, but the gaps on the shelves suggest that the policy might not entirely be having the desired effect.  Bleach, washing up liquid, and roll-on deodorant seem to  have become relics of a past era, while washing powder has largely been replaced with tablets of soap.  Bizarrely the depleted washing up liquid section was sporting a jaunty sign reassuring the consumer that in the ongoing absence of washing  up liquid, the makers of Skip clothes wash powder have confirmed that this can be used to wash dishes.  I’m sure they’re right, it’s all based on the same stuff, but given that washing powder itself is becoming as rare as rocking horse droppings I can’t quite see how the advice would be helpful. 

Don’t get me wrong, we aren’t talking about Soviet food queues, or even post-War UK ration books, but I did take my shopping list to a hitherto western-style supermarket fully confident that I would be able to restock on the household essentials, and I did come out scratching my head and wondering what else won’t be there next week. 

There´s a reason why news updates should be short and regular.  Trying to include the whole of the last two months into a blog would be mission impossible both for the author and the poor unsuspecting reader.   The salient features are that we went to the UK for Christmas and January, which looked like this:

And then we came home for 48 hours before me n´ the boys disappeared on Scout camp for a week which looked like this:

Both trips were fantastic, despite (or possibly because of; variety is the spice of life and all) the nine thousand miles and 35 degrees Celsius of difference.  

Now I´m trying to rediscover my house, and gather the stuff that Joni will need to start the new school year.  Actually at the moment I´m not entirely sure what date he is supposed to start on; they weren’t able to furnish me with that information when we said goodbye in December, so I need to cycle past the gate at some stage this week and see if there is anything useful on the noticeboard. 

The three Scout groups of San Francisco spent Saturday afternoon constructing this giant flor de lis solidaria;

(photo courtesy of the local rag, me n’ my kids are down there somewhere.)  I haven’t figured out how to translate the title, flor de lis in “English” is a fleur de lis, which isn’t English at all but we don’t seem to have a translation for it, and solidaria is somewhere between solidarity and charity but not quite the same as either; without the connotations of pity which surround charity, but without the commitment to “standing with” which we would associate with solidarity.  So flor de lis solidaria is the best translation available. 

Our aforementioned thing is made out of approximately 160,000 plastic bottle tops, sorted into colours, and laid out as the world Scout symbol across “la plaza civica”, San Francisco’s central square and most important public space.  This photo is taken from a small aeroplane and I think it looks pretty good for our hard hours’ toil in the boiling afternoon sunshine.  Publicity stunt over, the bottle tops are then transported to Buenos Aires to the Hospital Garrahan which is the national flagship children’s’ hospital, I guess the Argentinean equivalent of Great Ormond Street.  The Garrahan have been fund-raising through collecting bottle tops for as many years as I have been involved in Argentina.  I have no idea what they actually do with them to turn them into money but I imagine it must be some sort of recycling, like when we used to collect milk bottle tops and ring pulls when we were kids. 

Three short videos for Granny and anyone else who can bear home-movies of other peoples’ offspring. These ones are from the end of year event at the swimming club, in which Joni participates with more enthusiasm than panache at this stage, but he’s very happy and definitely water confident.

Beginners’ underwater doggy paddle

Backstroke sort-of

“Spiderman jump” (so we’re told).