Martin & Hazel Frost

We’re famous! Or we’ve made it to the Peruvian national press at least. Thanks to Bernhard for spotting this while reading the paper on the plane home:

It says; “This isn’t an image that is frequently seen in the centre of Lima. This group of people, including tourists, are attempting to dampen the incessant heat of the Lima summer with water from the fountain in the square of the Plaza de Armas (that’s the main square in the old city – H). A proof that the heat is becoming more intense year on year in our capital”

As I remember it, Joni was trying to reach the water in the fountain, Hazel was attempting to enable him to do so while preventing him from actually falling in, the officious looking police woman (not pictured) was blowing her whistle and telling us off, a bunch of Peruvians were taking pictures on their mobile phones, and Martin was trying to look like he didn’t know us. The next bit not pictured was where Joni went lay on his tummy in the pool of filthy water which was overflowing across the path. We’re always available for the “before” shots for any washing powder advert, just contact our agent.

Me: Joni! No biting!Him: Biting later?

Despite lots of people telling me I wouldn’t, I really liked Lima. The centre could be any other world city, and the differences in wealth are frankly obscene, but the neighbourhoods further out are vibrant and exciting, and the whole place has an exotic chaotic “disaster zone chic” / “real missionaries work here”feel about it.

Plenty of people were complaining about the heat, but since it was a consistent eight degrees cooler than San Francisco, we found it quite refreshing. I guess it’s about what you’re comparing it to. And there were no mosquitoes, which right now is about all anywhere would need to qualify as utopia. One conference survived. Good networking, always handy to be reminded that there are other sane people in the world; or at least sharing the same family of mad as ourselves. I’m writing some thoughts on revamping the program just in case anyone is daring enough to ask for ideas in advance next time. Joni treated the whole thing as a rerun of Scout camp; alternating chasing the “big boys” with playing in the mud which he’d made by spreading soil from the flowerbeds across the path, creating a small conflagration by feeding a smouldering tree stump with dried grass, and playing chicken with the sprinkler system which was watering the lawns.

As promised, we rewarded ourselves by taking a couple of days afterwards to see something of Peru. In my head we were “going travelling”, student style. In the event, we became hypnotised by a little fishing village / tourist magnet called Paracas, three hours down the coast from Lima, so we made it our home and meandered between the swimming pool and the sea shore.

Paracas is just a couple of kms down the beach from Pisco, which was the epicentre of Peru’s 2007 earthquake, and still under reconstruction, so folk were understandably jumpy following the recent events in Chile; some forms of excitement weren’t meant to be repeated. Out for a stroll near the sea-front in the late afternoon, we suddenly found ourselves kidnapped, bundled into the boot of a 4×4, and rushed up to higher ground. There was an unusually high tide as it turned out, although I’m not sure “making the basket ball court a bit damp” falls under the definition of Tsunami. Hey, I’m not complaining, better to get it wrong that way round. Once the panic had died down and the harbour had reopened, we went on a boat to see the islands of Ballestras which was a fantastic trip for any budding ornithologist (the seals and sealions were pretty good too). I had my first sighting of penguins in the wild. Humboldt. I know they’re not rare in global terms, but neither are they very common in my traditional stomping grounds of the English Home Counties and the interior of Argentina.

The day we managed to unglue ourselves from Paracas, we headed down to Nazca where we flew over the famous lines in a rattly little four-seater Cessna (Martin was the co-pilot), which definitely features among my most terrifying experiences ever. Serves me right for trashing my carbon footprint on frivolous air-travel. I promise I won’t do it again; some forms of excitement weren’t meant to be repeated.

And then we were on the bus back to Lima, where we waited for our plane and caught up with a friend who was spending an unplanned extra week in Lima trying to get a flight back to Chile. Finally, a bus, a taxi, another taxi, an aeroplane, a bus, another bus and a taxi later, and we’re home with a pile of thoughts to process and another pile of clothes to wash.

Summer scheme has ended for 2010. The final event on Friday was billed as an “evaluation session” for the leaders, which looked suspiciously like a water-volleyball match followed by a BBQ. I evaluate that as a worthy waste of a couple of hours, despite completely sunburning my face in the process.
So now I’m in limbo wondering what the rest of the year holds:
Quebracho Herrado is looking positive at least; a couple of the village stalwarts have suggested I should expect to be busy with requests for homework-club support.

Paid work wise, there is a possibility of English teaching; a couple of students came to see us for conversation practise the other day, one of whom reckons he can find us an opening either in the university where he teaches, or in the private institute where he studies. It wouldn’t be my first choice, but it would be foolish not to pursue the opportunity if it exists. The work I’m really looking for would be special needs teaching in a mainstream school, which is a growing area here, a couple of people have said that they could probably find me an opening, but so far nothing has come to light.

Meanwhile, I’m rolling my sleeves up for battle to get our kid from the village into school, be it a special school in San Fran, or the village school in Quebracho. The local governor of Quebracho is the gate-keeper for useful resources, but as far as I can gather only does that which is politically expedient, so I’m hoping to recruit the social worker to my cause, which may or may not happen since hers is a political appointment, made by the aforementioned inanimate object alias the local governor. The system here has to be experienced to be believed.

Our next piece of punctuation is our mission’s conference in Peru coming up next week. We hope to survive it, and then to reward ourselves for not being sacked by taking a couple of days off to see something around the Lima area. I’ve only been to Peru once in 1994, and then we didn’t make it to Lima. Apparently there’s some nature reserves on the coast south out of the city which I’m hoping might be worth a visit. Macchu Picchu is a long way away, and expensive, and our kid is at an age where he’ll almost definitely appreciate a walrus over an inca ruin.

And finally: What would you buy at this hard-ware store? Pink handled drill… chiffron overalls…?

The weather this summer is politely described as challenging (if you want more accurate but less polite listen to Robin Williams giving the weather forecast in Good Morning Vietnam). Imagine a fairly bad UK summer; rains a lot, with sunny-cloudy-might-rain days in between. OK, now imagine that the sunny-cloudy-might-rain days in between average 35 degrees, filled with mozzies, and so humid that you end up wishing it would just break and rain again. Then imagine that when it does rain half the city is underwater, and the unpaved roads (the rest of the city and the surrounding villages) have turned to slurry. All this slightly complicated by the fact that everything is cancelled when it rains.
I am still doing summer scheme for another week. The deal is that if it is actually raining at the scheduled start time of 9 a.m. then there will be no summer scheme for the day. This is complicated further by the fact that I am leaving home at 8.10 to go and collect kiddo from the village, so by 8 a.m I have to have predicted whether it will be raining or not in an hour’s time to know whether it is worth collecting him. He lives 10 km down a main road, and then two kilometres up a dirt track. When it rains the dirt-track becomes unpassable till it dries out again, which can take a day or two. In order to find out whether the road is passable I have to text kiddo’s mother (texting being the main form of communication in Argentina, particularly out in places where fixed-line phone technology was superceded before it ever arrived). The bit outside their small-holding usually dries out first because it has been sanded. The bit that dries out last is furthest away from their house, so she has to make a prediction based on what she can see. She doesn’t drive, they don’t have a car; sometimes her predictions are wildly off-beam.

Friday was one of those “The Clash” days (“Should I stay or should I go….?”) I hovered around and looked at the clouds till as late as I dared. I texted kiddo’s mother. She reckoned the road was OK at least so I decided to risk setting off. As I was leaving the city a couple of spots of rain started to fall. I texted mum again. She reckoned it wasn’t going to come to anything. I texted the person in charge of our group at summer scheme. He was just leaving home and reckoned it would still be happening. I drove the 10 kilometres to the start of the dirt track. Looked ominous, I parked up and got out for the multi-sensory inspection. Finding the road to be as soft as it looked, I decided not to drive through it, and texted mum again. She texted back about whether it was walkable. Meanwhile group-leader’s text interrupted our train of thought letting us know that summer scheme had been cancelled for the day anyway. So that was that. So far this week we’ve achieved summer scheme for both Monday and Tuesday, so it will probably rain tomorrow, (you see if it doesn’t, said Eeyore).

We’re back, both of us. Fantastic week, heat tempered by the surrounding hills, beautiful location just outside San Clemente in the hills on the West of Cordoba province;

Normal manner of traditional Scout camp activities took place; pitching tents;

Constructing things;

Hearty activities in the open air;

Ceremonies;

And quite a lot of plain goofing around. Actually I fell off that wall, not my most dignified moment….

The camp mascots, Joni and Luciano (two week’s difference in age), had a great time;

Bossing around their ever-willing fan club;

And now we’re sunburnt, scratched, bruised, filthy, exhausted and thoroughly content.

I’m off to scout camp in the morning. At five o’ clock in the morning to be precise; to avoid travelling in the heat. Joni is coming with me, and Martin is staying home (just in case you were thinking of breaking into the house… why not, everyone else is). Today has been a day filled with mummy-toddler conflicts in between trying to sort out our sleeping bags etc for a week’s summer camp. Here’s hoping that’s not the pattern set for the next seven days, otherwise there may only be one of us on the bus home next weekend.
Since I usually do the content while the technical guru has his mind on loftier concerns, blogging may or may not happen in my absence. Whatever, have a good week, and hopefully normal service will be resumed next Sunday. (Assuming I’m the one who makes it onto the bus home.)

I know why parents embarrass their teenagers; it’s the long-awaited revenge for all those times when the toddlers embarrassed the parents.
A thirty-five degree day with powercuts to boot, this afternoon we rounded off the errands by calling in to the ice-cream / coffee house. Coffee was off the menu owing to lack of electricity. Luckily they have a lot of good ice-cream flavours. We normally buy a pot of three flavours and all dip in with a spoon.

Joni sat very nicely until the ice-cream was gone, then he climbed down and roamed around the shop which he normally does. What he doesn’t normally do is realise that the people on the table behind us still have ice-cream, and clamber onto a spare seat at their table to take his chance. Indulgent grandmotherly lady then started feeding him her vanilla ice-cream. Encouraged by his success, he reappears at our table to collect his spoon, which he presents to his newly adopted complete strangers, who co-operate fully to feed him the rest of their ice-cream.

Will ten years be long enough planning time for an appropriately matching response?

In Argentina it only has to look like it might rain at some stage today for everything to be cancelled and no-one to go anywhere. There have merely been clouds in the sky at times when I’ve been the only person show up to a meeting and the organiser has expressed surprise that I turned out “in this weather”. “What weather?” I say, deciding whether it’s worth explaining yet again how much it rains in the UK and yet our economy still manages to creak along.
The clouds became heavy and black towards midday, and the kid who I need to deliver home lives ten kilometres down the Ruta (officially the equivalent of an A road, think just-about B road for quality), followed by two kilometres up a mud track. So I thought if we set off right now we might just be able to get up the track and back out again before it turns into a swamp. I collected Joni from nursery and off we went. The ruta was pretty dire, a lot of surface water but passable, if you’re OK with the lorries from the other direction periodically sending a sheet of water cascading across the windscreen. Luckily everything was going slowly, which is quite unusual here.

Knowing that mud track well, it’s the same one I was stuck in a couple of weeks ago, I deliberately turned in a couple of metres ahead of where I knew I’d get beached again. I didn’t get stuck, we skated across the surface of the not-even-remotely-hard shoulder and came to a halt at a jaunty angle with two wheels hanging over the grassy bank. The judges awarded 8.6 for artistic merit. At that exact moment Martin phoned my mobile to tell me he thought the weather was too bad and that I should delay leaving till it stopped a bit. So I was at least able to agree that the weather was indeed too bad….

I got out and clambered gingerly around the car before concluding that it was stable if rakish and that the kids would be safer in than out. AA and RAC are but distant memories. Critical as I may be towards those who cultivate their helpless female personations, there are times when. So I stood at the edge of the ruta looking wet and needy, next to my piruetted vehicle, and predictably the world stopped to pull us out.

Cue lots of thanks and no harm done. The car’s getting used to its regular layers of mud. Learning outcomes for the driver; 1. I am not called to Rally driving. 2. The hard shoulder is not called the hard shoulder in Argentina because it isn’t. 3. Despite my good British upbringing, there are some things that just don’t work in the rain.

Weeks are busy at the moment, Joni is at pre-school in the mornings, and I’m at the summer scheme, so the afternoons are juggled between taking life at two-year old level, and hoiking him around to do the grown-up errands that have to be done in order to maintain some sort of normality.
Weekends are less structured, so anything might happen and frequently does. This weekend the scouts were making a hundred dozen pastelitos which are little pastries filled with quince jelly (click on the link for recipe in Spanish or a photo in any language) to raise money for our forthcoming summer camp, so we made 30 dozen or so on Friday evening, before heading to Bible study group, which then turned into “drumming finger nails on table-top” when no-one else turned up. Saturday morning I was back at the scout HQ at 7 o’clock to put together the other 70 dozen. That’s a thousand two hundred pastelitos. No wonder we’re all sick of the sight of them.

Mid morning I was back home, Miguel arrived from his village of Porteña as usual to accompany Martin to the prison, so I prepared a swift lunch and off they went. Two o’clock I was all washed up, kiddo siesting, and I was more than ready for some down-time with the computer so I locked myself in the office. Within five minutes the house was broken into, that’s not quite correct, the house was audaciously walked into over the back wall and through the unlocked back door. I didn’t hear them for a while so they opened a lot of drawers and cupboards but didn’t actually take anything; pretty sure kids looking for cash and they didn’t find any since I only had 20 pesos (about three pounds fifty) and it was about my person. Eventually I twigged that the noises were occurring inside my house so I went to see, which I expect is what caused them to leave. Flippin dogs never squeaked, going to stop wasting money on food for them. So then there was some clearing up to do putting stuff back into the drawers etc that they’d emptied (the kids not the dogs). Hoping they were sufficiently disappointed not to return.

Next we were off to deliver pastelitos to various people who had requested them. Hot and sticky on the bike. Home, played in the plaza with Joni, followed by dunking him in the bath and bed. Left him with our favourite teenage babysitter hoorah while we went and met some friends for a quiet half.

Sunday, we set the alarm for eight-thirty to be up for church. Boy doesn’t yet know about weekends, so he went off at seven-o-seven and that was that. The alarm went off an hour and a half later to remind us of when we used to get up on those pre-Joni Sunday mornings. I was on Sunday school duty so I missed the sermon, which was mercifully short, probably for those listening as well as for those looking after the off-spring of the above. Small dramatic moment when the fan in my sunday school room burst into flames. Not sure how we’d fit that into today’s story of Abraham, probably better suited to Moses, but still, the kids enjoyed it.

Afternoon, kid slept siesta, we had an English-tv-fest. Every so often we catch up on the kind of rubbish that we wouldn’t lower ourselves to watch if we were actually in the UK. Kid woke up decided he wanted to take the dogs for a walk so that was next, blisteringly hot, didn’t stay out very long, followed by a brief turn around the plaza, on a swings, a trip to the supermarket, and then off to see some friends who have children a bit older than Joni. He has a mixed relationship with them; loves to go and see them, and then doesn’t understand why every game doesn’t always go his way; the little boy is five, isn’t yet prepared to make concessions for the stroppy two-year old on his patch. More than bed-time, threw Joni in the car, him protesting that he wasn’t tired “no sleeping”, arrived home some ten minutes later and he was begging for his bed, so that’s where he’s gone, and that’s where I’m headed. Next week starts tomorrow.

Took up the challenge (comment two blogs ago) to make a butternut squash cake. I pretended that squash was carrot and proceeded accordingly. We’re all still alive, and it got a thumbs up from my willing taste-testers.

It contains:
lump of squash, grated (skin left on)
SR flour
Sugar (I’d use brown in the UK but it’s hard to find here)
eggs
oil
walnuts, chopped
pinch of salt
ground cinamon
sodium bicarb (I’d use baking powder in the UK but it’s also hard to find here)

I think that’s all. Dump it all in a bowl and mix it up a bit. Pour into tin. Cook. Don’t ask me what temperature, my oven’s not that sophisticated. The filling is just a tangy buttercream; icing sugar, butter or soft marg, and juiced half a lemon.