Martin & Hazel Frost

Incest is alive and well and living in Argentina. I have been told lots of times about the practice, officially outlawed but still continuing in rural areas, whereby fathers “initiate” their daughters into sex, but this is the first time I have definitely encountered its practice, and in this case the disabled child whose father is also his grandfather.
I’m sure if I was a proper “deep south” preacher I would probably have a sermon already written about the sins of the fathers being visited even unto the third generation. In the meantime I am trying to figure out how to respond to the real child bearing a complicated set of social and educational needs, most of which have apparently not been addressed during any of his seven years of life so far. If I ever do get to talk about any of the other stuff I expect it will only be because I have first done the grind and put in the time building the relationships with, and being perceived to be responding to the practical needs of, the little boy and his complex family. In Argentina this is known as “earning the right to the floor”.

The nursery where Joni goes does birthdays on Fridays, and since he missed his week when we were in England, he had his turn this Friday. I made him a train cake which he seemed to be quite pleased with, he’s been saying “Joni cake train” at random intervals ever since, and he came home with toys, sweets and balloons.

Saturday and Victor, our senior Scout-leader (an adorably grandfatherly type and a traditional Scout in all the best senses of the word) had made these string and wood crucifixes as presents for all the mothers among us for Mothers’ Day today (2nd Sunday of October in Argentina). Personally I think it is beautiful so it’s up on our bookcase, and we are offering odds for how many days might be allowed to pass before someone gently suggests that displaying such a thing might be taken as idolatrous by “real Christians”. We’ll tackle that one when we come to it.

Still in my Scout uniform and I had a hospital visit to do on the way home to see someone who (only just) survived her suicide attempt. It was a poignant visit, hard to know what to say, recognising that the standard “hope you get better soon” platitudes would be miles off beam, and particularly thinking about her and her four young kids on Mother’s Day today. Joni took one look at all the tubes and apparatus and recommended “nice sleep”, which was probably far more sensible than anything I came up with. On the way back I found myself singing the Adrian Snell song “Silence” from his musical “Beautiful or What”, where the voice of God character sings

I celebrated the moment I gave you life
And you are mine

And reflecting on how many layers of fallen world debris get in the way of knowing and believing what ought to be such a simple truth.

Say that you love me
the way that I am
I have given you life without question
love with no blame
What if the world deserts me
I’ll cause your heart to sing
the sound that you take for silence
is the beating of angels’ wings

”Spring is here, oh spring is hereLife is skittles and life is beer…”

Tom Lehrer, mathematician and musician, emerges from obscurity of lecturing maths at Harvard to create a minor storm with his musical talent, writes and performs a fistful of songs until he has sung what he wanted to say about issues that interest him, and then disappears again behind the dusty blackboard of academia. Fantastic. The coming of spring always has me humming;

”All the world seems in tune on a spring afternoon
When we’re poisoning pigeons in the park…” oops.

We may not have skittles here, but the beer is OK, and even the San Francisco pigeons are proper countryside varieties rather than urban flying rats. But more important than pigeons, the spring birds are back. Our two favourite burrowing owls have reappeared on their usual fence-posts, and I’ve seen a couple of little hummingbirds performing a courting ritual, and the scissor tailed flycatchers, and the red-breasted blackbirds, and these;

Flame red “brasitas” (brasa being Spanish for embers). They look like they should belong somewhere much more exotic than the agricultural east of Cordoba, it’s a real treat to see them. This photo’s not mine and won’t be till I’ve saved up again and replaced the good zoom lens that was unfortunately attached to my camera when it was stolen. Till then I’m borrowing bird photos from Aves Pampa which is a really useful site on Argentinean birds for any budding southern cone ornithologists, with good photos and material in English

Today was a bank holiday. There are lots of bank holidays in Argentina, the UK could do with borrowing a couple. This one was for “día de la raza” “day of the race”, as in ethnicity rather than the two-fifty at Newmarket. Modern Argentina is essentially a nation of immigrants, although most of them have been here for a generation or two longer than we have. We spent the day exploring some of Santa Fe, the next province east from us, we made it to Rafaela, a town about eighty kms away, and from there did a little circuit of a couple of nearby villages. We drove a bit, walked a bit, stopped for ice-cream, Joni played on the swings; we drove a bit, walked a bit, stopped for another ice-cream, Joni played on some different swings… repeat to fade. All agreed it was a fine use of a mild and sunny spring bank-holiday.

The rest of the blood doning story…
After I left the hospital having been unsuccessful in my attempt to give blood on Tuesday, my needy friend contacted the haematology department to find out whether her blood doners had been through.

She was told by someone (?) in the haematology department that I had arrived but that they hadn’t been able to take my blood because I was having my period(!!) Recovering from the sheer audacity of the lie, I was left feeling rather intrigued as to whether Argentina actually has some sort of archaic psuedo-Levitical law on blood letting from women with their monthly emissions.

However, when I finally managed to get to give blood on Friday (we all took turns to be sick this week, airline bugs) I was subjected to an indepth questionaire leaving little to the imagination over how many drugs I take or whether I’ve had anal sex recently, but not the briefest hint of a mention of my menstrual cycle. Sometimes you just have to bow to the sheer creativity of the lying that goes on in this place.

Swallowing the overwhelming desire to have a sorely deserved rant about the beloved organisation we work for, but (for the moment at least) we are still working for them, so public rant maybe not the best policy for a long and peaceful life even if it is well merited. For now, just understand that I am more than slightly annoyed.

Cordoban essayist Marcos Aguinis believes that individualism is as much an issue in Argentina as it is in the northern hemisphere, just expressed differently. He argues that where societies in the north believe that keeping rules maximises the freedom of the individual, in Argentina the individual believes that such conventions curtail their freedom. That means that although collectives such as the family are stronger here than in the north, a concept of there existing a society outside of my personal collective is weaker.
Why am I thinking about this? Because I gave blood today and in Argentina nobody in their right minds would be persuaded to give blood merely for the benefit of society. So, the system is, that if you require blood you will need to provide your own blood doners from among your own collective – friends, colleagues, family. On really special occasions, like because you’re already unconscious, the hospital will graciously pour blood into you from their own surplus, but should you regain consciousness the onus will be upon you to replenish the necessary units.

In general Argentinean health care is quite good from what I have seen both in the public and private sectors, and having been inside a few hospitals in Argentina for various reasons (including giving blood a couple of times) I thought I knew what to expect. However, the hospital in San Francisco really is scraping the healthcare barrel, it even made the NHS look like first world medicine (actually the medicine in the NHS probably is first world, it’s the torturous administrative routes to get to it that are more reminiscent of a bygone soviet era, but we digress). Dirty, depressing, poorly signposted, toilets locked shut (not that you’d want to risk using them), dark unventilated corridors packed with waiting parents and their bawling kids… I won’t go on, it’s not pretty.

By the cunning device of asking the policeman at the door, and then being redirected half-way, I managed to locate the haematology lab. There was a rottweiler sitting at the reception desk. “Yes?” “what do you want?” she barked. Stifling the urge to apologise for spoiling her day, I explained that I needed to give blood for my sick friend. “Sit there”. So I did. For an hour. At ten o’clock a guy in a lab coat came out and locked the door, so I ahemmed and he looked surprised to see me. “it’s ten o’clock, we’re closing now” he said. “But I’ve been here since nine o’clock” I said. “Yes, there were a lot of people” he said, to which I almost responded “not while I was here there weren’t” but decided against it. “Come back on Thursday” he said. And that was that.

Combine the above with the other incident involving the three blokes in the corridor who asked where I came from and then proceeded to comment loudly on the Falklands-Malvinas in between comparing the merits of English versus Argentinean pornography and I say thank you for the policeman, the only civil person in entire place as far as I could make out. He even said goodbye to me as I left, let’s hope it’s him on duty again on Thursday.

As part of their orientation programme, Latin Link used to organise a “simulation game” (maybe still do… hope not!) As far as I remember its main messages were about how you can expect to be poorly treated by the rude and marauding natives. It was exaggerated and racist, apparently designed to scare candidates into trusting no-one. And I remembered it today as I was cycling back muttering to myself, because for the first time in fifteen years – yes, I did the Latin Link simulation game for the first (of several) times back in 1994 – so for the first time in fifteen years, the Latin Link simulation game actually came true, which might not have benefitted society very greatly or even at all, but it made me smile a bit.

For a few months I’ve been going out to the village of Quebracho Herrado, getting to know folk, particularly families with kids who need support at school, and a couple of disabled people. Mostly I’ve done all the running, relationship building, visiting, knocking, offering. Mostly people have been polite and welcoming, but not enthusiastically enough to come to me if I didn’t arrive at their door first. However, go away for a couple of weeks, and according to the old lady next door, there has been a stream of people seeking me out, and being annoyed that I wasn’t there. It will be interesting to see if any of them come back now I am there.
I’d written a little project to offer secondary school for adults and young people, which we thought was quite a nice way of offering something to the community, and, frankly, justifying our existence. However, go away for a couple of weeks, and come back to find that secondary school for adults is about to be offered through at the local primary school, starting tomorrow night. Fantastic that it’s happening, but in terms us defining something meaningful to offer to the community here, back to the drawing board.

There are a lot of statistics available about destitution in Argentina. Quebracho Herrado has a percentage of people who are probably fairly low down the foodchain, but very few people in real need as far as I can figure out. I’m torn between Hazel’s desire to be somewhere where I can roll my sleeves up and actually do something useful, versus the church’s desire to plant a church. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive, obviously, but in this context I wonder if we are here under slightly erroneous pretences and if maybe we have to think of our self-justification exercise in terms of how close we are to planting a church, rather than how close we are to serving the community here… and of course the proper missionary would say that planting a church was serving the community… so at least some of our supporters will be happy, just not sure I agree with them all the way.

We arrived safely home at 4.30 this morning after two nights’ travelling, all very smooth, just rather long. The plan was to sleep in and deal with the day when we got to it. However, no-one had told Joni about the time change, hence he was running around the house at ten to seven, so we sent him to nursery like a normal day, debated going back to bed ourselves, but decided to take a siesta later instead.
So here we are back in Argentina. The first thing we noticed was that someone had cut the grass; hooray. And the second thing was that the boiler didn’t work; boo. We’re getting used to the idea that leaving our house in other peoples’ hands here will always result in some minor disappointments on return; (different cultural understandings around the concept of looking after other peoples’ property), but in fact we have done quite well this time, bits of cutlery missing, no food in the house, but nothing requiring any major attention other than the boiler which in fairness probably would still have broken down had we been here.

England was good, felt a lot like a holiday, been a while since we had one of those, nice to see people, regretting not having seen a couple of folk, but time was short. A few days we did little more than walk in the woods, followed by finding some ducks (pigs, sheep…) to look at, and eating ice-cream. We struggled out for a couple of curries, and met up with friends for a pint or two. Most days included a reminder of how we aren’t quite as English as we used to be. Little things like “why is the glove compartment on the wrong side of the car?” or slightly more worrying “why is the gear stick not in this door pocket?” Traffic lights on roundabouts are quite a complicated idea and that is speaking as someone who used to drive them every day in my past life, I imagine that someone who has never been in the UK before might really struggle, especially since some of the signs and lane markings are ambiguous to put it politely. As well as doing several roundabouts twice having failed to figure out where to get off, one time we accidentally ended up on the M11, and boy are those junctions a long way apart, especially if you didn’t want to be there in the first place. However, the real winner that we never got our heads around was the fact that England shuts in the middle of the afternoon. Four o’clock in some places, most others at five, and six is considered late opening; Argentina is just about waking up for the evening by then. Yes we know all the good climatic reasons why Argentina is a siesta culture and England isn’t, but even English toddlers sleep in the afternoons. It seemed like there was barely a gap between junior waking up and the rest of the world knocking off for the day, we never figured out how proper English parents must organise themselves.

For Joni the delights were mostly culinary; cheese (cheddar and stilton), baked beans, popadoms with mango chutney, and blackberries. We were in the right season for those, and he demanded them every time we took the dog over the hill; “ba-bees, more ba-bees.” He is also now highly impressed by planes having been on several, so he was in his element at my parents’ house which is frequently under the flight paths for both Luton and Stanstead “pane, more pane”, although he was pretty fed up with the whole plane thing by the time we were boarding the third flight yesterday. When he moved into “kicking and screaming and throwing myself on the floor because I’m two so I can” mode yesterday, I suggested he might look out of the window and he brightened up a little… “Cows and horses?” he said hopefully, ‘fraid not babe.

All this year I have been saving up to replace my digital SLR that was stolen back in January, and I finally achieved it a few days ago. I’d hoped to be able to do this while we were in the UK or at least somewhere other than Argentina; better prices, and wider choice of models. I’ve gone for a Nikon D90 as I know my way round the Nikon family, and the D90 has a good chunky feel about it; and I was able to buy an ex-display model equals hefty discount. So I’ve been busily testing it out so that I’m satisfied with how it works before we take it back to Argentina…

Out walking the dog over the fields behind my parents’ house.

The real reason why we are here in England apart from buying cameras; the wedding of our friends Dave and Caroline last Saturday; congratulations and welcome to the battlefield guys.

Joni’s second birthday co-incided a couple of days after the wedding so it was nice that we were able to incorporate it into the trip and share it with his long-distance grandparents. Joni has very little concept of yesterday today or tomorrow, so marking the passage of a year is fairly irrelevant to him at this stage in his life. However, his experience at play-school in Argentina has taught him that “song plus candles equals cake”, and he was wildly excited to discover that it was his turn this time, and it didn’t take him long to get the hang of opening presents either.

Made it to church, nearly on time. In fact perfectly on time by Argentinean standards, albeit slightly after the service had started in English terms. Fantastic welcome from many surprised people since we hadn’t told anyone we were coming. Disadvantage of not telling anyone we were coming was having to go round the loop of how long are you here for/ when are you going back / hasn’t Joni grown / how old is he now with every single new conversation. Serves us right. Only one person asked if we had had a nice holiday(!) and she has a label so she’s allowed to. Church followed by good pub lunch with Tia and tribe, should insert hyperlink at this point but I can’t remember what I have to type and I’m being too lazy to look it up, so to go to Tia’s blog it’s “Behind the Child” on the bar on the right hand of the screen. And now we’re worn out with doing very little and suddenly it’s become bedtime.
The observant will have noticed that we’ve now put some content into the sermons and bible studies sections on the top bar. These are in Spanish, and Spanish will probably continue to be the main language of those sections for the foreseeable, given our current audience. So for anyone who reads Spanish and might find our stuff useful, it’s there. Obviously we would prefer to be acknowledged for anything you use, but we also recognise that imitation is the best form of flattery…