Martin & Hazel Frost

Some truly heartwarming sights from this weekend. Yesterday we saw two “cycling proficiency” type childrens’ events going on in Cordoba. About a dozen 8-10 year olds in each group, all with their shiny bikes, cycle helmets, and little orange vests, were being guided through the traffic on the main roads in the centre of Cordoba. Today as we were going through another town of Arroya, we found that they were having a “bike day”. Hundreds of people of all ages and sizes, with bikes equally of all ages and sizes, were converging on small patch of concrete in the sunshine. Maybe I am jumping to premature conclusions, but if this is the first evidence of government promoting a resurgence in cycling then I’m all for it.
Back in the UK, I find the following on the news:
“About 700 cyclists in various states of undress have cycled through central London in another leg of the World Naked Bike Ride in naked protest against oil dependency. The ride draws attention to the elegant simplicity of the bicycle, and celebrates the power and individuality of our bodies. It’s ‘as bare as you dare’ so full nudity is not required”.

Power to the bike. I think it is great stuff and I’ll say so to anyone who’s listening, and probably to quite a lot of people who aren’t.

Here bikes are the toys of the rich, and the transport of the poor. There is a big divide between the kids of the less affluent who walk and bike to school, and kids of the more affluent who are driven from door to door. Road accident statistics in Argentina are particularly shocking, at around 7,500 deaths a year. What is interesting is who these statistics include. For example, the poor kids who walk to school barely feature. The slightly less-poor kids who bike to school also barely feature. So who are the 7,500? By far the biggest group are young drivers and their passengers. The affluent kids who spent their childhood on the back seat, move to the front seat and kill each other. Ironically, the attempt at protection results in kids being denied the opportunity to develop the very skills that might have saved them. Wrapping kids in tin boxes is only at best a short-term safety feature, whereas allowing them to take graded risks in the short-term produces better odds for long term survival.

For a few years, I’ve been doing informal research on “why people drive their kids around”. Apart from the “safety” fallacy, see above, there are two other main reasons. One is the “99 lemmings” discourse; “everyone else does it, and I don’t want my kids to feel different”. This is an interesting hierarchy of priorities. Not hurting a child’s feelings becomes more important than the life-skills that might actually lead to their long-term survival. Little wonder we lack the ability to consider such wider details as frying the planet.

The second reason is that we have uncritically sold out to a secularised work-ethic which says that the highest ideal is to aspire to do as many things as possible. So driving ones kids becomes the tool that enables them to achieve their six extra curricular activities before tea. And again, no-one seems to find it unusual that the kid’s extra flute lesson occupies a higher priority than their long term survival skills, or ensuring that there is a planet worth surviving in. We live in strange times.

When I was a teen, and the older folk around me were doing the “youth of today” script, I used to find myself thinking “well so far my generation has not been in government, or started a war, or produced a serial killer”. I also used to think that as I left my youth behind, I would inevitably find myself understanding and identifying with the attitudes being expressed by those adults. In fact today I am even more convinced that it is just not valid to hold kids responsible for the outcomes of decisions taken by the so-called adults around them. So here we are, on the cusp of parenthood ourselves, wondering what uncritical attitudes we in our turn are going to foist upon our own off-spring. Fry planet fry.

First a disclaimer. “Third World Country” is in quote marks, because it’s a derogatory term not of my choosing. However, it is the term in most common usage in Argentina, and it is also probably the most relevant to the content that I’m writing in this instance.
I’ve been writing this blog entry for months, so I thought I should just bite the bullet and put it up, even though I’m not really happy with it yet. Think of it as a work in progress. It comes as a result of many conversations that I have had on the idea that “Argentina is a third world country”. I would like to explain why Argentina is not a third world country, and to explore some of the issues around these beliefs.

According to the United Nations
According to the United Nations, Argentina is one of the richest countries in the world. This is calculated using the Human development index which can be found in the United Nations development programme’s Human Development Report 2006. The Human Development Index is a comparative measure of life expectancy, literacy, education, standards of living, well being, and child-welfare. Countries are ranked according to their position in the world where 1 is the highest, currently Norway with an HDI of 0.965, and 177 is the lowest, currently Niger with an HDI of 0.311. As well as an individual rank, countries are also grouped into three broad categories according to high, medium, and low human development.

In 2006 Argentina was ranked 36th in the world with an HDI of 0.863, making it the highest ranked country in Latin America. It is categorised under the high level of human development, along with Chile (HDI 0.859), and Uruguay (0.851), the three Latino countries represented in the highest group. To give an idea in global terms, these countries can be seen on a par with many Eastern European countries, a couple of Gulf states, and several islands in the Caribbean.

According to Paul Samuelson
United-Statesian economist Paul Samuelson proposed a five-category economic model to include the three traditional categories of first, second and third world, plus Japan and Argentina as separate entities on the grounds that neither fitted into any of the three groups. He later revised this theory to four categories; essentially, the rich, the poor, Japan, Argentina, on the grounds that “rich” and “poor” were easy enough to define, but nobody could explain why a country with as few resources as Japan could be so economically successful, nor, conversely, why a country as rich as Argentina could consistently make such a mess of its economy. This tells us that Argentina’s economic past and present, while complex, don’t belong in a “third world” box.

According to Marcos Aguinis
In “el atroz encantó de ser argentinos”, Cordoban essayist Aguinis explores the paradoxes that have shaped the culture and economy of Argentina over the last hundred years or so. The very name Argentina comes from the Latin for “silver”, and a hundred years ago Argentina was the seventh richest economy in the world. However even at that time, paradoxes were observed and commented on by outsiders. Aguinis quotes Mexican comic Mario Moreno as saying “Argentina is comprised of millions of inhabitants who want to bankrupt it, although they haven’t yet succeeded”, and French administrator Gastón Jeze in “The public finances of the Argentinian republic”, concluded that “there exists a profound and radical contrast between the economic prosperity, and the disorder of the public finances”.

According to Freire
Grass roots educator Paulo Freire is best known for his work among the oppressed in Brazil of the early 1960’s. However, it was his later experience in Harvard, USA which changed his opinions considerably. Here Freire discovered that issues of poverty – in both material and human forms; repression, exclusion and powerlessness, exist in very diverse communities: the ‘third world’ exists within the ‘first world’ and the struggle for liberation in both is essentially the same. Although the UK and the USA are considered to be ‘successful’ economies by established standards, both also display wide disparities of wealth and opportunity. Thus from Freire’s experience in the USA he extended his definition of the Third World from a geographical to a political concept. In Freire’s language therefore, a “Third World Country” would be a false concept, since the Third World relates to the person’s experience of exclusion, rather than their current location.

According to Hollywood
Argentina comes off quite badly when compared with Hollywood. In Hollywood everyone is tall, good looking, rich, has straight teeth, and never goes to the toilet or gets sick. Naturally the facts are slightly different. The diversity of experience which surprised Freire in the 1960’s is little different in many respects today. In the USA there are over 46 million US citizens without medical insurance (Kaiser Commission Jan 2007) and uninsured children in the USA who are admitted to hospital are twice as likely to die as their insured counterparts (Families USA, March 2007). That means that there are more people in the USA without access to adequate health care than the total population of Argentina. Likewise I have had various discussions with people here who are adamant that there cannot possibly be any homelessness in the UK. The reality is that Shelter works with 170,000 homeless and vulnerably housed people every year in the UK. We of “The West” have a lot to answer for in terms of the images that we peddle of ourselves.

“How do you explain why Argentina’s public services aren’t any better if we are not a Third World Country?” Because however badly Argentina seems to be doing, at this moment there are nearly two hundred other countries who are faring worse, and the thirty or so who appear to be doing better aren’t as perfect as their Hollywood image suggests either.

Welcome to the real world
The other side of the coin is that the reason why the Hollywood image peddles so successfully is because people want to buy it. If someone else has managed to be tall, good looking, rich, with straight teeth and never need to go to the toilet, then maybe I can too. If I perceive myself to be poor and you to be rich, then you hold the solution to my problems. If I have none of the answers and you have all of the answers, then all I need is access to your answers. Accepting that I am richer than I think I am, and that you are less perfect than I think you are, means accepting the possibility that there might not be any answers after all, for any of us, and thus living with the reality that this world could never be as God intended it to be, and that Christ really is our only hope. And that’s a brave decision.

This week at the Hospital Rawson I was standing in the corridor talking to a transvestite and his friend, and I found myself thinking “I have to pray with this guy”, and since that’s not often the first thing I think, I thought I’d better act on it. So, when the other volunteers were preparing to move on, I said:- – “I think we should pray with these guys”, and one of the others said:-
– “No, we don’t need to, they prayed to receive Jesus a couple of weeks ago”. So I took my tiny shred of patience with both hands and suggested that it might be OK for them to pray more than once in their lives.

It reminded me of one of my favourite comments made about ten years ago, by a colleague in mission who said:-
– “Not until the last poor b*** on earth has been forced to ‘hear the gospel’ may we finally begin to realise that we haven’t yet started on the Great Commission”

We have a friend staying with us at the moment from the UK. We went to meet him in Buenos Aires and spent a few days touristing there, before bringing him to Cordoba with us to experience some real life.
If you’re ever in Buenos Aires, the obligatory tourist circuit includes; the Plaza de Mayo (the main square), at one end of which is the Casa Rosada (the pink equivalent of the White House), Calle Florida (very busy pedestrianised street in the heart of the CBD), Avenida Corrientes (one of the most important arterial streets, with lots of activity both day and night), Caminita (area on the port with brightly painted houses, used to be one of the poorest neighbourhoods, now attracts plenty of tourist dollars), La Boca stadium (home of Boca Juniors football team) and Tigre (town on the river delta). From Tigre we took a boat through the delta, ending up in the town of Carmelo on the Uruguayan side of the river. The trip through the delta was interesting, and of course the border crossing meant that our friend received his all important Uruguayan passport stamp. I can imagine Carmelo might be quite a sweet little town in sunshine, but as it was cold and drizzling, we ran out of ideas for entertainment quite early, hence we lurched from coffee, to lunch, to ice-cream, before catching the boat back to Tigre.

One day we branched out and went out to see our friends Ramon and Francis in Rafael Castillo. Rafael Castillo is a neighbourhood about an hour and a half away from the city centre, and definitely not on the tourist circuit, which is a shame, because it’s a great neighbourhood; Hazel lived and worked there for two years, and some of my favourite people in the world are in Rafael Castillo. When you pluck up the courage to visit, you will find that people are warm and welcoming, there is a strong sense of community, there are virtually no multi-national corporations, the ice-cream is great, as is the meat which is sold from road-side barbecues at lunch time.

Oxymoron: A rhetorical figure in which incongruous or contradictory terms are combined, as in “a deafening silence” and “a mournful optimist”. (dictionary.reference.com)
A friend of ours has kindly given us a subscription to “The Briefing” magazine. It is a fairly middle of the road evangelical journal, and to be honest we are so grateful to have reading material in English that we usually read it from cover to cover as soon as it arrives in the postbox.

This month I was reading a book review, during which the reviewer was lamenting the lack of Biblical content in the publication he was critiquing. He gave several examples, as in the following:

“One curious example can be found in chapter 3 where he describes a “World without God” with examples from poetry, Pink Floyd and Nietsche, but without a single reference to any Bible passage…. Another is when he uses Dorcas (of Acts 9:36-42) and the Samaritan woman (of John 4:1-29) as models of the way that we might evangelise. It’s not that we can learn nothing from Dorcas and the Samaritan woman, but to choose them as examples over and above biblical instruction….”

Now this guy’s Bible might be different to mine, but I have managed to locate both Dorcas and the Samaritan woman in my Bible, and therefore I was left slightly astounded by the inference that these examples were somehow as “unbiblical” as Pink Floyd or Nietsche.

It might be that the guy has an unfortunate writing style, or that the editing job could have been more thorough, but I suspect that it is closely related to the viewpoint that “if it isn’t Paul it doesn’t count”. I haven’t seen it on sale, but I know there is a marketing opportunity for a “wallet edition evangelical bible” starting from Romans and ending with Philemon. It would be an instant best seller.

I don’t know the reason for this phenomenon, I imagine it might be because actually we have no idea what to do with the Bible, and rather than say “we have no idea what to do with the Bible”, we try instead to stick with the bits that we think that we can most easily reduce to “three rules for holy living”.

What I do know is that this phenomenon needs challenging, if only because in some quarters the phrase “evangelical thinking” is hovering on the brink of being relegated to our list of favourite oxymorons, along with “police intelligence”, “Microsoft works” or “airline food”.

Now we have a new piece of paper to add to our collection. We have stopped being “precarious residents”, and we are now “temporary residents”. This gives us two years during which we are free to come and go at will, and is also our ticket to progress to the next stage of the residency process, which is to go to the civil registry office and start jumping new hoops to obtain official identity numbers. Having an identity number would be rather useful. They are needed for many aspects of daily life; having phone-line or a mobile phone in our own name, having a driving licence, participating in courses, and even when buying electrical goods (as we discovered when trying to buy a CD player.) We went to the civil registry, who kindly furnished us with a new list of documents, to collect and bring to the next appointment on the 30th of May. Watch this space.

In the childrens’ home in San Marcos for two mornings a week I am working on literacy and numeracy skills with three young people who, for various reasons, are not going to school. They’re great kids, I’ve been working them as hard as I dare, and we are pleased with our progress. One is a lad of twelve, who went to school for the first time last year. It was an unmitigated disaster, and he was sent home by ten o’clock every morning for fighting. So last November we gave up with school, and started working with him from zero again. Over the last couple of months he has really progressed to having a basic foundation of literacy, and in the last couple of weeks we have witnessed a real breakthrough as he is beginning to realise that reading is a transferrable skill which is actually useful to him, and he is finding words everywhere he looks…. from posters on the wall, to CD cases and even food packets. In the afternoons I focus on the children who do go to school, coaching the kids who struggle, and challenging those who are further ahead. I use a range of activities and different types of literature, including stories from the Bible. In the last couple of weeks with a few of the older kids we have been looking at the structure of the Bible and how it works…. the Old Testament, and the New Testament, using the index to discover different books, and looking up chapters and verses.
Visiting another city, I was talking with a lady from Bolivia, about a trip that she had recently made back to her home village after an absence of many years. What had impacted her the most was the almost complete death of Christian witness in her valley. When she had left there had been an evangelical work, with about 35 active families, and now there was nothing. She attributed this to several reasons. One the local governer and the “Catholic” priest were hand in glove, to the extent that people are fined for not attending mass. Two that there was no permanent Christian leadership, and the teachers who used to visit from the city had stopped coming. Three that there are a lot of people coming through peddling different religions and philosophies, and the local people listen to all of them without discernment. Four, the high incidence of alcoholism and lack of social-economic opportunity in the area. And yet, she found that when she produced her Bible and started reading from it, there was a real hunger and desire to know more, and the people came and sat on the ground around to listen. So what had gone wrong? Quite simply she believes that the uniting factor behind all the reasons above is a lack of literacy. Without literacy, people don’t know that they have religious freedom, so they don’t know that they are free not to go to mass without paying a fine. They are unable to read the Bible so they cannot learn or grow for themselves, hence they have no tools to discern between good and bad teaching. And they are unable to develop socially, or take advantage of economic opportunities. Thus the cycle grinds on.

I believe we can see a clear link between the two accounts above. Sometimes I have met people, or read articles by people, who want to say that literacy work is “secondary mission”, or even “not Gospel work”. To those people, in the light of these experiences, I would like to offer a word of suggestion: “Rethink”.