Martin and Hazel's Blog

One of the best and worst characteristics of Argentina is her spontaneity. Sometimes it drives us mad that nothing is ever organised until two minutes before it happens. Other times we love not having to do that “comparing diaries” thing when we want to see people, which leaves everyone free to “seize the moment”.

11.30 Sunday morning, church had finished earlier than usual, so what shall we do? “Let’s throw a couple of chickens on the fire and invite some people round”.

12.30 Sunday lunchtime the scene looks something like this:




1.30 Sunday afternoon the scene looks something like this:




Sergio, an ex-prisoner friend of Martin’s came to stay for a bit this week to take some time out from his not-too-easy home situation in Cordoba, so of course we did the obligatory trip to Miramar on Monday afternoon to see the ruined town and the flamingos on the salt-marsh:




I have also been to Quebracho Herrado a couple of times, particularly making friends with a family who have a disabled child who isn't receiving any schooling or stimulation... I'm hoping to build up enough trust with the mother that at some stage she might let me take him out for a walk around the village on my own, as a starting point for working with him and see where we go from there. This is a rural community, trust takes time to build and people are both curious and suspicious of outsiders. In fact as I was walking round the village the other day, a lady on a bike slowed down on her way past me and asked "¿Quien sos?" ("Who are you?") which was honest if slightly breathtaking in its directness! Question is... what is the answer, and is it the same as the answer she was looking for?

Joni and I were in Buenos Aires for a couple of days last week for team meetings. San Francisco to Buenos Aires involves a night each way on a bus, and since it is the first time I have travelled with him on my own, and since the last time we took him on the night bus he yelled and screamed the whole way, I was feeling rather daunted by the prospect. However, happily to say, he was highly made up by the whole transport theme; going on a big bus, sitting upstairs and looking down on the lorries and cars and buses and even the odd train. We didn’t get a lot of sleep but it was all good humoured and we didn’t prevent anyone else from sleeping which is probably a good thing in the interests of international relationships and all.

Anyway, the photo I didn’t take... Down by the river in Buenos Aires is a stretch of road where the lorries pull over to rest. While the lorries are resting, the drivers meanwhile are “entertained” by painted women clad in scanty underwear and impossible shoes (and painted men clad in scanty women’s underwear and impossible shoes. The transvestite sex industry is bigger in Buenos Aires than anywhere else in the world. Is that a valid claim to fame?). They strut their stuff openly between the cabs. Since last time I passed this scene a large sign has been erected: “No fishing allowed, of any sort”. It’s probably bad taste, but it made me smirk.

I had one of those conversations the other day... It opened thus:

“Everything OK for Tuesday?”
Me: “what about Tuesday?”
“The women’s meeting... (person) said you were going to be doing the teaching for the women’s meetings for the time being”

I really don’t mind doing the women’s meeting, I can even cope with not being consulted, but it would have been good at least to have been told... Welcome to Argentina. Thus I have initiated a series on “little known women in the Bible”, which will run either until I run out of women to talk about, or until the women of San Francisco become fed up with me and find themselves another teacher!

And thus another week has disappeared, filled with things, both expected and otherwise.




Our stove has been installed. This is a traditional wood-burning stove known as a “salamandra”. It heats our main living area very nicely and we are both getting more adept at lighting it. Martin’s first attempt involved a litre of diesel, which was dramatically effective, if smelly. One thing we are lacking is an axe, I did manage to split a log yesterday by wedging a tea-spoon into a crevice, but it is less than ideal.




After months of faffing, the community project in the village of Quebracho Herrado looks like it might actually be going somewhere. I have driven there four days this week for different reasons. We have rented a room, which from my point of view might not have been the highest priority, but having arrived at this point, now we need to furnish it as well as working on growing relationships in the community. I had a couple of families to visit this week, except that now I also have an unplanned trip to Buenos Aires this week, so the visits will probably need to go on hold again.




I planted a little lemon sapling at home, trying to fill the spaces that are currently filled with weeds, with things that don’t need lots of looking after and might give us useful produce. Am also hoping that it might provide some shade for the herbs when it grows a bit.




While Guides are rather thin on the ground in Argentina, (although they do exist), Scouts on the other hand are quite plentiful; there are three units that I know of in San Francisco, and these days they are all mixed gender anyway. In Argentina the Scout association is strongly linked with the Catholic church, which personally I wouldn’t have a problem working with, but it might have caused me to be cast into the outer darkness by some non-Catholic Christians around here. Fortunately, one of the groups here in San Fran is not directly affiliated to any church, so I made myself known to them and was invited to join. On my second week I found myself in charge of a cub-pack, which was a bit hairy since I don’t yet know the kids’ names. Luckily there were some stray venture scouts (called Caminantes) kicking around, who came and gave me a hand, and we all survived to tell the tale.




The last few days we have been entertaining Megan from Scotland, who has been doing her university language year in Cordoba. Today we went out touristing to a little place called Arroyito, whose main claim to fame is that it is the original home of “Arcor”, one of the biggest producers of chocolate in Argentina. It also has a nice river for walking and chilling out, and today we also watched the fire-brigade putting out a minor bush-fire near the river bank; there has been a drought for nearly a year here in Cordoba, things are pretty dry. Joni liked the fire engine, he has been practicing saying “nee-nor” to the pictures his Fireman Sam book!

Someone sent me a bunch of articles on practical theology which I am ploughing my way through in idle moments. The other day I was reading one by John Swinton (2003 Journal of Pastoral Theology) called “The Body of Christ has Down’s Syndrome”, in which he quotes a care worker as saying “I sometimes wonder if Jesus had Down ’s syndrome”.

When it came down to it, neither Swinton nor the careworker went on dogmatically to defend their hypothesis, if only because probability is stacked against them. But it is interesting to think that if a film-maker portrayed Jesus as having Down’s syndrome (to give but one example) it would definitely cause a reaction, be it positive or negative, and it would be most likely referred to by the critics as “making a statement”. Conversely, when Jesus is shown as being blonde and blue eyed, as in the film we endured enjoyed the other week, no-one bats an eye lid, even though statistically it is even less likely that Jesus was blonde than that he had Down’s syndrome. This portrayal of Jesus becomes even more questionable in the light of passages such as Isaiah 53 which suggest that Jesus had nothing striking about his appearance, and Mark 6 where they ask “Isn’t that the carpenter?" i.e. where did this common or garden bloke get this teaching from? The fact that scripture tells us virtually nothing about Jesus’ appearance means that we have to guess that he was probably quite similar to the people around him, so while he was unlikely to have had Down’s syndrome, he definitely wasn’t blonde.

I think this relates to something that Francis Young would refer to as the “idolization of Jesus” which when I first read that phrase I thought it was a strange concept, and I thought she was about to try and tell me why Jesus wasn’t really God or why he shouldn’t really be worshipped, but actually she went on to talk about how we create a false idol out of the real God. I suspect our reaction to “the Jesus with Down’s syndrome” compared with our non-reaction to “the blonde Jesus” is about our idolization of him, that it is OK (in our minds at least) to tell lies about Jesus as long as our fictitious image of him is one which is recognised as positive by our own society. The net result of which is that we prevent Jesus from challenging our stereotypes by ensuring that our “graven image” of him fits right into them.

Mama Mía but it’s cold. At this moment it is 4 degrees both outside and in. Our house is huge and wonderful and versatile and unheated. We have just bought a gas heater and a wood-burning stove, but they both need installing. This may happen tomorrow. In the meantime we are wearing three jumpers each, and sleeping in thermal underwear.

Meanwhile, our child has learned how to say “mine”. Actually he says it in Spanish “mío”. Things he has designated as his include all mobile phones in the universe, all the lollypops, particular any that are already in other kids’ mouths, all the footballs, the swimming pool where we go a couple of times a week (“pool mío”), the car keys, daddy’s glasses, daddy himself (“daddy mío”) and the little girl who lives round the corner (“Abeeeee mío”). Her usual name is Abril, she’s nine years old and Joni adores her. She and her little mates quite often come round and borrow him to go and play on the swings in the plaza just across the road from us. It’s a fine arrangement; Joni gets to go to the park, the girls get a “walking talking living doll” to play with, and we enjoy a few minutes’ peace while still being able to eye-ball them all from out of the window. Everyone’s a winner.

I was supposed to producing pizzas for our cell-group’s film evening. After cycling round three supermarkets and discovering there was apparently some sort of national shortage of ready-made pizza bases, I gave up and bought the flour to make them instead. Handily printed on the side of the flour packet I found recipes for bread and pizza bases, thus saving me from having to trawl the internet to find out.

The instructions read thus.... (in Spanish)

1. Put the ingredients into a bowl, apart from the water.
2. Add a little warm water. To achieve this mixture (“What mixture?” thinks Hazel) mix one part of very hot water with one part of cold water. (“oh, they’re telling me how to mix two temperatures of water together”)

While I’m touched by the efforts to which Pureza have gone to ensure that my pizza turns out perfectly, I rather suspect that anyone who needs to be told how to mix hot water with cold water in order to make warm water, probably shouldn’t be allowed in the kitchen unsupervised. For the record, a kilo of Pureza flour makes six round pizzas and they all tasted fantastic.

A not very News-worthy Roundup of the last ten days, which we aren’t exactly sure where they disappeared to. Oh look, I’ve figured out how to do strikethrough text in HTML. The thing about writing our own software is that we don’t have handy buttons to do these things automatically, coupled with the fact that I’m a natural technophobe so please at least act like you’re a little bit impressed.

Our friend Sergio came out of prison, and we went to see him give his testimony at a church in Cordoba, along with his family, friends and even a Christian prison officer. He was initially homeless, so we invited him to stay with us, which wasn’t ideal as he is doing a course in Cordoba, as well as wanting to be closer to his kids. However, someone has now lent him a house to look after which is only a couple of kms outside Cordoba, and he is very happy with it; Martin is meeting him for lunch today.

I took a women’s meeting at short notice. We did a little Bible study about Lois (grandmother of Timothy, see 2 Tim 1:3-6 and 3:14-15) and I told them that grandmothers are the future, which I think they liked.

I also led our home group last week, which was going quite well until someone started talking about the demon in her bathroom, and the lady next to me started whispering “don’t worry, she’s mad”. We made 48 empanadas to share afterwards; empanadas are like meat pasties only smaller, so you have to calculate 5 or 6 per person. I’m also in charge of writing the next study; still ploughing our way through Mark, I’m in chapter 5 for this week.

Martin went to the prison in San Francisco on Saturday with our friend Miguel, which they were both pleased about, and we all went back to Miguel’s village of Porteña afterwards for coffee and cake with Miguel and Mrs Miguel. They are really solid “salt of the earth” folk, I always like to see them.

I spent an increasingly bad tempered day-and-a-half trying to sort out Martin’s insurance claim for his knee operation from last September. After all, if you are an insurance company purporting to deal with people living and working abroad, it would naturally make perfect sense for you to operate an email system which dumps attachments into a black hole, thus preventing anyone from sending you their claim forms. Doh! We finally solved it by Martin putting the whole thing onto a web-page and sending them the link to download it themselves. However, once they actually had the file, they turned it round in 48 hours which we can’t really complain about. The claims people were probably so surprised that a form had made it through their torturous communication department that they dealt with it by return as a mark of respect to a superior technical intellect. Or something.

We are making progress on the poo saga. After having to empty the black hole (not the same one where the insurance company’s emails go to... or maybe...) for the third time, we pleaded with the landlord, who agreed that we need to be connected to the mains sewage. So she sent a couple of goons around to measure up. Apparently their measurements are then sent to the municipality for project-planning permission. Time estimates for this to be given range from “a couple of weeks” to “a long time” so in the meantime, permission for pooing will be granted in exceptional circumstances.

These are our own home-grown kumquats being pickled in whisky: obviously next year’s project will be to distil the whisky as well. We also had our own spinach in the pasta sauce yesterday, and my parsley and oregano are coming on a treat.

I have finished all my immigration paper work. I never have to do any of that again. Yesterday we left home at six in the morning to drive to Cordoba. We spent three hours queuing in immigration, and another three hours queuing in the civil registry. Joni became fed up with the whole thing at about the twenty minute mark, and most of the rest of Cordoba became fed up with us fairly soon afterwards, that is apart from the folk who appreciated it as a welcome diversion that he was smearing a green lollypop all over the chairs in the waiting room and occasionally over the legs of some of the people sitting on same. Martin still has one trip left to the civil registry, but by popular agreement he is going on his own next time. Apart from the high-pitched screaming, and spreading green lollypop across the world, Joni spent some time learning how to take his own clothes off; so I realised when I looked round and saw he was down to his nappy. We arrived home some fourteen hours after we had left, about two and a half minutes before our bible study group descended for their weekly meeting. Luckily I managed to chop the onions and tomatoes to go on the pizzas in the small talk bit before the meeting happened, while simultaneously bathing Joni (green lollypop in hair).

Today our kitchen flooded, which we thought was the washing machine until we realised that the water was coming up through a drain cover in the floor. So Martin went to look for a plumber, who came and informed us that we didn't need a plumber, we needed to empty our septic tank yet again. I tried to ask him why it had filled up so quickly, and the explanation was something to do with "napas" coming down from above. Which was either something spiritual or something in plumber speak but either way I wasn't getting it, so we called the sucky hose people to empty the black hole again. The sucky hose people said, "it's your washing machine, you should try to tip the water out somewhere else". Hmm yes, like over the neighbour's wall or where? Which still didn't explain why the tank had taken six months to fill up the first time and two weeks the second time. We really haven't done that much extra washing, even counting the green lolly incident. In the afternoon I took the lid off the black hole, and was slightly disconcerted to see the water levels already rising. So we called on our neighbour, Sergio, who is also a builder and plumber. He tried to explain the "napas" which as far as we can make out is something to do with the water table, and it depends on the level of humidity and whether it's a north wind or not. So I think that means I was right in the first place... "something spiritual in plumber speak".

The last few days I’ve been involved in an ongoing argument over someone else’s blog; which at least makes a change, it’s usually my own stuff that gets me into trouble! It has been doing my head in more than most arguments usually would, and it has taken me ages to figure out why. Here’s a bit of the original:-

We have managed to artificially create an income discrepancy - our lab was populated by a single statum of the beekeeping class before we brought fair trade principles in, but now our lab contains one class of rich Fair-Trade-branded beekeepers whose livings are subsidised by rich people assuaging their conscience with expensive brands, and an another class of poor beekeepers untouched by the "benefits" of Fair Trade on the same income as before. So Fair Trade widens the gap between rich and poor - actually it creates one - which is a bad start. A rising tide does not float all boats.
Now comes the funny part. If we extend Fair Trade subsidies to the majority of beekeepers in our lab, then the situation is even worse. Now most people can afford to pay more money for goods and services as income is higher, inflation happens and prices go up, but a minority of people, the newly-poor beekeepers, still have the same income and can buy less food then they could previously. Bringing Fair Trade into our lab means that some of our beekeepers now have a worse life than they did before, whereas those we have helped are getting more in but are spending more to get the same life as they did before. Oops.

There then ensued a 32-comment discussion, and I think the referee would probably agree that I lost. And it’s taken me all day today to think about why I couldn’t just move on from that. It has been an interesting exercise, if somewhat navel gazing. For which I apologise a bit but I’m still going to write about it. So if you don’t want to see my navel, it is OK to stop reading now.

The first thing that didn’t do my head in was the niggly stuff. Like when I was accused of “appealing to emotion”, by the same person freely using phrases like “rich people assuaging their conscience”. That’s annoying, but it’s not the main point, and it doesn’t do my head in, things like that happen in arguments. We’re human beings.

The secondly thing that didn’t do my head in is that the theory was plain wrong. It assumes that “beekeepers” are in some little sub-society a very long way away from anyone else. Whereas in our little corner of the world here at least, the “beekeepers” work in organisations which also employ supervisors, team leaders, foremen, etc. And the whole organisation itself exists within a town community of lawyers, doctors, businessmen, the butchers the bakers and the candlestickmakers. Within that context, the beekeepers are nearly at the bottom of the pile. So introducing fair-trade, or in our own context, equivalent initiatives, doesn’t push prices up, because that’s already been done by the lawyers, the judges, the politicians and the business managers (who around these parts are mostly in bed with each other, spawning questions such as “where did the government’s money go?” and “who ate all the pies?” but that’s a whole other story). And it doesn’t make the fair-trade (local equivalent) beekeepers rich because they are still essentially primary producers and if the gap between the cost of their honey verses the honey down the road gets too big, even do-gooding bleeding heart liberal types like me will eventually stop buying it. What we see round here at least is that the outcome of co-operative ventures is to boost the member beekeepers into positions of participation and choice-making, like choosing to work eight hours rather than twelve, or choosing to enable ones off-spring to continue studying, or for the beekeepers themselves to complete their schooling at night school, or in two cases that I know of here, for the profits to be ploughed into other things; in one case community projects, and in the other case, into supporting Argentinean missionaries overseas. However, we digress... although it caused me to expend probably too much emotion that the theory was defended to the death as though it were a globally generalisable fact without ever giving one concrete example where the theory had been shown to function, that in itself isn’t what did my head in. Having wrong hypotheses, and defending them, are still basic human rights and necessary for scientific progress.

The third thing that didn’t do my head in, but probably should have done, is that it is patronising. The underlying conclusion is that it would be better to leave people in poverty than to support an initiative that might later be shown to have unequal outcomes. Why is that patronising? It is one of a raft of rather too many models which are proposed for “other” people a long way away, particularly in “developing” majority world contexts, but nobody would seriously advocate as a great idea for Liverpool or Bradford, let alone Oxford or Tunbridge Wells. However, there are already plenty of patronising theories floating around here, one more of those doesn’t do my head in.

No no, the thing that actually did my head in, I realised as I cycled back from the supermarket today, is much more selfish and close to home than that. It is the frustration of being out-articulated. That for me is an almost unknown occurrence. I lose arguments all the time (ask my husband!), I lose arguments because I am wrong, because the other person knows more, because I walk away, because the other person shouts louder, because we all degenerate into childish sillinesses and for a zillion other reasons, but never because the other person is more articulate than I am. In fact, it’s usually the other way around. It has been an interesting exercise today reflecting that winning an argument by being right is not always directly correlational to winning an argument by being articulate, and thinking about times when I too may have gained an advantage simply by being more gifted with words than my sparring partner. It’s not been a comfortable process to think through, but it’s probably been good for me to do it. So to you, who have unintentionally led me here, I say “thank you and no hard feelings”.

There is something smug making about the sight of newly-jarred marmalade cooling on the worktop, and the smell of home-made pies baking in the oven. I don’t even like marmalade, but I enjoyed the whole faffy process of peeling and chopping and grating that is involved with preparing the oranges, and I love the witches cauldron sensation of stirring a big pot of bubbling gloop.

I made some plum jam a couple of weeks ago, which I do like. Plums were on offer, so I bought quite a lot, along with the sugar to make jam, and I dumped it all in a heap on the work-top, and I thought, “I dunno, that looks a bit much to me”. And then I thought, “that’s because if I was making this in England I would have been thinking in pounds not kilos”. Doh. So then I divided it all in half which looked more like normal. Then I learned that my largest pan isn’t really big enough to make jam. And as a result of that piece of learning, I also learned that jam that has boiled over and caramalised onto the cooker takes a jolly lot of scrubbing to clean off.

Last night I made three pies to feed our bible study group after the meeting (evening meal happens late in Argentina, people go out first and eat when they get home afterwards, so we normally just invite them to stay on when the study ends). We know that at least one family survived to tell the tale because they invited us to an asado (BBQ) for lunch today (it’s the may-day bank holiday). And today I also made a pineapple upside-down cake, and a board-book of transport pictures for Joni. So now I’m officially smug, at least for the next three minutes, when I shall be forced to relent and tackle the fallout from bath-time.

I was cutting the grass, which isn’t my favourite job, partly because the grass cutter is rubbish so I always end up having to take it apart three times and swearing at it, which doesn’t improve its functionality any more than the taking it apart does, but it makes me feel better. Anyway… I was cutting the grass, and I realised that the grass in one small area was longer and lusher and greener than in the rest of the garden, because it was standing in an inch and a half of, let’s call a spade a spade, POO, seeping out of the top of our sceptic tank. There are still areas of San Francisco that aren’t on mains sewage, and even in areas where the sewage system has been put in, it is up to the individual house-owner to organise, and pay for, the connecting up. Hence, many haven’t. Particularly owners who don’t live in the property anyway, like our landlord. He assured us that it wouldn’t be necessary to connect our house to the sewer because our sceptic tank would never fill up. Which now we have actually seen inside the thing, it is difficult to see where he thought the contents would disappear to, given that the tank is concrete. We find there are some quite big cultural differences around what constitutes “telling the truth”; it does still catch us out quite often. Or maybe he just thought that English people don’t poo. Anything is possible. So now we have had our first experience of the poo lorry. Think about the tanker that used to empty the Greenbelt “tardis” portaloos, only bigger, making satisfyingly slurpy noises up a big sucky hose powerful enough to hoover up any wayward children (that’s a cautionary tale in the making). They dug around in the garden a bit and found a small entrance to a big hole, that’s the cess pit I think. It’s called a “pozo negro” in Spanish. That means “black hole”. Fair description. The “black hole” is connected to the big concrete tank which we already knew about, that’s the one that was overflowing in the first place, and the big concrete tank is connected to a second, smaller, concrete tank whose purpose I am unsure about. Dem bones dem bones... Hear the word of the Lord. So now we have the guys’ calling card conveniently attached to our fridge in readiness for next time. And the learning outcomes of this story are: if you want to improve the quality of your lawn, we know a handy source; and “excessive toileting is a sin”.

Copyright notice: these photos aren’t mine; I’m still hatching a plot to replace my camera later on in the year.




These photos were taken by one Megan Ramsey, Scottish lass, who is spending some of her university language year in Cordoba, and came to stay with us for a few days to remember how to speak English and see something else of Argentina.




So we took her out to Miramar, a little town of some 1600 inhabitants, on the shore of the Mar Chiquita, (“Little sea”) which is a big salt-lake.




The lake is 115 kilometres long, by 88 kms across, so it does look quite a lot like a sea, as well as being salty. I think it is the fifth largest salt-lake in the world.




It is home to some 300 species of birds, which is something like a quarter of all the species of birds in Argentina, including three types of flamingo. The flamingos are quite shy so they don’t always stick around to be photographed, but there is one on the right hand side of this photo, pretending to be a stork.




In the back-ground is the imposing bulk of the ruined “Hotel Vienna”, which is a conspiracy theory in the making. It was built with German money during the second world war, as a five-star hotel, totally out of keeping with anything else in the area, it opened in 1945, and closed some fifteen months later, leaving a German scientist as caretaker, who was later found poisoned in the basement. No-one has ever come forward to retrieve the body of said caretaker, or to claim ownership of the building or its contents. It has gradually fallen into decay, until in recent years the local tourist board has recognised an opportunity to capitalise on its mystery, and is now running guided tours every afternoon and selling souvenir T-shirts and postcards from the old foyer.




The lake has expanded greatly in recent years. The most famous flood was in 1977, when a large part of old Miramar became submerged, and the army was brought in to blow up some 35 blocks of the town where the buildings had become unstable due to the water. Walking along the shore there are still large areas where flooring and foundations are clearly visible, and swimmers are advised to stick to the marked bathing areas which have been cleared of broken piping and other nasty surprises.

With its ecology, geography, history and tales of intrigue, not to mention the fried “pejerrey” fish sold in the many restaurants along the front, Miramar is a fine place in which to waste a sunny afternoon.

This is a quote from our friend Simon’s blog, which is fairly pertinent to some things that are happening here at the moment...

“Some may rankle at the idea of allowing unfettered discussion of church activity, but we are in a generation which mistrusts authority claims and places a high value on ‘freedom of information.’ While no substitute for peer-to-peer accountability structures, being honest and open with the world at large is not merely important for its own sake, but also helps us to ensure we have no hidden agendas. The Christian message has always been communicated not only through carefully selected and polished words, but also through an open and public witness. Instead, therefore, of giving in to concerns of vetting and message, we should be eagerly looking out for opportunities to live out Acts 20:18 in the information age”.

Question is, how can one work effectively across two cultures, when one culture values, even requires, candour as a sign of credibility, while the other would see anything less than a fully united front as a sign of disloyalty and a breach of trust in relationship?

Now I’m not always very wise and I have been known to talk out of turn, but I think that would be quite a conundrum even for someone who was very wise and didn’t talk out of turn. So if you are that person, answers on a postcard... or better still post a comment.

Sorry about the long silence, here is the list of excuses…
1. We have a small child who likes pressing buttons, so only one of us can be on a computer at a time when he is at home.
2. We bought a second hand PC for me, which took a while to organise and set up, and then turned out not to have enough memory to be useful, but it does now.
3. I am sorely feeling the lack of a decent camera following our little house-breaking event, had hoped to rectify that by now, but...
4. I was writing an essay in Spanish, which probably isn’t a great work of literature, but developing a topic over 6,000 reasonable quality words has been a good exercise, and hasn’t left me with too many brain cells to think about a lot else for a couple of weeks.

Here are some of the events of note from the last couple of weeks...

1. The kingdom of God is being built in Argentina... Although I’m not sure we’re necessarily having a great deal of influence over it!
2. Martin has been invited to produce the Bible study material to be used across all the cell-groups in our church. This is an unexpected opportunity, and he is leaping at the potential to have an influence over how the Bible is studied here.
3. Joni has started going to a little kindergarten in the mornings. It is called “garabatos y redondels”, which means doodles and circles. We aren’t sure whether he is a doodle or a circle, but he seems to enjoy it. He has a little (or in his case three sizes too big) uniform to wear which he is modelling here:-


4. We have a new member of the family. Shrek was camped out on our door step for a month while we played hard to get and definitely weren’t going to adopt another dog, until the day we gave up and adopted another dog. The local kids had already named him Shrek, not sure why, he’s small and skinny and definitely not green, although he is quite a funny looking creature with his oversized top jaw, and only three toes on each front foot.


5. Mr independent has learned to push his own pushchair. Unfortunately he can’t see, or steer; and any attempt to help him results in a major strop.


6. I found the culprit who has been eating my plants.

I have set myself a challenge this year to read through the Bible in Spanish. It is doing me good for at least three reasons.

One, I am encouraged that I can actually read and understand the Bible in Spanish these days; currently ploughing towards the end of Leviticus at the moment.

Two, it is a good source of new vocabulary; my latest word is "degollar", which means "slaughter" and appears a lot of times in Leviticus. Unfortunately I haven't yet found a use for it in my every day life.

Three, it makes me approach the text afresh, and read it properly as if for the first time, so I am seeing things that I hadn't seen before. Like all the verses in Leviticus 15 about sex and ceremonial uncleanness and washing with water. Call me un-devout, but my first thought was "imagine knowing which days your neighbours have sex on according to who has got their washing hanging out".

Said by:-

A certain pastor; “Servanthood is a position of leadership and authority”. And there was I thinking it was the other way around. Apparently, or so his exegesis went, there are two levels of servanthood. One is anyone who is a Christian, but they don’t actually have to do anything to be given this title, that’s just another word used to describe Christians. The upper tier of servanthood describes people who have been given leadership roles in the church. So you can be a servant of God, and it doesn’t mean anything and you don’t have to do anything, or you can be a servant of the church and that means that you have a special position of leadership and authority.

A certain mission partner; “I don’t care if Walmart is inethical, it’s cheap and they have peanut butter”. Must have read the manual on servanthood written by the above guy I guess. In the mission quite a few of us are involved in projects related to poverty reduction, community programmes, wealth creation projects that kind of thing. A project is going to change the lives of how many people? Ten? Twenty if we’re lucky? Compared to how many people we are actively maintaining in situations of injustice through our every day buying decisions? Hundreds? Thousands? It’s often a decision of time, lack of it, but the irony is that if we really had to choose one or the other, we would do better devoting less time to our little project (rescuing babies out of the river) and more time to making our own buying decisions more carefully (asking who’s throwing them in in the first place).

A certain husband of mine; “God must really hate Sundays”.

There’s no answer to that.

When I say the temperature has been dropping to 30 degrees at night, you will understand that it has been rather warm around here of late. We finally have a computer set up, which is still driving me a little bit crazy (even more than usual) trying to persuade it to behave in something like a predictable fashion. I have spent a lot of time combing random “options” boxes looking for elusive settings to tweak. All further complicated by the fact that the next step in our child’s development has been to learn that the big green button switches the whole darned thing off, which is even more annoying than when he merely used to “help” by typing on the keyboard. So now I can only really use the office when sweet child is in bed. Unfortunately he only seems to need marginally more sleep than I do...

The weather probably has quite an effect on our energy levels, the heat here is also described as “especial” because of its high level of humidity. Things seem to grind along expending energy and wasting time without actually achieving anything very much.

Joni on the other hand is in a great phase, it’s like he has just realised that he knows how to learn and is making the most of it. Apart from pressing the big green button, yesterday he was filling up pots of water and pouring them out again (not into the computer but it’s only a matter of time), today he learned how to hold his own cup of milk without spilling it over Daddy. He loves books, although we don’t often get to read the traditional left to right version of the stories, since he takes charge of deciding which order to look at the pages in. Language is coming along nicely, he can put together a whole paragraph in some alien language with inflection and everything, and he is learning individual words in both earthling languages. “Daddy” is used for important people; i.e. daddy, mummy and the dog(!) although he can say mummy too (mostly when he’s cross; pattern set for the future...), and “agua” (water) is used for the water in the swimming pool, and for anything that he thinks might be edible, apart from banana which he can say (nana), or biscuits (bis bis). Newest additions to the vocabulary are “key” (he likes to steal those!), “car” and “shoes” (pronounced without the vowels; sh’s). We’re hoping to send him to a playgroup this year for a couple of hours in the mornings, but there aren’t that many that accept kids as young as him, although there is obviously the demand because the ones that do, don’t have any free spaces. I need to mount a piece of research to find out which ones we haven’t been to yet and go on a little tour.

Chile tried to kidnap us. The annual conference of the Latin Link team was being held in Chile for the first time this year and we thought we’d take the car, being more environmentally friendly, possibly slightly cheaper, and an opportunity so see some different bits of the continent on route.

San Francisco, Argentina to Temuco, Chile is probably three days hard driving, so we did it in five more gentle ones. On the way out of Argentina the border guards were rather flumoxed by our status as foreigners with temporary residence, Argentinean ID cards, and driving a vehicle in someone elses name. Two of them poured over our collection of documents for a considerable time, while our child explored the multi-sensory properties of the fire extinguisher. Finally one of them said: “Have you ever seen ‘Terminal’? It’s a Tom Hanks film about a guy who gets stuck between two countries because neither of them will allow him in….” Thanks pal!

There is nowhere to get money out at the border, so we thought we should find a town with an ATM. Before we arrived however, we had to go through a tunnel with a toll booth. “Oh well”, we thought, “we are so near the border they’re bound to accept Argentinean pesos….” Ha ha. “You must pull over to the side and see if another Argentinean coming through would be willing to change money with you”… Goodoh. Luckily a Chilean behind took pity on us and changed enough to see us through to the next town and an ATM. Chilean money has a lot of zeros, we never quite figured out what it is really worth.

The conference went well, greatly improved by the fact that no-one had had time to make a programme in advance, so we did what we had to do, with no unnecessary space fillers, plenty of coffee-drinking and general spontaneous bonding which was only slightly marred by the latest outpouring of “management-speak gobbledegook” from the upper echelons. I guess it is a few years since the last phase of gratuitous jargon so I probably ought just to give thanks for the peace while it lasted. We also ate good food, swam in a lake, saw a smoking volcano, and picked ripe blackberries by the road side. Joni enjoyed having a bunch of willing slaves / young people to boss around for a week, and he learned some new words including “agua” (“water” in Spanish), and “come ‘ere” in English.

Mapping in Latin America is an art-form encompassing a variety of genres such as impressionism, abstract, and fantasy. Mostly it was possible to identify that our three maps were of the same area; towns with the same names, in a roughly similar configuration. The similarity ended when we started attending to detail: Towns are variously depicted as being joined / close / up to 50 kms apart, with the roads between them being possibly a major road / a minor road / no road at all. However, having beaten the worst of the maps on the outward journey, we confidently designed ourselves a slightly different route for the way back.

We left Temuco on Saturday morning and progressed nicely to lunch in Santa Barbara, and to a little place called Ralco early in the afternoon. The road out of Ralco towards the frontier, apart from being unpaved, also seemed to be heading in the wrong direction. A trick of the map? Or the wrong road? We stopped to ask. Right road. The whole area had recently been redesigned to encorporate a massive HEP project, so there was a large lake 20 kms long or so which also wasn’t on any map, and the quality of the road suggested that it had been recently hacked out of the hillside with a pickaxe. We bumped along for some 30 kms or so before running into another little village, where a “you are here” board suggested that we weren’t on the right road at all. The man in the little shop confirmed that indeed we should head back to Ralco and take another road out, which apparently we would find off the plaza. So we bumped back 30 kms along the rocks to Ralco and drove round the plaza a few times. Not finding anything reminding us of a major route to anywhere, we stopped to ask an old guy sitting outside a bar. “Who published that map?” He said. “You should phone them and complain…” The road that used to go from Ralco to the frontier no longer exists despite being present on all three of our maps, and the border post has been moved further north, accessible by a road not shown on our maps, that we would need to reach via Santa Barbara.

Deja Vu, we headed back to Santa Barbara, which was probably just as well, being low on fuel and biscuits by then. Arriving in Santa Barbara we sat in the plaza with ice-cream taking stock of our situation. Having been given more than enough duff information we were reluctant to trust the old guy completely, but who out of the strangers around us would be able reliably to corroborate his story? As we pondered our possibilities, a couple approached and asked if we needed help. They worked for the local government on tourist development, and they took us to their office, and showed us round the tiny museum, as well as confirming that the border post has definitely moved, and that there was a “good road” which would take us there.

By this stage it was evening, so we stayed overnight in Santa Barbara and launched our second attempt at leaving Chile on Sunday morning. Clearly one of the first jobs of the local tourist developer will be to put in a few sign posts, we took a scenic tour through charming little un-named villages on unsigned narrow dirt roads before popping out onto the main road that would lead us to the frontier. The main road became less main, then disappeared into a national park. A guy manning the gate confirmed that we definitely could exit to Argentina by keeping straight ahead. So we did.

The definition of “good road” has been broadened to mean “it exists”. We crossed boulders and deep sand, rivers and ravines with some spectacular views over the national park, at least for the person not driving. What looked like a village on the map turned out to be a military outpost. Every few metres along the road was a monument to a dead soldier, mostly dated in the last couple of years. We wondered what Chile does to their young soldiers, but remembering the sight of the Chilean army goose-stepping around Santiago in their Prussian uniforms, it might be better on the whole not to know. The road was some 60 kms long, which at barely faster than walking pace took most of the day.

We arrived at the border in the late afternoon, where a cheery guard said “You didn’t do that in a car did you?” and another cheery guard said “They shouldn’t have let you out of Argentina in the first place”. Oh. He showed us a book of rules, including the clause saying that only people with full Argentinean residence are allowed to take an Argentinean vehicle out of the country. Luckily the guy who let us out didn’t know that, because now this guy couldn’t do anything except let us back in, which he did with good humour, which was fortunate because it still took us two hours of driving through the desert to reach a town, Chos Malal which we had stayed in on the way out. It welcomed us back like an old friend, the hostel even offered us the same room again, and we celebrated with ice-cream, followed by heading out for barbecued goat in a nearby restaurant.

We arrived home to San Francisco late last Wednesday, via San Rafael and a broken windscreen (more unpaved roads). We still don’t have a computer at home, hence the continued lack of communication, but we are hoping that might be rectified in the next couple of days.

We are off to Chile for the next little while, starting on Wednesday. Apart from that, we had our house broken into on Friday so we are currently without internet. That's not strictly true, we are without anything to plug into the internet. And even that's not quite true, because the idiots managed to leave behind the cable when they took my laptop. Only thing worse than a thief has got to be a stupid one. Our old desktop is currently on long term loan in the prison in Cordoba, so we need to organise borrowing it back after we return from Chile; in the meantime, ironically, it will be safer left in the prison!

Back at the beginning of February sometime.

I started writing this last August and it has sat on my desk-top not writing itself ever since, so this is me finishing it by hand. Technology huh!

This cartoon appeared on the Asbo Jesus blog on the 4th of August.






Which generated quite a lot of discussion on the site, including this comment; "I am getting pretty sick of all these progressive/emerging conferences that say want to reflect the kingdom of God and yet you go to the gathering and it’s like a college reunion..."

Then a couple of weeks later in August, some USA friends in Bolivia wrote in their news update; "X went to Cochabamba last weekend to be part of a Christian Education Conference. He was scheduled to teach two seminars and we wondered if this was good stewardship to go that far and only speak twice..." Now to be honest, I have followed the progress of this family for the last fourteen years or so, and I have lots of respect for what they are doing in Bolivia, but the impression I had of their lifestyle is pretty much "corn-fed USA", so it kind of surprised me, in a positive way, that they were thinking more widely (sorry if I have underestimated you, guys), and it also made me ask a few questions of my own.

Some time around then, the first advertising mailshots started arriving for our own Latin Link "Inspire" conference held in the UK. My attention was grabbed by the one that highlighted how many missionaries we are flying in from Latin America to contribute to the weekend. I had kind of thought that in times of increasing carbon awareness, it might be considered anachronistic to measure the importance of ones event according to the number of air-miles clocked up by the speakers; but apparently we haven't yet got that far in our thinking.

Also around the same time I was reading an article on "vulnerable mission" on the Oscar website where the author was also publicising his forthcoming seminars on "vulnerable mission" to be held in three different countries. Which made me think that if we are prepared to spend thousands of dollars jetting around the globe in order to discuss how to make ourselves more vulnerable to the people we are working among, without even blinking at the irony inherent, surely surely we have lost the plot completely.

We receive monthly updates from the Oscar website, (which incidentally is a fine source of information and resources). The last section of the monthly update is a gazetteer of upcoming events. There are zillions of them. I could spend my entire life cruising from Christian event to Christian event. What are they all for? What do they achieve?

I imagine that at least some of it is about scratching backs and boosting egos, hence the "college reunion" quote above. There's nothing inherently wrong with that; heck we can all use a bit of ego boosting from time to time. But I suspect that there might not be entirely 100% correlation between "doing things that make me feel busy/useful/important" and "building the Kingdom of God", and that it might be a good idea once in a while to stop and be honest about the real reasons why we are doing some things, and not doing others.

Christian events enable us to opt out of real life, which let's face it, is difficult and tiring and we all need a break from it from time to time. And we are also able to pretend that "back there" somewhere else in our real lives, we are doing better than we are because Christian events don't require us to prove that we are walking the talk outside of the cosy walls. The 3D people I work with are much more complicated than the 2D powerpoint presentation I put together about them. They also don't applaud me in the same way as the audience of the powerpoint presentation. It is much easier to be loving to the people who speak my jargon over the coffee that someone else made, than to the kid whinging around my legs or the beggar at my door while I am trying to cook dinner and mop the floor. Take me out of my environment and I can do the image thing; look like I am getting it all right for two, three, even four days at a time. I can also fail to mention to my fellow conference goers that I too am unable to sustain this for more than two minutes in my real relationships back in my real life.

Here in Argentina there are a million self important little ministries who measure their own significance according to the number of international conferences the pastors / leaders attend. How childish, we say, how mickey mouse. Absolutely. Which is why it is hard to know how to respond when those very leaders say of our mission members "(Person) must spend their entire life on board a bus or a plane". And of course our temptation here is just as high to fill our time with things that make us feel busy/useful/important, as we flit in and out of the meetings we have organised, and just in passing don't quite have time to allow too many people into our lives in any real or sustained way. Is the observation true? Maybe or maybe not. Are all the miles travelled justifiable? Maybe or maybe not. Actually I don't think those questions are too relevant. What I think is more relevant, is that this is the impression people have of us. This is the image we have created. This is the Christian life and ministry that our mission (and probably lots of others) has been modelling. So are we going to be OK about this, or do we need to start dealing with it?

Sometimes there's too much real life going on to do it justice by writing about, and sometimes the most interesting things can't really be aired on a publicly accessible website. Sometimes other peoples Real Lives make mine seem too insignificant to write about. I wonder if Balfour ever regretted his declaration.

Anyway. Saturday Martin went to the prison in Cordoba, taking with him a guy from here who was visiting for the first time, always a nerve wracking experience, although apparently he was spared the worst of the security checks (I won't go into details, it's not pleasant). Meanwhile I had a phone call from one of our team members who is normally in Buenos Aires, to say that he was in Cordoba, and was going to pop over and see us in the evening; (three hours drive constitutes "popping" around here, Argentina is a big country). So in the evening Martin and Rafa arrived back from Cordoba, shortly followed by Dany and Flavia. As soon as they arrived we had an appointment with a notary to sort out the papers for our car (Dany was the previous owner and the car is still in his name), so we spent a happy two hours sitting in the notary's office (notorious office?) while the lady shuffled papers around us. Then we picked up Marisa (member of our church who is involved in the project in the village of Quebracho Herrado), and went out to see the village with her, picking up a couple of roasted chickens on the way back for dinner.

Sunday we went to church, entertained a bunch of neighbourhood kids, waved Dany and Flavia off to Villa Maria, their next destination, picked up Marisa again, and went to another church, out in a different village of Porteña, 40 kms away, where there is a guy who is involved in the prison ministry which Martin is hoping to hook up with here in San Francisco. Arrived home at 2300 hours, and a family from church came round to share food (evening meal happens late around here, midnight is quite normal). At 2 in the morning I remembered that I was supposed to have written an email to someone, and decided that I didn't have enough braincells left to put a sentence together (sorry Viv!)

Today and for the next while, I am helping in the mornings at a summer play scheme for kids with learning disabilities. Which is how I got into this whole silly game in the first place, working on a play scheme for disabled kids when I was 15 years old. Full circle. In about an hour or so, someone is coming round to talk to Martin about prisons, we're not sure exactly who it is, he just phoned up, but we think it might be a guy who Martin met the other day who has a son inside.

Meanwhile, there are some slightly bizarre (to us anyway) military maneovres happening in the upper echelons of the church, causing political rumblings in the rank and file. Luckily this one isn't being funded by the USA, so there is hope that the outcome might not be quite so bloody. We are trying to provide a space for the wounded and the offended to sound off (partly because we agree at least with some of them), but we're trying to do that in a way that might enable people to build bridges and move forward in relationship rather than to bed into their trenches or resort to guerrilla tactics.

It's silly season in Argentina, post-Christmas, summer holidays, everything official stops till March. By April things are just about getting into the swing of the year. By October people start saying "can't start anything new, it's nearly the end of the year".

We've been taking the car out to discover the back of beyond around here. Main roads are asphalted, minor roads come in a range of potential surfaces. Martin downloaded some GPS software from the internet, so he with his toys, and I, armed with my binoculars, have been enjoying discovering a whole new world in the bush, spotting birds, iguanas, and the odd hare.

Today we went out to the village in Quebracho Herrado with a couple of church folk, found somewhere which might be suitable to rent for activities there, a couple of rooms at the back of the bar, and a large patio area attached. It needs a bit of restoring, and we need to find out how much they would want for it, but it feels like we might have taken another step forward.

The post Christmas trough started early, not helped by the fact that it rained nearly incessantly from Wednesday to Friday. New Years eve went OK, there were fifteen of us around the table for barbecued cow. Some of our guests couldn't get transport, so I played taxi-driver. Dodging the fireworks being set off by small children in the middle of the main roads helped me to realise why sensible taxi-drivers take the night off. New Years day, we spent the whole day trying unsuccessfully to decide what we were going to do with it, and yesterday didn't fare much better either. So now we're all worn out from arguing about doing nothing. Luckily it's sunny today, there's hope for 2009 yet.

And a merry bloomin' New Year to you too.

I was humming a little song out in the garden this morning as I was putting in bedding plants with the enthuseastic assistance of some of the neighbourhood kids;-

"... and my desire is to have you near, Lord you know that you are welcome here... "

and the internal voice said "Really? What if I appeared as a bunch of grubby nine year olds talking incessant rubbish and spreading mud across the patio?"

Which reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend here the other day, who said "Evangelicals never tell so many lies as when they are singing". Which caused me to smile ironically.

As for the kids, they're fine really, we do encourage them to come, and we like the fact that they feel free to make themselves at home in our house. But there are moments when...

The area around San Francisco reminds me quite a lot of South East England; understated, and under-rated. It would never figure in the seven most spectacular sights of the world, or even in the seven hundred, but it does have a quiet charm of its own which is worth stopping to appreciate.

Today it rained, so I took Joni out for a lesson on splashing in the puddles. He's a fast learner, I may live to regret that bright idea. These photos are from the other day on our favourite walk. It takes about an hour and a half; or two if you keep stopping to take photos and talk to the horses...



Go down to the football pitches, and turn right into the lane;






Trees and football pitches give way to fields which held winter barley, recently harvested;






Watch out for bird life; from big birds of prey (Carancho), to the flycatchers with their long scissor-tails, and even tiny humming birds. Ever tried to get a photo of a humming bird? I haven't succeeded yet, it's jolly not easy, especially with such willing assistants as Joni and the dog.




Carry on up the lane to the horses field. Horses still play an important part in Argentinean life, both for work and play. At one end of society, the polo world cup is no longer played because Argentina won it too many times; and a proportion of the illegal drugs sold for human consumption start life as illegal imports for doping race-horses. At the other end of the scale, it is quite common to see ragged, moth eaten, knock-kneed beasts moving builders rubble, or pulling carts with entire families and their belongings. There doesn't seem to be a great understanding that looking after ones animals might make them last a bit longer. However, our horses here are neither ill-treated nags nor ill-treated race-horses, but somebody's pride and joy, well groomed and gentle, they quite often come to the fence and let Joni stroke their noses;






Turn right past the farm, and go down another lane. Notice the owls on the fence posts, they're nearly always there on the same posts. Sometimes they even stay put and let us walk right past them;






Keep on till the point where the tracks cross. Watch the field flatten out, and the sky open up;






At the crossing point turn right. Pass the "vivero" (nursery, of the plant-rearing variety, we've been enjoying buying things here) Beyond the vivero, the barley gives way to two big fields of yellow sunflowers, which the parrots are loving at the moment;






Stop to look (point / wave / say "moo" at) the cows and chickens in the farm-yard, and then head up the road for home. With any luck it might even be time for a mid-morning coffee.

Big grown up baby becomes a toddler; Joni took his first independent steps at the end of last week. He is rather pleased with his new trick which is rapidly developing from "party piece to impress the neighbours" to "useful means of locomotion". It is quite a performance; he pulls himself to his feet, grins around to make sure that everyone is watching, gives himself a little round of applause, and then sets off in an optimistic stagger.

Meanwhile, Mummy and Daddy are learning that not all silence is golden. Yesterday when it went ominously quiet, we found he had been busy unpacking the bags of fruit and veg shopping from underneath his pushchair, and he was located sitting on the floor surrounded by fruit, thoughtfully munching on a peach, which looked like he had probably sat on it first.

Still no internet at home. Starting to feel rather like Robinson Crusoe carving notches in a stick and sending smoke signals to passing ships.

First we were tourists, then we were precarious residents, and then we were temporary residents, and now we are "precarious permanent" residents, which sounds like a contradiction in terms ("BT helpline" etc). I think that means we have made progress. We managed to escape being sent to take our fingerprints and photos yet again. I said we had already done those quite a few times, and she said "Oh have you been here before then?", so then she went and dug out the file six inches high with all the zillion photocopies of our birth certificates, photos etc which we have presented on previous occasions. I think we can safely conclude that no-one ever looks at any of it.

We spent the weekend simultaneously at a funeral (they're two day events here) and a church conference, as well as hosting two families who had come from Cordoba for the church thing. It felt a bit like the restaurant sequence in "Mrs Doubtfire" attempting to slip seamlessly from one to the other so that no-one missed us from the important bits of either.

Yesterday afternoon I went to the prison together with another lady from church. Someone else from the church said "I really feel it is the will of God that you shouldn't go". So I said "that's interesting why do you say that". And she said "they look up your bottom I went once I didn't like it". One day we might have to unpack the intriguing theology that says if it didn't give me a warm fuzzy, it can't be the will of God. Needless to say we went, and survived to tell the tale.

Joni is learning about animals, we see cows, chickens, horses, sheep, goats, and lots of stray dogs when we go out and about. He gets very excited about spotting animals in pictures or on TV. In fact he has seen so many cows that when we saw the statue of a horse and rider in the San Francisco central plaza (San Martin I would think) he pointed up to it and started mooing like a cow, which entertained the public at least.

Stop press... we now have internet at home as of just now. It too is a little precarious, but Martin has his technical guru's hat on, so we should be fully up and running any time soon.

In France the adage is "I think therefore I am". In Argentina it's "I have an ID card therefore I am". We submitted our application for ID cards a year last May, but the government here has contracted out the service to the lowest bidder, and we all know what that means. There are an unimaginable number of things that one cannot do without an ID number in Argentina, they ask for it every time we try and use a credit card, or make a doctor's appointment, or fill in any sort of form, or receive any services in our name, or register our child for anything. Passports are just about acceptable, except that the UK passport handily has one digit more than an Argentinean ID card, which either sends computer systems into flat spin, or lops off the end digit, giving us the same "unique" number as some other unknowing Argentinean who clearly isn't us. Hence it was with great joy this week that we have finally collected our ID cards, known as "DNI" or simply "el documento".

This week's tricky question... What does a muslim in Finland do if Ramadam falls in June? I asked Martin, and he said;- "so that's what your mind is doing when you're quiet...", which hardly strikes me as a comprehensive answer. So if anyone out there knows, please share.

I'm working towards my ambition to be an earth mother. We're making progress, as long as you don't count the bit where I fed the baby half a packet of cheese flavoured crisps yesterday to keep him quiet while I chopped the salad up. I'm enjoying having my own cooker again, tried out a new recipe for hummous this week, tasted great, we introduced it to some Argentinean friends last night, very successful. We also squeeze our own orange juice most mornings. Making yoghurt is too ridiculously easy in the Argentinean summer; warm up some milk in a pan, dump in some old yoghurt, plonk the whole thing in a sunny spot on the patio, out of the reach of baby and dog (that's the hard bit), ignore for eight hours. Fridge. The end. Speaking of the patio, our orange tree is just coming into flower, and in the beds we're growing mint, parsley, chicory, tomatoes, zapallitos (little round marrow-like things), runner beans, and we will have oregano when I just figure out where I put that packet of seeds down yesterday. At the moment the crop making the most progress is the runner beans. Those seeds were imported possibly not entirely legally, so if you see any news stories about giant runner beans taking over the southern hemisphere, remember you heard it here first; but don't tell anyone it was me.

Long time no communication. We remain without internet, and the flotsam and jetsam of life sometimes seems to occupy a lot of time. Last week it took me three trips to the electricity company to have the bill changed into my name, and two trips to the Banco de Cordoba to pay the police fine that I incurred by driving on the arterial road without my headlights on Friday. (Law here is that headlights must be used on major routeways at all times, except I forgot to switch them on.)

On the whole life is going OK, we like San Francisco very much. Our house is right in front of the neighbourhood plaza, and our view at the front windows looks like this:




which is not an entirely unpleasant backdrop for eating ones breakfast. What we can't quite understand, given the proximity of fifty mature trees, is why the sparrows insist on trying to nest in our window blinds, squawking peevishly whenever we raise or lower same. On the far side of the plaza, just visible through the trees, is a well-kept children's play area which Joni loves. We stop there most days on our way to or from wherever else we might be going to.




Ministry-wise, things are starting to take shape. We have been going out to the village at Quebracho Herrado once or twice a week, meeting with different people. I managed to get the car stuck in the mud there this week. Didn't have the camera with me, but Martin said the car looked like I'd been rally-driving. At the moment priorities include building a relationship with the school; the head teacher would be best described as "interested but wary" at this stage.

At church we have done a couple of teaching slots, and taken the mid-week meeting for the last two weeks. Last Sunday we invited the whole church home for an "English tea". I spent a couple of days baking scones and biscuits and cakes, and we made all willing victims drink their tea our way; "put a little bit of milk into the bottom first..." The end result was something like the Mad Hatter meets the Typhoo chimps (or was it Tetley?) but it was all good clean-ish fun;




The senior members of the church testing our sofa for durability;

And here we are in San Francisco. Our furniture arrived here last Saturday, and we came across on Monday. The two day delay was a good move; the young people from the church here came in over the weekend and put our furniture together before we arrived! At the moment we are pretty much camping out in the house as we are still waiting for hot water, and gas, and a cooker, and phone-line, and internet. Yesterday we had our first asado (BBQ) with fourteen of us round the table. This afternoon one of our neighbours helped us to connect some more electric light fittings, so now we have light almost throughout the house. At the moment we are in the house of another of the neighbours, piggy backing on their Wifi system.

Our cooker should be arriving on Wednesday. Most of it is already in San Francisco, but we managed to leave the top part - i.e. the useful bit with the gas-rings - behind in Cordoba. That would have been OK, because I was going to Cordoba anyway on Saturday to teach a seminar, so I arranged that someone would bring it from the house where we had stored it on the other side of the city, to another house nearer the church, so I could collect it after the seminar. So, when the class finished, we went to the house and rang the door bell. First there was no answer, so we rang again. After a while, the youngest (teenage) son came out and opened the door, wearing his underwear and a towel. As he came to the gate, the door slammed shut behind him. In the manner of normal teenage males, he knew nothing about our cooker, nor the location of his parents, nor how he was going to get back into the house without a key. We tried to phone mother's mobile, but it wasn't being answered, so we loaded him into the car complete with towel, and trundled back to the church. Here we found someone who had his sister's mobile number, so they phoned her, and thus found out that his mother was at this moment on her way back to the house. So we went back to the house. Sure enough female parent arrived, and informed us that the cooker had in fact not been brought across from its original location, and we would have to go and collect it. So we set off again across the city. On arrival, we found the house apparently occupied, except that there was no answer at the door. So we mounted an unsuccessful piece of research to try and make contact with the occupants. Two hours later, we gave up on the attempt, it being ten-thirty at night and the kid wailing on the back seat, and the increasing thunder and lightening indicating dramatic storm approaching; and set off back for San Francisco sans cooker. A fairly "direct" phone call from Martin extracted a promise that it will be brought without fail to San Francisco by the people coming to the church meeting on Wednesday.

In Argentina at the moment there is a mobile phone company called Personal, who are running a TV advertising campaign about a baby where everyone who looks at him becomes pregnant. He looks a bit like ours; no hair, cute smile. For the last few days every time we go out, various people are patting their abdomen, covering their eyes, and cracking jokes about being pregnant. Here's the advert:

Mobile phone advert

Internet access is somewhat sporadic around here. Actually electricity is fairly sporadic around here, so it is probably a miracle that we have internet at all. So, if you are writing interesting stuff on your blog and I'm not reading it, then send me a copy by email. And if you've sent me a mail and I didn't reply yet please be patient.

Hospital appointment went well yesterday, the doctor was more enthuseastic than last week, and the stitches have been removed. He still has to wear the imobilizer, and keep resting and icing it for a couple of weeks and then they are going to send him to a physio-terrorist for some cruel and unusual punishment. The good news is that our house in San Francisco is nearly ready, and we are hoping to move into it this weekend, with the help of some willing slaves from the church who have offered to shift furniture for us.

Our kid goes around in bare feet, I do try and put socks on him sometimes just to make people think that I'm not a terrible mother, but he takes them off in three seconds, so I am fast gaining a reputation as a terrible mother. Lots of people tell me that I will make him ill. I haven't yet found anyone who can explain the mechanism by which viruses enter through the feet and travel to the nose and throat, but I am assured it is so. This week two people have told me that if I don't put shoes on him soon, then he will never learn to walk. Apparently shoes prepare the feet to be walked on. Yesterday someone told me that if I don't put shoes on him soon then his feet will grow enormous. I'm not sure there's an answer to that, I think I'll just get used to being a terrible mother.

We are compiling a collection of T-shirt slogans written in English seen on people who presumably don't know what they are wearing. Yesterday was our favourite so far. In the hospital, a little old white-haired lady, 85 if she was a day, leaning on someone's arm; wearing a fleece jacket, emblazoned accross the back with "street rebel pitbull". Wished we'd had a camera.

Imagine a party where the host stands at the door in order to ask the guests their names on the way in? The original story can be found in Luke 14:15-24. Here is an alternative:


A certain family were preparing a party so they could invite their friends and neighbours to celebrate their son's first birthday. When the day came for the party, they found themselves stuck in the wrong city, in a neighbourhood where they didn't know anybody. "What shall we do?" They asked themselves. "We can't let this occasion pass unmarked". So they went out to the highways and byways, and they said to the children who were playing out in the road, "Come in and share a cake with us". And verily, the children did come in, and the candle was lit and blown out a few times, and some songs were sung, and the cake was eaten, and the balloons were popped, and everyone went home happy.




And now every time we go out with the pushchair, the neighbours say hello to us! As for Daddy's leg, it is coming along, albeit more slowly than we would have liked. He has been ordered to rest up until next Monday when hopefully the stitches will be taken out.

Martin had his operation yesterday, and we have moved house again. He had to be at the hospital at 7 in the morning yesterday, so Joni and I booked him in and then we went off to the cafe for breakfast while they were chopping him up. We were allowed in to see him in the recovery area by lunch-time, and we were all home in the middle of the afternoon. He is supposed to rest it for the next two weeks, and they want to see him this Tuesday. Hence we are grounded in Cordoba which we hadn't planned. I'm trying to figure out what we should do about Joni's birthday on Monday, because we had planned to celebrate it in San Francisco, only we won't be there. At the moment we are thinking we would still like to celebrate with the folk at San Fran, so we would just have to postpone it a bit. We also found ourselves homeless, having not planned to be in Cordoba after last Wednesday, so we are staying at the YWAM house for now (YWAM being another mission org). YWAM are fairly newly establishing themselves in Cordoba, there's a team of six living in the house with various other hangers on at different times. The neighbourhood here is "interesting". YWAM run a kids club sometimes here at the house, which we went to last night. The plan was to present the story of the "Good Samaritan" in fairly traditional Sunday School style; i.e."don't walk by if you see someone in need". What actually happened was an emergency piece of improvised discussion on how you might take a stand and be different when it is your friends/ family who would have robbed the guy in the first place!

Things have been somewhat tense in Cordoba of late. Depending on one's political allegiance, the explanation is that the provincial government have overspent, or that the national government is withholding money belonging to the province; either way the net result is that Cordoba has run out of money. Trips to town involve dodging demonstrations and riot-police, winding around road-blocks and crash barriers, sometimes finding that the shops have closed anyway, and then trying to figure out where the bus home might have been re-located to this time. Yesterday we heard that some sort of agreement might have been reached, so there is hope that progress might yet be made.

On Tuesday Joni and I went to the children's home in San Marcos. We nearly didn't go, we didn't decide until late on Monday and it felt like a lot of hassle at short notice, but the opportunity came up so we took it. In the end it was a really nice day, catching up with the kids and the adults. One of the adolescents said "Hazel trajó la alegría" (Hazel brought joy!). Joni spent the day in the middle of a mêlée making mud pies; he came home exhausted and it took me ages to clean the mud out of his nose. There is a part of me that regrets that we haven't gone to live in San Marcos, but we had two full-time job offers 400 kms apart so it is just a feature of life that saying yes to one of them would mean saying no to the other. I played with the idea of building in a program of visits to San Marcos from San Francisco, but the distance is too far really to develop anything meaningful, and I also believe in principle that mission partners need to be working more strongly in the communities where we are living rather than flitting in and out of places like a flock of seagulls, but I am already working on another blog about that subject.

The saga of Martin's latest mishap rumbles on. He went for a scan yesterday which revealed that the tendon which allows normal folk to bend at the knee is no longer attached, which explains why his leg no longer works. The plan is that tomorrow they will have him in for day surgery to reattach the tendon. Our distrust of our insurance company (it's justified; they're rubbish) is sufficient that we are organising ourselves to pay up front via Visa (hooray for Visa) and to claim it back whenever the insurers decide to pay up some (considerable) time after the event. The insurer have embarked on their usual round of not-returning phone calls, while emailing us their usual stack of irrelevant forms "Write the numbers of your inbound and outbound flights", while requiring us to prove that this wasn't an existing condition "Well, I did used to be able to walk normally but unfortunately I don't any video to demonstrate..." Luckily this surgery is only a fraction of the cost of Martin's previous mis-adventure so we are able to circumvent the insurer with only a few minor squeaks from our bank. Meanwhile my job today is to purchase two biodegradable bone anchors in this season's colours. I think I have located a source, but we need to go and talk to the company this afternoon.

I like this photo, confident baby taking over the world. It was taken by our friend Diego, whose family we were staying with in Cordoba. Diego himself has just left for "the north", to have a mission experience working in a children's home for a few months.

And so here we are in San Francisco, so I thought I'd just write a quick update. We don't have internet access very easily at the moment so I'm grabbing space in Wifi cafes whenever the chance comes along.

We spent some frustrating time in Cordoba, apart from Martin damaging himself. Can't really go into details without causing offense, except that it wasn't at all the fault of the people we were staying with. Ana and Oscar's family are lovely and we really appreciated them and their hospitality.

Then we went to San Francisco and things started improving. The church have been very welcoming, we stayed three days with a sweet old lady, and the last three days we have been with a family with lots of kids who have an ongoing competition to make Joni laugh.

Folk from the church have been helping us to look for a house to rent. We have seen four, and have chosen one that we think we have closed a deal on. It's too big for us really, but we really like the location, it's in a working class area, the same neighbourhood where some of our friends live, in fact just round the corner from the family who are looking after our dog, and it is just in front of a plaza which has a children's play area complete with baby-swings. We are hoping to sign paper-work within the next 24 hours. At the moment it is being "sympathetically modernised", (pretty much everything has been ripped out) so we can't have it yet. The builder says two weeks, although looking at it I would think more like a month; further developments to follow as they unfold.

Bus journey from Salta. Let's not go too closely into that. The one consolation was that there was another small (female) person at the back of the bus making as much noise as our small (male) person was making at the front of it. Pity the poor passengers in the middle who thought they might catch a wink or two of sleep.

Arrived in Cordoba. Our Argentinean-qualitycontrol pushchair had been dying since England, and now it gave up the ghost completely in the bus station, so we couldn't fold it up to put it into a taxi with all our stuff. So we had to take two taxis between us.

I arrived at the Right place, complete with baby and most of luggage. Thought I'd wait outside for Martin to arrive with the rest of the luggage. Martin took his taxi to the Wrong place, rang the door bell, was told he was in the Wrong place, so he rang the Right place, where they thought I hadn't arrived because I was still waiting outside for Martin to arrive. So I'm now technically missing, even though I'm actually in the Right place. Chaos reigns. People in the Right place eventually realised I was waiting outside, and a few minutes later Martin turns up too. We've arrived.

Reunite ourselves with our car, and decide to take it for a test, and buy a replacement pushchair; see above. There is an interesting pile of books been left on the back-seat. At some stage we need to mount a piece of research to find out whose they are and whether they want them back. We decide to leave this till later. Driving in Cordoba is always an interesting experience, especially after four months in England, and probably heightened further by not having any sleep; see above. Successfully negotiated the usual hazards... horses, motorcycles on the wrong side of the road, the odd dead dog, we manage to purchase a pushchair. Prices have gone up, this one had better last or that kid's going to find himself sold into slavery.

Afternoon, Martin goes to the prison to catch up with his friend. I take Joni for a walk. Mobile phones not allowed in prison, but I persuade Martin to take the house number written on a piece of paper. I receive a phone call. Martin is on his way to hospital accompanied by three police-men. Nothing to do with the prison, he was on his way home and he slipped on the pavement. Good job he didn't try and cross the road; who knows what he'd have done. I take the car and our friends to meet him at the hospital. We arrive before he does. After a few minutes Martin arrives in wheelchair accompanied by policeman. Hand him over to hospital. They strip him, poke him and x-ray him. X-ray clear; probably knee ligaments. Rest, ice, hopping around on crutches. He's a terrible patient, but at least he hasn't broken his neck this time. Things could get better.

On the positive side, we're being jolly well looked after by the friends we are staying with, just had a great asado (BBQ) for lunch. And our favourite internet cafe has gone Wifi, so I am typing this on my own laptop, with a coffee on the side. And we're hoping to get to San Francisco on Wednesday.

Hey, what's going on? Well, we ran around a lot in England and generally had far too much fun. We were sort of prepared to come back to Argentina, but we weren't really prepared at all actually to be back here if that difference makes any sense. We got off the plane and thought "flip, now where are we?" and then we all caught some stomach bug for a few days, and then we went into suspended animation for a few more days. So two weeks later, we're still in Salta, which wasn't the plan, as far as there was ever a plan. But now we're all fit, rested, eaten well, done some walking, and enjoying the coffee shops in Salta, had some good talks with our friends here, and we're taking the night-bus to Cordoba tonight. Meanwhile, while we were vegging, our luggage seems to have been busily doing that magic expanding thing, where the same stuff that used to fit into the same bags that we packed a couple of weeks ago doesn't fit any more. Must be something in the air.

Now this is just too cool!

I've just figured out all by myself how to insert a hyperlink into our blog using html. If you have no idea what I'm talking about then please nod and say yes. If you know lots about computers then please pretend to be impressed anyway, I'm a technophobe, it took a lot of effort.

If you click on the link below, it will (hopefully, after all that!) take you to an exremely silly video on You Tube, which has been making us laugh for the last few days. Even Joni finds it funny, but we hope it won't give him any ideas...

You Tube baby video

In a house in Barnet, in a corner of the lounge, lives an old man. He has had a distinguished career in medicine, and now his body is ravaged by Parkinson's disease. He keeps our newsletter on the table in front of him, and he prays for us every morning. We were both in tears when we heard that today. Praise God for Peter, it's folk like you that keep us going.

We're back! Right now we are in Salta which wasn't the original plan. TAM airlines who were supposed to deliver us direct from Sao Paolo to Cordoba decided instead that we should go on a scenic tour around the airports of Buenos Aires, so we turned the situation to our advantage and decided to re-route to Salta. This saved us having to make an extra trip from Cordoba to Salta which we were planning to do anyway in a few days, means that we can spend time landing gently in Argentina with our friends and colleagues here in Salta, and also enabled us to travel the final leg of our journey with Andes airlines. Andes airlines are one of those "must have" experiences, from the hand-written boarding passes with truly original spellings of our surnames (Canit for me, and Srose for the guys), to our seat being not quite attached to the floor of the plane, to traveling with the cock-pit door wide open giving the passengers an interesting view into the bewildering array of electronic gadgetry inside. Bizarrely the cockpit also appeared to double as the storage point for tea and coffee pots, taking the concept of multi-skilling into unexplored new territory.

So here we are in Salta, and at some stage we shall wend our way down to Cordoba, and eventually on to San Francisco. In the meantime we need to try and persuade our kid into Argentinean time; it was still pitch black when he woke up this morning, and then he started singing for his lunch before the rest of us had moved out of pyjamas.

It's our final weekend here in Baldock and the family descended. There have been up to twenty people at various times in my parents' house. Fun and chaos reign in fairly equal proportions. Sunday afternoon and most people have headed off so we are now a mere nine, the kids are all wild and over-excited, and we really need to starting thinking about packing for heading back west tomorrow.



I know it barely compares with world hunger and the global credit crunch, but I am filled with dilemma over whether to pack my walking boots or not. OK, let's get real; I wear my boots most days in England, I took them to Argentina before, and I never wore them once. Argentina has three categories of terrain as far as I can make out. One is concrete and requires trainers, the second requires major mountaineering and a better grade of boots than these, and the third is vast prairies of arable land without any footpaths, and is sprayed with toxic chemicals from the air. So realistically I'm probably never going to wear my walking boots in Argentina. And heaven knows that I surely need the space in my rucksack. And yet, to leave them behind feels like I'm abandoning part of my person here, and somehow making a statement that I might never really be at home in Argentina. Dare I do this?

Herewith is the promised blog on homosexuality, gafcon and affairs of a similar nature (no pun intended). Although I'm trying to be careful about how I write this, I'm sure it won't be my final and definitive position, just a snapshot of the view from where I'm standing at the moment. In reality the homosexuality debate in the Christian world in general, and the homosexuality debate in the Anglican church in particular, has been winding me up for a while, so the gafcon conference, and the "Jerusalem Declaration" coming out of it arrived like a red-rag to the already wound up proverbial. So this is me trying to tease out where I think the problems are with the debate in its current form.

Problem one; "The false gospel and the true gospel". It has become the norm to state positions in terms of the false (homosexual) gospel and the true gospel (the rest of us). In their final statement, gafcon choose to word it as the "false gospel" versus the "biblical gospel" which amounts to the same thing. I think there is a non-sequitur here; namely the assumption that if the other guy's position is false, then mine must be true. Naturally I believe my understanding of the gospel to be true, otherwise I would revise it. However, I am also aware that I am continually revising my understanding of the gospel, so I am unable to guarantee that I will still fully agree with my today's understanding by this time next week. Yes, I surely do believe in absolute truth, I just can't claim that I will have a handle on it this side of heaven. When climbing a mountain, we may be pretty sure that the path we are on leads to the top, but incontrovertible proof can only be had by successfully reaching the summit (or not). Some of the false gospel / true gospel arguments that I am reading seem to go one further than the builders of the Tower of Babel in that the writers appear to believe that they are already at the top, in possession of the mind of God, and therefore don't need even to go to the bother of building a tower. A little humility might go a long way.

Problem two; "The authority of Scripture". This phrase makes me so cynical. It's not the fault of the words, it's the way they are carelessly thrown around. Say "it's an authority of Scripture issue", and apparently that clinches the debate; everyone must agree with me or you are being deliberately anti-scriptural the end. What is not being discussed is what we actually mean by "The authority of scripture". How is scripture authoritative? To whom? Under what circumstances? Does this mean that we have to take it literally? All of it? Are some parts more authoritative than others? Who decides? On what basis? How do we know they are right? Is Paul's request that Timothy should bring his coat also authoritative to us? If we use common sense to decide then are we ranking common sense above the authority of scripture? Latin Link is a multi-denominational mission, although theologically we probably lean towards a gafcon type position. Our basis of faith statement is similar to those found in many similar organisations. It slithers out of any discussion on the authority of scripture in a fairly standard, but non-the-less thoroughly cheapskate fashion, by inserting the phrase "as originally given". This prevents any argument, since we don't have the originals to argue over, and in doing so, claims absolutely nothing at all regarding the translations of the Bible which we hold in our hands today, giving us free reign to toss such phrases around without wasting any valuable energy over understanding their meaning.

Problem three; "Proof-text ping-pong". Assuming that we had reached an agreement on the nature and function of "the authority of scripture", turning to scripture itself presents us with another range of issues. Leviticus 18:22 and Leviticus 20:13 both tell us that "to lie with a man" is detestable. Pretty straightforward, until we find that these verses are sandwiched around other instructions such as Leviticus 19:19 in which it is also forbidden to plant two crops in the same field, or to wear a garment made from two types of cloth. So, what would an honest and consistent approach to these verses look like? (And what does that say about the recent resurgence of allotment growing in the UK?)

If the Old Testament complicates our lives, how about the New Testament? Let's assume we have agreed that homosexual practice is sexually immoral, because while the NT only mentions homosexuality a couple of times, it does have more references to sexual immorality. The "fruit of the spirit" passage in Galations is one well-known example. It says "The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality... (long list) and envy... and those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God". For a different genre compare Revelation 21, which offers "the fiery lake of sulphur" as the ultimate destination for various people, including "the sexually immoral" and "all liars". In my blog of the 7th of July, I clearly admitted to being envious (of those people who weren't spending their lives queuing on the M25). Since then, no-one has cancelled their speaking invitation, no-one has declared us to be out of fellowship, and no-one has called me in for counselling. I am pretty certain that all of those things would have swiftly followed if I had admitted to being a practicing homosexual. Likewise in Revelation, the phrase "all liars" suggests that there is little wriggle room to distinguish between "a white lie" versus out and out fraud. So when we say "I didn't have time" meaning "I have no intention of doing this", then we are condemned right alongside our homosexual brother. Therefore, if we are unable to draw a wedge between us, the question must be asked; are we equally God's children, or are we equally to be excluded from the Kingdom?

One way of moving away from "proof-text ping-pong" is to look for the wider principles of the Bible. I have heard a couple of speakers begin with Genesis (which is the beginning after all). Genesis 2 sets out the principle for Christian marriage; a man and a woman, different roles, man "united to his wife" etc. The opening chapters of Genesis also define a pattern for work and rest. If we are going to use Genesis 2 as a mandate to exclude homosexuals from holding prominent positions in Christian organisations, then we quickly end up playing ping-pong again, since consistency demands that we will also use the same passages to oust many (most?) existing leaders of Christian organisations, for consistently failing to maintain Godly patterns of work and rest. If we are making any serious claim for scripture to be authoritative, then surely we must recognise a modicum of internal consistency, however uncomfortable that might be for us.

Problem four; "The parts we didn't read".
Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke
to set the oppressed free and to break every yoke
Is it not to share your food with the hungry
and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter -
when you see the naked, to clothe him,
and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood? Isaiah 58
We have set ourselves up for this one. Any single issue debate carries a risk of losing sight of the bigger picture. Although gafcon et al may not have been responsible for starting the debate, for us to respond by defining it as an "authority of scripture issue" leaves us wide wide open, with the areas where scripture is rather less than authoritative in our own lives exposed to the heavens and the world. Where sexual immorality can be found in a few isolated verses, which I had to use a concordance to go looking for, the mandate for God's people to model justice and inclusion occupies vast swathes of the Bible, from whole books such as Amos and Proverbs, to much of Isaiah's teaching, to the scaffolding set out in the Pentateuch upon which Israel's society was to be built, to the Jesus who spent his life identifying with sinners and marginalised people.

The gafcon declaration upholds the four ecumenical councils at item three, it upholds the thirty-nine articles at item four, it upholds the book of common prayer at item six, it upholds the unchangeable standard of Christian marriage at item eight, and it "seeks relief of the poor" at item ten. Skating swiftly over this interesting order of priorities, the wording of "seeking relief", is still rather unfortunate. Maybe freudian, it could be mis(?)-interpreted as "we seek to be relieved of the poor", but most importantly, it belies a "charity for the helpless" attitude, one where my conscience can be appeased by dropping a coin in a jar, which exposes a total lack of commitment to seek out the sources and causes of injustice, particularly those where my own economic decisions lead to the oppression of my unseen brother.

To give one example, when Coca Cola are stealing water supplies from poor farmers in Brazil and India, and polluting water courses in Panama and Guatemala, and treating the poor less favourably than the rich by permitting 30 times the level of toxicity in Coke in India compared with the USA, and standing by while their trade union activists are murdered in Colombia, it is difficult to see how I can maintain the contradictory stances of endorsing this organisation by buying their products, while looking down on my homosexual brother, and still claim to have any regard at all for the "authority of scripture".

How can we who have consistently prostituted ourselves to secular gods of consumerism claim even a molehill of moral high-ground from which to judge another's servant? (Actually Coca Cola aren't even the worst, I just use them as one example of many, partly because they the most "in your face" of the multinationals in Argentina, and as such they have come to symbolise to me a daily reminder of the insidiousness of the evil which dwells among us).
The Independent correspondent in her response to gafcon wrote "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, or fiddling while Rome burns; pick your metaphor and weep". I am reading John 8:1-11, and I am weeping. I weep for the lostness of all those people genuinely desperate to uphold the truths of scripture yet somehow lost in a caricature defending their tiny god and his mini-scriptures; and I weep for the lostness of the rest of the world waiting for a real Saviour; and I weep for myself for all those times when my own rage and frustration render me impotent to take the action that I ought. Come Lord Jesus.

We've been having fun with my sister and her three kids, over from the USA where they live. Joni is loving having three bigger cousins to entertain him. They never tire of playing "peek-a-boo" like his boring parents do. We all went to Southend for the day where he had his first taste (literally) of sand and sea.



Then the next day we recreated Southend in the garden, with the paddling pool, the sandpit, and some genuine Southend stones and shells. They added the sand to the water, and the water to the sand, and turned the garden into a giant mud pie... which I guess is a fairly accurate representation of Southend.




I bought a cool 6 man tent from ebay for fifty quid, it's tall enough to stand up in, and it'll only take ten minutes to put it up now we know how it goes. The kids spend the day playing hotels in it in the garden, and the more enthuseastic campers among us (read Hazel and the kids) have been sleeping out in it the last few nights. I love it when kids are un-sophisticated enough to enjoy making mud pies and sleeping outside, long may it last.

Keswick. Good week. Weather typically Keswick. Stayed in the most amazing flat, looked like it had been completely refurbished just before we arrived, all new and shiny; I don't even know how to operate a microwave, let alone a dishwasher as well. Thank you Keswick ministries for your "missionary hospitality fund". Interesting teaching threads on Genesis, Isaiah, and working with marginalised people. Need to go back and re-read my notes next. Greatly appreciated the well stocked creche, complete with live link-up to the teaching; shame it wasn't open for more of the sessions, difficult to see why it couldn't have been. Made the most of the opportunities for walking; pottered around Dodd on an unusually sunny afternoon and spotted ospreys and buzzards, enjoyed some airy views from Catbells ridge on the other sunny afternoon, trudged around Derwent water in the rain, bit of a plod but hey I've done it now, and the last afternoon was Skiddaw or bust. Excessive wind and rain meant that no-one else wanted to come, so I took Joni, he doesn't object (yet), he even seemed to enjoy spotting the sheep when they emerged from the low cloud which was pretty much all we saw above the 500 metre mark. Sometimes I need to do these things to prove to myself that I'm still the person I thought I was. We shared the week with some fantastic people, longstanding friends of Martin who I didn't really know that well before; I'm risking embarrassing you guys, but I don't think you realise quite how much I have appreciated having this time with you. Little gifts from God found in unexpected places.

This week I just bought my first thing on ebay, and set up a pay-pal account. Does that mean I'm in the 21st century now, or do I have to set up a facebook account... oh please don't make me have to join facebook.

Yesterday we went to see some wonderful people near Dartford. We even volunteered to drive round the M25 and queue for the Dartford crossing on a weekday because we really wanted to see them. Some people really inspire us, not flashy types, just quietly getting on with walking the talk in the place where God has put them. And they have Battenberg cake.

Tomorrow we're off to Keswick convention for a week. I'm hoping for good teaching and some nice weather to climb hills. I'd like to climb Skiddaw with Joni on my back, and see the ospreys at Dodds Wood.

I'm working on writing something about the whole Gafcon / homosexual debate thing. It's disturbing me and I probably need to write about it in order to think about it.

Meanwhile here's a few gems from the last couple of weeks...
Bumped into a kid who I'd met at a school Christian union meeting. Greets me warmly. Her friend asks "who's that?" She replies "Oh she came to that thing at school, you know, the one where you get food and that..."

Old man up the road from us, not sure what to do with his cardboard waste... "I think I'll just put it in with the re-circulating"

At a church service, person leading worship; "this is an internal notice for Ann.... How great the father's love for us, how vast beyond all measure... no everyone it's not a message from the Lord, I've just forgotten to write the words out"

"Don't let your husband's mind wander; it's too small to be allowed out on its own"

Seen on a postcard "Cracked people are valuable because they let the light through"

Have a good week everyone

Question; What do Tony Blair, US tourists, and mission leaders have in common?
Answer; "It's Tuesday, must be Holland".

It's been a bit like that the last week or so. Last Sunday we were in South Darenth, followed by Welwyn. Monday we were in London. Tuesday we were at a school in Baldock, and then Potters Bar. Wednesday we were at a school in Letchworth, and then Cambridge. Thursday we were in Bristol. Friday we were in Oxford. Saturday we were in Lewes. Sunday we were taking part in the service in Baldock, and then the service in Bygrave, followed by going to Reading.

On Saturday, someone whose job-title means that he jolly well ought to know better, asked us "How is your holiday going?" Naturally we forgave him.... right after I'd dumped my pasta and sauce over his head... not really, just thought about it... Jesus says that amounts to the same thing.

Friends who we were at college with tend to have one or two big churches who provide most or all of their support, so homeleave basically involves popping in to say thank you very much, couple of weeks, job done. While part of me is envious of not spending however many hours on the M25, I also very much value the relationships that we have with our supporters. We put effort into them, we find them rich and meaningful, and we like to hope that we have a role in peoples' lives as they have in ours.

Meanwhile, I'm also glad that this week has some blank spaces in it. That place-to-place thing is good for a few days, but it wouldn't be my long-term choice for a life-style. Which I guess is one of many reasons why I hope never to be Tony Blair, or a US tourist, or in mission leadership.

"It is our hope that this Statement on the Global Anglican Future will be received with comfort and joy by many Anglicans around the world who have been distressed about the direction of the Communion. We believe the Anglican Communion should and will be reformed around the biblical gospel and mandate to go into all the world and present Christ to the nations."
Gafcon Final Statement can be found in its entirety on www.gafcon.org

Rather a long way from being comforted and joyful, I sincerely hope that my continued employment never becomes conditional upon my signing this document or any other like it. Nor do I give permission for anyone else to sign it on my behalf. Dole office next week?

We're back! If you've been looking for us, you will have noticed we have been off air for a few days. Our friend who kindly hosts our stuff had some major hardware issues, and fixing a box on a rack in London from where he is in Japan sounds like it was no mean feat.

Last week we disappeared off for a couple of days to see some friends who live on the edge of Sheffield, and enjoyed their good company, cooking, and stomping in the Peak District. This is us, looking smug if windswept, realising that we could see most of the route that we had just taken across this sweet little rocky plateau...

This is the cleverest cartoon I've seen in a long time, It's had me thinking for a week about sheep and goats, and how a "non-homogenous sheep" might find themselves less welcome than a "goat" in some places. The original and a whole lot more can be found on asbojesus.wordpress.com which is a blog belonging to a Jon Birch and well worth a visit. His work reminds me of Adrian Plass in cartoon form, perhaps sailing a bit closer to the wind than AP, but often dealing with the same sort of issues from a similar perspective.

Isn't it astonishing that the most densely populated corner in one of the most populated countries in the world can still offer views like this;




and this;




and these;




These wild roses are part of an ancient hedgerow, believed to be several hundred years old, knitting together I don't know how many species of trees, shrubs, and climbers.




And all these riches just from one short post-breakfast walk in the home-counties.




There are lots of things we like about living in Argentina, some of which I've written about in previous entries, but these photos remind me that there are sacrifices too. People tend to have a fairly simplistic idea about sacrifice in mission, i.e, how we have abandoned our "first world comforts" in order to live in "third world hardship". While this might be true in some parts of the world, for us in Argentina the sacrifices that we feel most keenly are much more subtle, but none-the-less real.

Family and friends; the obvious big one; not being able to see people for ages at a time, particularly since some of our friends here require third-party assistance to communicate. Not knowing when Joni will next see his grandparents. Realising that even four months here isn't going to be long enough to see the half of the people that we had hoped to.

Free time; a network of footpaths, varied and accessible countryside, rules about what sort of chemicals we spray on it, RSPB reserves, books in English, public swimming pools, lots of friends, a "local" that serves real ale... In Argentina we have none of these things, and we still haven't figured out what we would do with free time.

Church culture; being part of a church where we feel part of the scenery because its mistakes are our mistakes. Church in Argentina also hampers the development of friendships because "being spiritual" seems to mean "being seen at a lot of meetings", so the people with whom we are trying to build relationships often don't have time to do anything outside of work and church.

Being useful; it's an ongoing joke that our greatest impact on people in Argentina has been through Martin breaking his neck, and me having a baby. We used to be known as competent professionals who other people called upon to do things, now we are neither known nor called upon.

The weather; people moan about British weather, but really the weather in the UK is as gentle and predictable as any in the world. Most of the year we have no concern more pressing than whether to take the jumper, the coat, or both. In Argentina we spend the summer hiding indoors hoping for Autumn; and the Winter hiding under the duvet hoping for spring. This has a surprisingly big impact on our motivation for life and ministry.

Thinking, "hmm, that's a bit of a negative note to finish this post on". Big temptation to find a way of writing a rounded conclusion with the ends tied up to say that it's all OK really. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But we do sincerely believe that we're doing what we're supposed to be doing, so we're going to carry on doing it anyway. And maybe tomorrow will be another day.

The global conference of influential evangelical anglicans is about to get under way in Jerusalem. Under the acronym of GAFCON, it ought to be good for a few jokes, but I haven't heard any yet. I haven't seen the agenda, but I'm confidently predicting that it will contain an item or two on homosexuality, the most high-profile issue currently facing the global anglican church. Chatting with a friend, himself a studious evangelical, I expressed surprise both that the anglican church has managed to hold itself together for so long, and then that the issue of homosexuality looks to be the one that finally rends it asunder. He said "it's an authority of scripture issue". Other issues, such as ethical decisions on whose regimes we endorse with our spending power, loving ones enemies, the rights of refugees, and responding to the needs of the alien, the orphan and the widow, apparently aren't authority of scripture issues, otherwise presumably our learned colleagues would have chosen to hold their conference in an alternative location.

This is a sweet little gimmick (thanks Tia...). If you click on the graphic you can take a little quiz to find out what time you are. Apparently I'm 10.02... Funnily that's probably quite accurate, it's a time of day I like... late enough to be awake, and early enough still to have lots of day to have fun with.

We've been on the road the last few days, enjoyed staying with Viv, and visiting friends in Colchester, Mersea, Cranham, Felixstowe and Cambridge. The weather was fantastic, so we managed four walks in four days in between speaking at meetings. I saw my first cuckoo ever; I was listening to a cuckoo calling in a small clump of trees, when a cuckoo-sized, cuckoo-shaped bird flew out; and it still took the mighty brain cell five minutes to figure out what it was. Oh well. Heybridge Basin (temporary residence of said cuckoo) is a truly superb place for a walk; plethora of birdlife, and the ice-cream in the tea-shop was pretty good too.

One thing that Argentina and the UK have in common is that both countries used to have a world-class education system.

"Schooling" (I stop short of describing it as education) in Argentina has largely been reduced to a series of facts and procedures to be memorised and reproduced in response to the corresponding question, which is itself previously memorised by the student; i.e. really rather similar to the SATS system in the UK.

Argentina is different to the UK in that internal auditing reveals that state schools have both the highest and the lowest results, with the private schools occupying a nicely-dressed block of mediocrity in the middle. This seems rather strange to me as an English person, but it was confirmed by a friend who teaches at an expensive private school in Argentina, who explains that many parents appear to prefer a "creche service matching their social class" as a priority over educational content.

In the few weeks that we have been back in the UK, we have witnessed something of a genteel back-lash over the SATS tests. The non-stampede has been led by the Head Teachers Association, followed up by a less than complimentary report from a few education advisors. What I find most surprising is that parents are virtually nowhere to be seen; they're certainly not leading the revolt, and they're not even coming out to support the efforts of the head-teachers et al. When parents are prepared to move house, lie about their address, send kiddo to live with Auntie Jemima, give sizeable "donations", or change their religion to secure those elusive places in a prime school for six years, it seems very odd indeed that the same parents apparently don't mind very much if two of those six years are frankly wasted.

Could it be that the SATS have survived this long because they actually hook into some parents' need for competition between themselves? Witness a place where I used to shop for books. Today in a space previously housing "books of fun activities for kids", I find racks of "books of exam papers, poorly disguised as fun activities for kids". Who buys them? I wonder. A head teacher friend confirmed "Oh the parents love SATS, it's all about your child getting a higher score than someone else's child". My sister came across a magazine article on "packed lunches to help your child get ahead". Among the recipes for alfalfa and apricot on ciabatta, the article included the advice that although a parent might relapse and include the odd chocolate bar, this should not be done on days when child goes to play at friends' houses after school, lest lax parent be looked down upon by parents of friends. Key learning outcomes:
Image is everything
Lie if it helps to preserve image
Never give anyone a chance to accept you as you are
The old adage said that "education is wasted on the young". I suspect the real issue may not be entirely the fault of the young.

It's been a whirlwind tour. Sunday, friend Jo came to see us. Monday, we went to Oxfordshire to see friend Tania and her two little girls aged 3 and 5. Tuesday, we went to Berkshire to see friend John. Tuesday evening, we went to another bit of Berkshire to see friends Sarah, Richard and their twin boys aged 5. Wednesday we went to Colchester to see friend Faith and her prayer group, and Wednesday evening we went to Dovercourt to see friends at Kingsway Evangelical church.

Joni of course loves all the attention. It's a good job he still needs his parents to drive him places, otherwise we'd probably be superfluous to requirements. We have also enjoyed ourselves catching up with lots of friends, and we were also encouraged by the warm response we received at the two meetings that we took. I was thinking last night that giving presentations to groups is a bit like crowd-surfing (you can tell the kind of gigs I used to go to as a student); person throws themselves onto the mercy and the upstretched arms of the crowd, who bear said surfer aloft, passing them to the back of the arena and safely restoring them to earth. Sometimes it went wrong and people got hurt, but that was part of the risk, and I never actually saw it happen in all my gig-going experience. So, we threw ourselves on the mercy and the upstretched arms of our supporting groups.

The church at Dovercourt have gone technical since we were last there, but unfortunately we couldn't make our laptop talk properly to their beamer. So after a lot of fiddling by us, and patience from the church, we had to set up our (borrowed) beamer and use that instead. Having finally begun the meeting, I was disconcerted to see Martin exit with Joni and the nappy bag just at the end of my talk, when Martin was supposed to come to the front and do his bit. I swiftly moved into a time of "any questions?" but there are limits to the stringing along that one can produce, so I made my excuses, and leaving the stage empty, went to swop with Martin who was located changing the baby on a window sill.

Three days; three curries. By long-standing tradition we had a curry with Tania on Monday. On Tuesday we thought we'd go for Chinese, but Sarah and family live in a small village where the Chinese doesn't open on Tuesdays, so we had another curry. On Wednesday, Faith had been reading our blog entries about curry, and made us one. Only another dozen or so and we'll have stocked up enough to see us through the next couple of years of curry-famine.

A friend of ours died this week, I have known Jon since I was 19, he's a top bloke, we share a reputation for asking the difficult questions. We feel sad for us that he's not around, but he also knew very starkly the likely progression of his illness, and we're grateful that he was spared the worst of the potential end-scenarios. Most importantly of all, he knew where he was headed, and I reckon his welcome party is just getting going. "I have run the race, I have kept the faith".

Since last week we've been giving presentations to churches in Cranham, Whitstable, and Welling. We went to an event with folk at a church in Hatfield, caught up with old friends in Cambridge, dropped in "on spec" to a group in Harlow, and because obviously we hadn't driven enough miles yet, we fulfilled a longstanding promise to take a young friend to Alton Towers. The motorway network is well into traditional "summer" mode, i.e. filled with traffic cones and contraflow systems, without which the congestion alone would probably still make the experience arduous enough; but my goodness we do have the most fantastic bunch of friends and supporters. Today was a series of joyful little reunions with friends at a drop-in centre in Harlow, and I was struck yet again with the warmth and care, and by so many people just quietly getting on with walking the good deeds that God sets before us. It probably sounds sentimental, but we are really proud to know you guys.




There's something about theme parks. I always think I'm too grown up, and have no intention of mounting anything moving faster than a cable-car. I can maintain this stance without any difficulty until someone persuades me that my presence is necessary to make up a twosome. I ascend as a (relatively) dignified adult convinced I wouldn't be doing this apart from as a favour for my needy friend, and descend as a fully transformed consumerist adrenalin junkie; "That was fun, now get me a bigger one...".


Joni at eight months old today is too young to be impressed by roller coasters, but he was highly pleased by his first experience of donut. His newest skill learnt this week is blowing kisses. He is very generous and non-discriminatory over whom he bestows his kisses upon. Worthy recipients have included the lady serving in a corner shop, my parents' dog, and the sheep and lambs in the field we walked the dog through.

The Independent newspaper is a fine publication. I read it every day, including online in Argentina. As well as keeping up with UK news, it is useful for monitoring progress of the "UK perspective on the rest of the world". For a more accurate majority UK perspective I know I should be reading a paper with a wider circulation... but I scrapped that idea on realising that it meant The Sun, or The Mail.

Thus we have been able to follow debates on wheelie bin taxes, and hospital super-viruses. And thus we have also discovered that South America is truly a "forgotten continent". In his book "Notes from a Small Island", Bill Bryson says;
"If your concept of world geography was shaped entirely by what you read in the papers and saw on television, you would have no choice but to conclude that America must be about where Ireland is, that France and Germany lie roughly alongside the Azores, that Australia occupies a hot zone somewhere in the region of the Middle East, and that pretty much all the other sovereign states are either mythical, or can only be reached by spaceship". Bryson, (1995) p32.
And of course even Bryson where he lists "America" actually only means "the USA", along with every BBC newsreader who insists on referring to "the American president..."

In the month that we have been back in the UK however, there have been a couple of South American news stories actually made it to the UK press. The first, a bus crash in Ecuador involved British kids on a gap year project, otherwise it probably wouldn't have featured. The Independent travel editor, one Simon Calder, described the country's infrastructure as "basic", and said:
"This is a third world country with all the problems that come with that." There's nothing like an insightful piece of analysis to enable the reader to understand the story... and that is nothing like an insightful piece of analysis, but it was quoted by the BBC, so presumably it was the best elucidation available and at least Mr Calder was able to identify correctly the country he was writing about, which is probably all it takes to put a journalist into the "elite" class when reporting on South America. This leads us on to the South American news story covered last week, i.e. the Bolivian department of Santa Cruz voting for economic autonomy. The story was interpreted in The Independent as "Santa Cruz voting on distancing themselves from Lima". I rest my case.

Trying to find out what people give to teething kids in the UK. Apparently one "infant suspension" by Calpol. Puts me in mind of "ten green bottles" but if it takes his mind off his teeth...

... income tax and morris dancing.

The tax office, the beloved tax office. Martin logged on to the tax office website and thus discovered that he had been re-designated as the owner of one "Saffron Indian Cuisine". We don't know where Saffron Indian Cuisine is, which is a shame because we'd like to call in for a meal, since we apparently own the business. Meanwhile we applied to calculate my tax online. My pin-number arrived promptly through the post, to my house, with all the correct details, apart from the small oversight that I had been renamed as a Mr CD Jones. Pro-ID-card campaigners used to suggest that people with nothing to hide would have nothing to fear from ID cards. Clearly this is not true for as long as government computer systems continue to perform these spectacular identity mix-ups with such inevitability.



I had forgotten it was May Day today. We were having a quiet pub-lunch with some friends, when a man dressed as a tree appeared at the bar. He was closely followed by the Offley Morris men, complete with bells, flowers, sticks and the ubiquitous handkerchief. Close inspection under the floral hat revealed one suspect to be the father of my friend from childhood. So we swopped family yarns, and Joni rode on his horsey. May Day is a big day in a Morris dancer's calendar. They start at sunrise and drink... er... I mean dance, in a packed and varied itinerary of locations throughout the day. So they downed a swift pint and performed four dances in the car-park accompanied by accordion, fiddle and a lot of banter, before moving on down the road. I explained to Joni that this fine tradition is part of his heritage, should he choose to accept it. Question is, how am I supposed to explain it for our Argentinean readership?

The sun shone, the blossom blossomed, and the hillsides were alive with newly hatched lambs as we stomped the paths with Joni bouncing along in his back-pack behind me. Each walk makes me greedy for the next, I can't get enough of it. This is what I really miss about England. No, we don't have the drama of the Andes, the Iguazu falls, the pampas, or the glaciers. English countryside isn't show-offy, but that, ironically, is one of the reasons why I love her understated rolling green so much. And even more important, it's only two minutes walk from my door. I think that's the main reason why we don't take enough time off in Argentina; we've never managed to figure out what one does for free time in a country where hardly anyone just goes for a walk, and in any case most places are too far away for anything other than a major expedition.

One of the things I was really looking forward to about England was a chocolate-fest, since Argentinean chocolate is officially nasty. But now I'm here and faced with groaning shop counters of everything I could possibly want in the confectionary department, I find I'm not as excited by the prospect as I thought I was. In fact I am surprised to discover that the one thing I really wanted but didn't know it, is a good greasy English "All day breakfast". I love English sausages, even though they actually are rubbish; the "meat" content is barely meat, and the other ingredients are barely food. Nevertheless, despite feeling my arteries harden with every grease laden serving, I am joyfully taking every occasion to plough through a good old fashioned fry-up. And in case you were wondering, I'm not even pregnant.

Still on the theme of food, we finally made it out for a curry the other evening. It was fantastic, needs to be repeated soon. The place was moderately busy for a weekday evening, so we were surprised by the amount of personal attention we were receiving from the waiters. Polite and friendly Bangladeshi guys, they all came to talk to us, even the ones who didn't appear to have a reason to be at our table. And the questions they were asking seemed rather strange; the "where are you from and what brings you to these parts" variety of questions that we normally expect to answer five times a day in Argentina. Then we realised; everyone else was smartly dressed and neatly occupying their table in grown-up twos and fours, having left the kids at home with a baby-sitter. Cultural gaffe number one. As Martin observed, even after only a couple of years abroad we are already at the stage where we can only just about masquerade as English, and even then it doesn't always work. For the record, our baby expresses a preference for popadoms and mango chutney.

Having been back in the UK for almost two weeks I thought it was time to write something. So far we've been enjoying seeing family and friends, going for walks over the fields, and revisiting old haunts. We did our first official church presentation last week, which went OK in a slightly disorganised "wondering how this powerpoint projector thingy works..." sort of way. Luckily we were among friends and they were good to us. I will write about my impressions of being back in the UK, but not this time because I haven't figured out what I think about it yet.

The last couple of weeks in Argentina went a bit mad. The contract finished on our house, so we had to pack everything up and store it in someone else's spare room. I had an invitation to go to a conference in Ecuador in the last week, which I declined, thinking that moving house, going to England, and being the parent of a small person were three good reasons not to be going anywhere. But I was persuaded by Small's other parent that it was a good opportunity and that he would be delighted by the prospect of taking charge of his son for a week. So having boxed all our belongings, we installed Martin and Joni into the pastor's house, and off I went to Ecuador.

For reasons best known to someone else, the most logical route from Cordoba to Ecuador is via Panama. And it wasn't until I reached Panama that I discovered the time difference and realised that the wait was an extremely long one. Hence, on exhausting the entertainment possibilities of the airport (allow twenty minutes max), I was stamped through immigration and went out to discover the world.

From my brief sojourn, Panama looks like a place worth returning to. Watching massive boats ease their bulk through the canal at Miraflores Lock is enough to bring back any little kid's fascination with transport, while Panama city is the clash of two worlds. On one side the shiny glass and chrome tower-blocks rise above air conditioned shopping centres and white people drive around in showroom 4x4's; on the other side the afro-carribean population crouch on upturned crates along cobbled streets lined with rickety ex-colonial terraces. Then the digression was over and on we went to Ecuador.

"Sometimes this missionary thing does have its exotic moments..." I thought as I strolled along a mountain track, at 4100 metres with the mist swirling around us, high above the city of Quito, sharing a mango with a Brazilian theologian, and a Peruvian disability activist. It was a good conference, a first consultation on disability and theology from a Latino perspective, organised by EDAN, the disability network of the World Council of Churches. We tackled some brave issues, of embodiment and the image of God, as well as thorny questions of Bible translation. It was good to see that EDAN has also moved forward in its thinking since the last event of theirs that I went to a couple of years ago. They don't have all the answers, but at least they're now asking some of the questions that hadn't yet made it onto their previous agenda. And now I have a whole lot of notes to read through and things to think about. I'm also wondering if it might be time to start doing some more theological study. Probably in Spanish and possibly with a more "traditional" establishment in order to have freedom to explore ideas without being browbeaten by the self-appointed thought-police. Now, how to slide that idea in past an organisational hierarchy...

Although Joni’s body-clock would have us believe that we are still somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, actually we are back in the UK, TAM Airlines notwithstanding.

The first connection delivered us to Sao Paulo airport without incident, where we discovered that our 22.45 flight had been renamed 23.45, but in any case wasn’t leaving till 01.00. Sure enough at 01.00 they loaded us all on, and then made us sit there until 03.00. The explanation given was that “the baggage was being loaded”. We couldn’t quite figure how the baggage could take that long to be loaded, and we suspect that the real explanation might be that “the baggage wasn’t being loaded”. In any case, it meant that Joni was fed up with the plane before it even left the tarmac, and the other passengers were probably equally fed up with Joni.

I have heard that some airlines give extra room to parents with babies (given that we pay a percentage of the ticket price for him), but TAM isn’t one of them, so we got to share a seat in the middle bank, in the middle of the plane. The meal thing is the biggest challenge, using one set of hands to pin down baby’s waving limbs, and the other set of hands to wrestle the lids off the containers, while not tipping anything over the people whose elbows are trapping mine by my side. I gave up on the cutlery; eating pasta with ones fingers might be indelicate but it ensured that some at least made its intended destination.

Arriving at Heathrow, we waited for a gate to become available (having missed our allocated landing time I guess), and on finally entering the terminal we found ourselves corralled into a passageway, behind a locked door, beyond which the bomb-squad were dealing with an incident in the immigration department. Luckily we were in Terminal four, so after immigration had eventually spat us out, we were quickly able to collect all our baggage from a moving carrousel, apart from the pushchair which was shortly delivered to our hands by a real person. Now there’s a novel idea for keeping the system moving, might someone suggest it to the gurus scratching their heads in Terminal five.

So here we are in sunny Baldock feeling slightly surreal, trying to figure out whether the last couple of years were a strange dream, which of our two worlds is the real one, and where the points of connection might be between them. Joni is bypassing such existential angst, and is busily categorising his two worlds according to flavour. Major discoveries associated with the UK so far include tinned baked beans, rusks, instant oat cereal, cheddar cheese…

Our gorgeous baby has decided that in this world there are two modes of being...

One... You are providing me with your full and undivided attention, involving both hands and total eye contact, so I shall smile, laugh, gurgle, and generally be very happy.

Two... You aren't, so I shall cry inconsolably until you do.

Fantastic. We have produced a child who is sociable, outgoing, responds to stimuli, and is able to communicate his opinions.

So just when does mummy get to write a sermon, make a phone call, empty the washing machine, cook lunch, put her clothes on, drink a cup of coffee, or go to the toilet?

I'm having a standby feature built into the next one. Meantime, we are looking forward to going to England in two weeks time; "Granny...."

Life's been a bit domestic of late. I painted the doors, Martin conjugated verbs, Joni had his next set of injections, the dog went in for a second attempt to spay her, we had food poisoning...




The intrepid missionary carves a swathe through the jungle.





Meaningful theological discussion in German





Comparing babies in the swimming pool.... ours is fatter and has less hair.





Young friend Brenda introduces Joni to the major food groups.

When I was at All Nations (hesitate to say "studying", although by all accounts I did more studying than my beloved by virtue of the fact that I actually wrote an essay or two...), on Wednesday mornings, we used to have a session known as CiM, "Contemporary Issues in Mission". This was basically a "choose your own adventure" activity, where a case study would be presented, and students invited to come up with responses and solutions. A typical case-study would look something like this...

Case Study
A certain organisation, henceforth known as Mission-in-action, runs a short-term programme to place (mostly) young volunteers to work with national projects for a few months at a time. Over recent years the programme has grown, matured, and gained recognition and status both in the sending, and receiving countries.

Recently, a disturbing pattern appears to be emerging from a few projects, challenging Mission-in-action to respond, and maybe to rethink their modus operandi.

In general projects have tended to be fairly small scale, existing operations, characterised by a dynamic national leader, with experience, track record, a positive attitude to Westerners, and vision to move forward. As part of Mission-in-action's relationship with the national leader, volunteers are seconded to the project to fulfill specific roles for an agreed period.

Over time, in some projects, relationships with the national leader have subtly changed for the worse, leading to a perception that the concepts of "partnership" and "project", may have been given a lower priority than the personal ambition of the project leader. This has manifested itself in a variety of ways;volunteers feeling as though they are being exploited, in being asked to do more and more; or the prioritising of "fundraising" appearing to become the most important activity of the project, with volunteers being put under pressure to raise funds from their own friends and family. In some cases, this had resulted in relationship breakdown, and Mission-in-action declaring a moratorium on providing resources for a particular project or leader.

It has been suggested that there may be some parallels between a Western mission organisation finding themselves in a strained relationship with a national leader who has been enabled to construct themselves an empire; and a Western Government deciding to go to war against the dictator that they helped to put into power; "created by the CIA, wanted by the FBI".

How could these situations have been prevented?
How should they be responded to?

Discuss with the person next to you, and be prepared to share your results by coffee time.

Two hypothetical scenarios...

1... I hear the words "the exec has decided", and I know that whoever decided, it wasn't the exec, since I'm on the exec and it's the first I've heard of it.

or...

2 ... I sit through a zillion meetings in order that "the exec" can truly decide.

At what point does honesty step aside for the sake of ones quality of life?
How far do we really believe in democratic process?


We have just got back from our team conference in Buenos Aires, which was the best one I have been to so far. There were good people, we weren't self-catering, we did a relaxed trip out to Tigre (on the delta of the BA coastline), there was nothing truly pointless on the programme, and I'm not pregnant! I accept it wasn't the fault of the organisers that I was pregnant last year, but it does somewhat interfere with one's enthuseasm for wading through relentless hours of pointless information.

Too busy to blog... ironies of life.

This week we went to San Marcos, and to San Francisco, and we're about to go off to Buenos Aires for our annual team conference. In between, there have been trips to town, church meetings, various visitors both expected and otherwise, prison visiting, sundry appointments, cleaning, shopping, cooking, washing, entertaining Joni, and a man knocking a large hole into our kitchen wall in order to repair our burst hot-water pipe. He also fixed my oven; hooray hooray hooray. So I made chocolate brownies yesterday in celebration.

On Wednesday we went to look at the work that we have been offered in San Francisco. The road was full of trucks so it was slow going; three hours each way from Cordoba. We started with a meeting in the prison where the sub-directora wasn't exactly delighted to see us; "ice-maiden" would be a fair description. Fortunately, another guy came along, whom I recognised as being the chief of security from one of the Cordoba prisons, now apparently transferred to San Francisco. When we started explaining about the ministry that Martin is involved with, the guy interrupted to say how well known and respected this ministry is in Cordoba, and the ice began to thaw.

We had lunch with some people on the leadership of the church; small baptist congregation, partners to the church in Cordoba. Then we went to visit the Rios family, who are good friends of ours. They have five kids who like playing with Joni.

Later, we went out to the village where we would probably be based. More of a hamlet than a village really. Surrounded by plantations, it takes five minutes to circumnavigate in a vehicle, and only slightly longer on foot. Although it is less than twenty kilometres from San Francisco, Quebracho Herreda seems to be a forgotten back-water with very few services or opportunities for its population and we managed to ascertain that there are no Christian activities going on at all. The idea of the project would be to work with families and kids with special educational needs. Many kids don't go to school, others travel for hours in order to go to special schools in San Francisco, and still others attend the village school where the staff have neither resources nor understanding to respond adequately to individual requirements.

Ironically, the two most glaring needs that I could identify from a first visit are two things that I have always said I wouldn't be getting involved with in Argentina! The first would be some sort of micro-enterprise project; high-tech farming techniques on huge plantations means that today there is little need for a low-skilled village workforce. The second would be to set up a Scout troop or something similar to provide some sort of structured activity to the pack of young kids hanging out in the plaza.

We probably won't make any decisions until we are back in the UK and can put some distance between ourselves and the options, but there is certainly plenty to think about in the meantime.

We spent this weekend at a funeral. Kid's funerals are emotional affairs, although it has been a very long road for this child and his family so the funeral was also coloured more by a sense of peace than injustice.

It's the first time I've been involved in a funeral in Argentina, so part of me was dedicated to observing with outsider's eyes to figure out what was happening and where I should put myself within that. From first impressions I am impressed by the way Argentina handles death. The theme here is "accompanying the body", from the moment of death till the burial, which happens quite quickly, usually within 24 hours. The body is laid out in an open coffin in a place of the family's choosing, sometimes a funeral parlour, sometimes the person's own home, and friends and family come and go. At an appointed time the coffin is sealed and a vehicle comes to lead the procession to the cemetery, where the burial takes place following a simple ceremony, and the grave is filled in.

While I'm sure that the practice of "accompanying the body" owes its origins to folk-catholicism and the cult of the dead, the net effect seems generally to be a good one. Adults sit quietly with the parents, stand around and chat, send out for biscuits and hand them round. Children look, prod, ask child-like questions and, satisfied with the answers, go back to their game. The coffin in the middle is clearly the focal point, yet without receiving a huge amount of attention. Although Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians, refers to death as the last enemy to be destroyed, for now at least, dying is a natural consequence of living, and it seems to me that Argentina has found a healthy way of responding honestly to this reality.

It's been a bitty couple of weeks. We've been busily chasing our tails, and it's been too hot to exist, let alone to indulge in gratuitous tail-chasing.

Dates have been fixed and air-tickets purchased for our trip to Europe later this year. Some things have to be organised in advance, even in Argentina.

Now we're trying to leave some things in place for when we return here in August. This is proving to be slightly complicated, not least because we have two different job offers to come back to. One is a situation filled with potential; and an equally abundant range of problems. The other may not be so controversial... or it might just be that we don't know what the issues are yet. Since they are four hundred kilometres apart, the one sure thing is that we won't be accepting both of them.

Meanwhile, normal life rolls along. I was preaching last Sunday, so I spent most of my free time musing thorny questions, like why Jesus seems to have set out deliberately to antagonise the Pharisees, and what is the likelihood that we would have recognised him had we been in their shoes.

We took a day out with our friends Ana and Oscar, and went touristing to the Jesuit estancia of Santa Catalina, an isolated village in the province (photos above). Oscar's family is from Santa Catalina, and the place looks as though it hasn't changed a great deal since the time of the Jesuits, complete with some of Oscar's relatives still working in the village.

Joni is discovering that the world is full of yummy things to eat other than milk and his fingers. So far his favourites include ice-cream and his socks. Strangely, the weaning section in the baby book doesn't mention either of those.

The piglet in the pushchair or the lamb on the fire?

We went to San Francisco for new year, a small city about 200 kms from here. Our church has been supporting a small congregation in San Francisco, and we have become good friends with one of the families who we like to visit when we can.

The plan for New Year was to roast a piglet, so the day before, the animal was collected from the neighbour's freezer. When it was unwrapped however, it turned out to be a lamb. So we debated briefly about putting an apple into Joni's mouth, but decided to stick with the lamb. Here we see one of several methods of cooking a lamb. The main fire is built on the top, and then as the embers are produced, they are shoveled underneath, so the meat cooks slowly from both sides.

Joni who had the narrow escape, is just up to the six kilo mark, so he would have made a fine substitute. This means he has more than doubled his birth-weight in three months. Martin has had serious words with him about not making a habit of it.

Merry Christmas all. Here's what we've been doing the last few days...

Since Christmas doesn't start in October here, our first event was last Monday, when we celebrated with the guys in the prison. I realised how famous Martin has become in the prison, when I was walking through the corridor with Joni, watching the guards pointing him out to each other as "son of Frost". We had a service, with some speeches given by sundry invitees, followed by sharing a large cake. It was a good atmosphere, and Joni was in his element being passed around between the infamous of Cordoba.


The same evening found us on a bus to San Marcos where we spent a few days sharing a cabaña with the family of our friend and team-leader, Priscilla, affectionately known as La Jefa (the Boss). We had some good working/not-working time; went to the childrens' home a couple of times, and bounced a few ideas around. Joni had his first dip, which he responded well to, after the original surprise; he's used to a slightly different bath-time routine....

Christmas happens on the 24th here, which we spent with our friends Ana and Oscar, sharing food and fellowship before heading outside to watch the fireworks at midnight. I really like the uncomplicated nature of Christmas in Argentina, although as an English person I also feel cheated that nothing happens on the 25th; it's just another bank holiday like any other.


This year the 25th began even less auspiciously than usual, with the discovery that we had a burst pipe leaking water down the kitchen wall. The small consolation was that clambering onto the roof to locate the stop-cock was probably slightly more interesting than watching the East-Enders special which is apparently what half of the UK population were actually doing. Our second discovery was that there was no food in the house because we'd taken it all to Ana and Oscar's the day before. Luckily, eating chocolate for breakfast on Christmas morning is an age old family tradition. Deciding that the day needed some improvement, we took the car out for a random drive into the back of beyond, and came across this rather cool range of mountains. Ambitiously named Los Gigantes, (The Giants), they aren't exactly Everest or even Aconcagua, but at 2,300 metres, to us Europeans they are a very respectable height.


Unlike most mountains in Europe, we were the only people there. And just a couple of kilometres away we found a little outpost selling the scrumiest empanadas (think Cornish pasty). Now I'm coveting a serious baby-carrier rucksack so we can go for a proper walk another time.

Domestic story coming up, would apologise but, hey...

There are a lot of good reasons for using cloth nappies over disposables, price being one; here's a few more...

- 4 % of the world's domestic waste is disposable nappies.
- Every disposable nappy that has ever existed still does.
- If William the Conquerer had introduced disposable nappies in 1066, estimates suggest that the first ones would be decomposing sometime now.
- Disposable nappies are made from petroleum by-products.
- We assume that disposable nappies are safe for babies. Assume is all we can do, because by and large the long-term research hasn't been done.
- Most disposable nappies are made by organisations who I would rather not give my money to; if I would not do certain things in my personal life, then it seems hypocritical to pay a corporation to do essentially the same things on my behalf.

When I made this clear decision several years ago, I hadn't figured that I would be giving birth in Argentina. Ho hum.

Searching UK websites for "cloth nappies" brings 305,000 hits, increasing daily... cloth nappies have made a real come-back in the UK.
Searching Argentinian websites for same brings a handful of hits, mostly well out of date. The one interesting thing I found out was that there had been a real attempt to re-establish cloth nappies during the 2001 economic crisis, when the cost of disposables had gone up 150% in six months, but even in those circumstances, the attempt was unsuccessful. I haven't got my head round this really, but the sociology of it does interest me.

The one drawback of cloth nappies is the inconvenience of having to wash the things. It has been suggested that the reason for their lack of popularity here is therefore related to higher rates of poverty and therefore lower rates of washing-machine ownership. Except for three things... One, most people in reasonably paid employment do have washing machines, which isn't everyone, but there are probably still several million washing machines in regular use here.... Two, the last economic crisis is credited with decimating the middle class, the very people most likely to own such commodities; stories abound of people who found that their fur coats were worthless when they couldn't afford to buy food.... Three, the owners of the posh 4x4s towing jet-skis who overtake us on the motorway not only own state of the art appliances, but they also pay other people to load and unload their washing machines for them... inconvenience factor eliminated completely. So, I don't know what the real issue is, and in any case it didn't solve my problem.

So, I ordered some stuff from the UK, and got a friend to export it by post. Except that the post here isn't that good either, thus only some of it arrived; enough to keep us going as long as we did the washing every day, a regime that was never going to last very long. So then I made some. That was arduous. My sewing teacher at school used to say "haven't you got a violin lesson to go to?" on the rare occasions that I showed up to her class. I made a few. And I ordered some more waterproof wraps from England which actually arrived. And then, I received an email introducing me to a lady near the city of Buenos Aires, who, having made cloth nappies for her own baby, is now beginning to produce them commercially in a micro-enterprise sort of way. So I arranged to go and meet her last week while we were in BA.

Picture hot sweaty city bus full of hot sweaty standing passengers. Stops every two blocks. The trip takes three hours each way, and we saw the first blade of grass at the two hour mark. At the other end I found a rather cool alternative community, people building their own houses out of wattle and daub, growing vegetables in a communal garden, wrapping their babies in home-made nappies... Marvellous. So I bought a batch of those, and a couple more waterproof wraps for good measure.

Meanwhile, the outstanding original consignment from England also arrived through the post having taken a round-the-world mystery tour. So now we have nappies and waterproof covers in a full range of shapes, sizes, colours and designs. Personally I'm happy with the ones made here by Marcela, and now I know where to go when we need more. And through the contact that we made, she has now received an invitation to sell them through a shop in La Plata, and we are also advertising them in San Marcos, a local magnet for hippies and "alternative" types. Not sure Billy Graham would think that's a good result for a day's work, but my standards are a bit lower and I count it as a small victory.

Here we are in Buenos Aires, doing Joni's paperwork. Now he has an English birth certificate and a passport, and we're heading back to Cordoba on the night-bus in a couple of hours. We discovered on the night-bus coming here that we could all have a reasonable trip if Joni slept in the footwell; I just had to remember not to stand on him. We continue to be jolly grateful that babies in Argentina can be breast-fed more or less wherever is convenient; our favourite places so far have been the foyer of the British embassy, and the steps to Harrods; what a fantastic culture.

As always we have made the most of the trip and enjoyed visiting people and fitted in a bit of touristing here and there. Sunday afternoon we went on a long explore, taking in the nature reserve, which is the one oasis of relative calm in Buenos Aires. On route we went to see the latest phase at Puerto Madero, where the old port buildings have been redeveloped into shops, flats and restaurants, "Docklands"-style. I'm not a city-scape connoisseur, but I was impressed by the way in which they had used the character-filled old red-brick dock buildings to recreate Stevenage, through the addition of grubby concrete verandas and balconies.

One experience that we had promised ourselves was a trip to the Indian Restaurant. There are two Indian restaurants in Argentina, both in Buenos Aires, and Indian food is one of the tastes we have been missing from England, curry being our national dish and all. It wasn't cheap, but it was definitely worth it. The proprietor is from Jaipur, but he has been in Argentina for about twenty years. He wins an award for the best quote we have heard in a while... "Argentinian taste in food is very primitive: Ten thousand years ago, man was throwing meat on a fire, and here there hasn't been much evolution since then." Actually we like the food here, but we will also look forward to another fine curry when we're next down this way.

We had Joni's photos done for his UK passport so we can take him to meet the family next year. Passport photo rules say he has to have his eyes open, so we had to do mean things to him in the shop to wake him up, gathering ourselves an audience in the process. Then the rules say that no-one else has to be visible, so we were trying to contort the pair of us so that we could hold him up to the background cloth without being seen, only of course he can't hold his own head up yet so it didn't work too well. Eventually we took the background cloth thing off its runners and laid it on the counter, and put the baby on top of it, and then the guy taking the photo stood on a stool and looked down on his face.

Hopefully it will good enough for the passport people, although to be honest it all seems like rather a waste of hassle given that within a few weeks he won't look anything like his passport anyway. Our friend Ben says "it would be more of a worry if it did (look like him); how many people do you know who look like their passport photo?" Still we provided some amusement for the general public of Cordoba; service to the community and all that. Next job is to take all the paper-work to the British consulate in Buenos Aires, and see if we can swop it for a passport.


On a different tack, we have solved the mystery of Joni's missing red blood cells that I mentioned a couple of blogs ago. They tested all three of us for a bunch of possibilities, and discovered that both Martin and Joni have pherocytosis (it's ferocitosis in Spanish, took me ages to figure out why I wasn't getting any hits in English... stupid spelling). In the sort of terminology that I can understand, it is a hereditary condition characterised by a defect in the wall of some red blood cells causing them to be sphere shaped rather than egg-timer shaped, and therefore less elastic and more easily broken. There are some potential complications in a small percentage of cases, but the doctor says that more often than not, the first a person knows about it is when their offspring shows up as being anaemic; as with Martin and Joni.

The Hospital Privado, not being enormous, has a combined hematology and oncology department. There can be fewer things more symptomatic of the injustice of this world than the sight of little kids having chemo. We are really grateful that while our kid may not yet have hair, he is healthy, chubby and currently asleep.

This quote is dedicated to all parents of small children everywhere....

"Methought I heard a voice cry "Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep," the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast—
Still it cried "Sleep no more!" to all the house:
"Glamis hath murder'd sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more; Macbeth shall sleep no more."
Macbeth, Act 2 Scene 2




We carried these hammocks here with us from England and we hadn't really had the use of them. But now we've discovered that Joni likes being swung, so we dug the hammock out. Except he didn't like going in it on his own, so somebody had to sacrifice themselves to accompany him.





Daddy was looking forward to a good theological discussion, but settled for a compromise and an exegesis of "The Wheels on the bus"... "Now this story tells us that at one time the UK had public transport. Notice that each stanza finishes with the line all day long which tells us how long it took to get anywhere..."





We're doing rather well for presents at the moment. This rather posh baby-carrier is thanks to some fantastic friends. It is fully adjustable in a zillion directions, holds him securely in a good position, and can be worn facing in or out. (Now why aren't they paying me for this advert?) In fact it even works on...





... the bike! Joni thinks it's great too; he even fell asleep in it as we were peddling home from the post-office the other day (for the record we should clarify that mummy was doing all the peddling). Look closely and notice his stripey trousers, sent by granny and grandad from England. Now all we need is a generous benefactor to offer to do the 4 o'clock in the morning shift...

The sublime... Martin Fierro is probably the most famous piece of Argentinian literature. Written by Jose Hernandez, in 1872, it is the tale in verse of a Gaucho sent to the frontier against the indigenous, under the presidency of Sarmiento. The language captures the dialect and culture of the Gaucho at the time, and it is rich with imagery, metaphor and social commentary. I was challenged to read it, which is probably a bit like a foreigner to England reading Shakespeare. A challenge it surely is, but also a privilege to experience this work that is so embedded in the culture and history of Argentina.

The ridiculous.... Trying to buy more sheets for the spare beds. Went to the usual shop in town. They have clothes downstairs, and sheets and towels upstairs. Except that the stairs were taped off. So I went to find a shop assistant...

Me: Are you still selling sheets?
SA: Yes
Me: Where are they?
SA: They're upstairs
Me: How do I go upstairs?
SA: No you can't, it's been closed off
Me: So how can I buy sheets?
SA: No, it's not possible
Me: So actually you're not selling sheets.
SA: No, we are still selling sheets
Me: (very slowly, as speaking to a foreigner...) Let's do this again... you are still selling sheets?
SA: Yes
Me: But it's not possible to buy any?
SA: That's right
Me: (therapeutically, while backing slowly towards the door...) oooooo...kaaaaay...

This week's piece of good life-advice is for mummy: "Always organise the bath before you remove the nappy".
Now he's learning to roll, he is no longer safe to be left on the changing mat (tendency to end up in the sink!), and hoiking a squalling, squirming, poo-coated creature under one arm while trying to fill the bath, find towels etc with the other hand is not an experience that either party would be rushing to repeat.

We had Joni's one-month checkup yesterday. He now weighs in at just over 4 kilos and he responded very well to all the poking and prodding. Luckily he likes human contact in just about any form, although he wasn't entirely pleased with the lady taking blood out of his heel. Next week we have to go back for another blood test, as his hemoglobin levels seem to have fallen quite rapidly. Mummy and daddy are trying to decide how concerned we ought to be at this stage, given that baby appears to be healthy in every respect, but we're not medics, so we'll see what they say next week.

I improvised us a sling using a single bed sheet, mostly for the times when he is grizzling but doesn't appear to want anything. It's not Joni's favourite mode of transport, but in the scale of things he likes it better than being abandoned to whinge in his cot. This is the view I have of him when I cross my eyes and look down my nose...


Here we are cleaning the bathroom together... To be honest he's not a great asset to the cleaning process. But he is quite useful as a fashion accessory to hide my "not quite yet back to pre-pregnancy" stomach.


Some lovely friends sent us some money for Joni, so we had fun shopping for presents. This is his favourite, a cot mobile with beany-animals, which spins around and plays a truly dire version of Frere Jacques. Joni loves it. Martin is hoping that his musical tastes might improve as he gets older. He played him Beethoven's Eroica the other day to try and help the refining process along a bit...


And this is a multi-sensory baby gym type affair including a textured mat, and things hanging over the top of it. He's just getting the idea that a good swipe at one of the hanging rattles makes for a satisfying noise. We're hoping that he might see this as an interesting environment for practising his skills, as an alternative to swiping the contents of the bathroom work-surface onto the floor, and rolling himself into the sink...

"Dear Son,
Here is a piece of sound advice to see you through your life: Biting the nipple that feeds you is generally considered to be bad form."

Today is mothers' day in Argentina. Historically the mother-son bond has been the rock upon which society has teetered, and to this day mothers continue to have an elevated status, so mothers day is a huge event. These days of course it has been hijacked by the multi-national corporation; people spend ridiculous amounts of money on presents, and then spend all year paying back the credit. In fact in the newest shopping centre in Córdoba there is even a shop named "Edipo", which I can't imagine would be a selling point anywhere else in the world.

Leaving aside cynical commercial exploitation of the Oedipus complex, the day does have some nice aspects in recognising the importance of family and the woman's role in the family. It is celebrated in forms both traditional; from several generations of a family round a table sharing a meal, to complete strangers stopping in the street to wish each other "feliz día"; and modern; sending and receiving text-messages and emails with friends.

The other theme of this week is contrasts... the season has leapt from winter woollies, to summer sweltering, without pausing for breath in the middle. Spring and Autumn seem to be optional add-ons around here. Joni is going around in his nappy, with the rest of us wishing we had such liberty. I am reminded that I come from a climate whose central feature is tepid. I like tepid. I know what to do with tepid. I wonder if our tepid island climate is partly what gives the British our characteristic distrust of extremes; we know about living with grey, it hangs over our major cities. Conversely, there are currently other areas of our daily experience where restoring some black and white from the grey fuzz would be no bad thing... night-day, light-dark, awake-asleep... funny how we don't know how much we appreciate something until it goes missing.... Martin is wondering if we can download an upgrade module to include a volume control and a stand-by mode.

Now we have a car. It's not as photogenic as a baby, but it is more functional as a method of transport. We received some insurance money from Martin's road accident; and Dany, our friend and colleague in Latin Link Argentina was selling his car. It seemed like a good swop, and saved us from having to deal with dodgy secondhand-car-salesmen. Dany also did all the paperwork with us which was a big bonus, knowing what we already know about paperwork and Argentina.

Accustomed as I am to owning motorised wheelbarrows held together with string and double-sided sticky tape, with a tendency to do unpredictable things like spontaneously set light to themselves on the A1, this one is without a doubt the newest, poshest machine I have ever driven. A 2006 Chevrolet Corsa, with the full set of bells and whistles, it is so new and shiny that it is almost a shame to take it out and make it dirty.

This is us looking halfway scrubbed and presentable at Joni's official presentation at church, which took place on Sunday.



The presentation / dedication ceremony is a little rite of passage in practice in many churches, particularly those who reserve baptism for adult believers. We were brought to the front, Joni held up for all to see (imagine sound-track with lots of ooohs and ahhs), the elders prayed for him and for us, and he was officially welcomed into the family of the church.



Exodus 29:41 "Sacrifice the other lamb at twilight with the same grain offering and its drink offering as in the morning—a pleasing aroma, an offering made to the LORD by fire".... Oops.. wrong passage....

Don't know about twilight, but we were having a rethink about sacrifices at 2 o'clock the other morning... in the end we decided it would probably be more socially acceptable to put him in his pushchair and go out for a walk instead...

This little person in our lives is 40 cms long, he does nothing except eat and sleep, and yet he has taken over the universe. Forget WMDs, if you're looking for global domination, this is the real thing. How does he manage it? At three o'clock this morning while I was feeding him (need to have something to think about if we're going to be awake at three in the morning) I realised that eight out of every 24 hours are taken up with the feeding / changing thing. And that's before we factor in the washing, shopping, cooking, and all the other aspects of "general living".


I am enjoying the many opportunities for little creative projects on route... yesterday found me busily winding pompoms in primary colours to hang on the cot and push-chair, now that he's started really looking at things. Run out of nappies? (OK... should have been more organised with the washing...) Go buy a roll of terry towling and make a batch. We've already discovered that light fleece material makes great re-usable liners. I would like to claim that I've become a domestic goddess, or even an earth-mother, but a quick glance around the house would tell a different story (photo not about to be included!)

Monday we were back to the civil registry for another "Argentina day". That took three hours. Then we thought we'd "pop" into the post office. That took another two hours during which we nearly lost the will to live a few times. Note to self; "pop" and "post-office" should not be used in the same sentence. We are very grateful for three things... one, that we live in a country where it is perfectly socially acceptable to breast-feed ones baby in any queue that one happens to be sitting in; two, that we managed to get out of the post-office alive; and most of all, that Joni now has his Argentinian DNI (ID document). We're ridiculously excited about that, if you think about Argentinian paper-work as a game of snakes and ladders, then we're like a pair of little kids who've rolled a six to go up one big ladder.


Thursday we went to the childrens' home in San Marcos for the first time since Joni was born. The kids have all charted the progress of my growing belly from gestation to three days before the birth, so it only seemed right that they should meet him in real life while he's still new and little. Inevitably we ended up doing some work, impossible not to, but mostly we spent the day playing outside in the sunshine, while Joni had a whale of a time being mauled and prodded by young and old. Luckily he really likes people, noise, movement, and going on the bus!

The Hospital Privado let us out again on Wednesday morning. Luckily mummy had managed to dash into town between feeds and more or less put the cot together. So now Joni has a proper bed, complete with orange Teddy, who was hand-made by David, one of the guys whom Martin visits in prison.


Latest addition to the list of complaints... being put in his cot. O perverse boy-child of your father...


Yesterday we had one of those "Argentina days". We need to register Joni and begin the process of obtaining his birth certificates, ID documents, and eventually passports. We also had a parcel to collect from the post-office. So we thought we'd go to the registry office and make a start. First problem, we weren't sure which of the several registry offices we needed. So we went to the one that is already handling our own paperwork as foreigners. Wrong answer. But they told us which one we should go to.

So we took a taxi across town. Right place, wrong time. "You need to take a ticket, and we start giving out tickets at seven in the morning, and if you want a ticket for today then you need to arrive before they are all gone, which is usually around nine o' clock". But of course. We did manage to find out what we would need to bring to increase that chances of making progress on our next visit. Passports, and a certificate of place of residence which apparently can be obtained from the police. So on to the central police station.

The butch looking police-women in scary uniforms cooed and gurgled over our baby; one of them actually took him off into the back office to show to the other staff. They even directed us to the correct department of the police station. Right place, right time. In order to obtain a certificate of place of residence you need to bring: passports, got those; residency papers, got those; and two witnesses who are Argentinian nationals, with valid Argentinian DNI documents, darn, dead end. There's one to organise. So we thought we'd take advantage of being in the right area of town and walk to the main post-office to collect the parcel.

Wrong post-office. Please excuse us for not guessing that "CBB 4" printed on a piece of card referred to some back-street sub-post-office in some random part of the city that we hadn't thought to go and visit. So we took another taxi across town and lo and behold there was our parcel. Hooray! It's all a treasure hunt.

Monday's job... back to that registry office.

We were back at the Hospital Privado this morning, registering Joni for his health cover, and having his first battery of checks done. The first blood test showed up as high for "bilirrubina", whatever that might be, think it's something to do with jaundice as his eyes are yellow rather than white at the moment. So they've taken him back in and they've got him under a sun-lamp, no kidding, people pay huge amounts of money for this kind of treatment. We're not sure how long he's going to be there for, certainly overnight tonight and they'll tell us tomorrow. They're letting us in every three hours so that I can feed him.

Here he is, looking slightly surreal and purple. Latest list of complaints: having his clothes removed, being dumped into a plastic crate, being blindfolded. Parents also have a complaint to register: not being allowed to sleep last night... never mind, when he's fourteen we'll probably be looking fondly back on the nights when he kept us awake by staying in rather than by going out!

Doctora Travela, our gynecologist, said "it might have been happening for thousands of years, but it's still a miracle every time". So this is us, introducing our own little miracle to the world.

Jonathan was born yesterday, 22nd of September at 10.50 in the morning. His full name is Jonathan Oscar Frost which he'll probably grow into one day. Jon (or Joni is the norm in Argentina) will also suit him fine. He weighed in at 2.7 kgs, which I think is about 5 lb 15 oz in old money, he was three weeks early, so he's quite little and skinny, and like his name, his clothes are all too big for him.

This is Jonathan, newly arrived in the world and registering his first list of complaints... being cleaned, being suctioned, being weighed, being measured, being injected, being dressed...

I learnt that babies don't arrive looking pink and cute, I'm guessing eight months in a warm bath followed by being stuffed down a drain-pipe probably doesn't do a great deal for ones complexion. He looks a lot better a day later. I was also surprised at how counter-intuitive the giving birth process was for something that is supposed to be "natural", I wonder if that's what Genesis 3:16 means when it refers to increased pain in child-birth.


Here he is clothed and in his right mind, looking pink and cute in our room on the ward.


This is us released from hospital, arrived at home, and setting out on a whole new learning curve, encompassing the enormity of psalm 139 and being entrusted with the nurture of this little person whose every detail has been crafted and known by God since the beginning of time; to the "significant trivia", like how we don't yet have any sheets for the cot...


Training for the family business begins at an early age. Here he is having bonding time with Daddy, who by the way did a superb job yesterday gowned and scrubbed up in the delivery suite, and is fast becoming a dab hand with those nappies.

Click on image to see a larger version. Then click on larger version to see details.

The other Sunday we went to the polls. Argentina has presidential elections coming up at the end of October for the whole country, but in the meantime each province also sets its own date to elect provincial and municipal governments. So we had the opportunity to go and vote with some friends of ours. The friends did the voting, while we tagged along as unofficial election observers.

Voting in Argentina is a complicated business. As well as voting for the Governor of the Province of Córdoba, we were also voting for the "Intendente" of the city of Córdoba (the closest in English I can find is "Mayor" but I don't think that's a good translation). Both the provincial Governor, plus the municipal "Intendente" have a raft of councilors and law-makers which are also elected, and within the province each town and city were voting for their corresponding local governors and law-makers at the same time. All in all, each member of the public had to make six votes.

On entering the polling station, you present your ID document, which is checked against the list by the lead person, then double checked by several others along a line. You are then handed an empty envelope which has been stamped and countersigned several times. This is effectively your voting paper. Envelope in hand, you pass through the doors into the voting area.

Before you is a table, upon which is a bewildering array of lengths of shiny white toilet paper about half a metre long (remember those primary school days?) Each one represents a political party, or an alliance. The idea is that you search for the length of toilet roll that represents your political allegiance, fold it up, put it into your envelope, seal same, and drop it into the voting box, job done. Would that it were so simple....

Remember that each member of the public votes six times in total, one vote in each category. Each length of toilet paper on the table is also divided into six sections, one for each category. Now, the bigger political parties will put up their own candidates in each section, nice and easy. But the smaller parties won't run in every section, so they will align a limited number of candidates behind one of the bigger parties. This means that there will be several lengths of toilet paper which at first glance appear to be the same, but read along and you might find that the small print in one of the sections contains a little group of communists, neo-faschists, nuns on the run, and a variety of other practical jokers who have chosen to align themselves behind candidate X from one of the mainstream parties. So you need to be a bit careful in making sure you choose the length of toilet paper that represents the people who you actually want to vote for, or you might find yourself being represented by Crusty the Clown for the next four years.

But you're not done yet. Now for the origami class. At this point you need to decide whether you want to vote for the whole package proposed by your chosen party, or whether variety really is the spice of life. You might decide that you want a provincial Governor from one party, but a city Intendente from another party, and some lawmakers from yet another party. So now comes the fun part. You take a pair of scissors, and you cut as many strips of toilet roll as you like along the dotted lines to put together your own DIY government. We've cut ours into three to make it fit the scanner. Think of it as fantasy football for grownups. But you need to be careful that when you are done, your envelope contains exactly six votes, and that they represent exactly one vote for each of the six sections. Otherwise your careful origami will be worthless, your vote will be invalid and you really will find yourself being represented by Crusty the Clown.

Two weeks later, we still aren't quite sure about the outcome, as there is a dispute ongoing over the results between Schiaretti, who appears to have won, and Juez, who many think ought to have won, the two main candidates for provincial Governor. Crusty the Clown anyone....?

Fat










Fatter.



Fattest! Martin and Cami are very jealous because they have been working for years on their stomachs and I have come in from behind and overtaken them both from no-where!


The cause of all the trouble. Blissfully unaware, at his seven month scan a couple of weeks ago. We saw him asleep with his foot in his mouth.... aaaah.

Back in June I posted a blog entry which mentioned a little boy in San Marcos village whose mother had spent several years trying unsuccessfully to extract a wheelchair from local social services. Through a contact of a friend of another contact of another friend (this is Argentina!), we managed to establish a link with the Córdoba branch of a national organisation, Cilsa, who are involved in various disability-based projects, including providing wheelchairs and other equipment. We then had to present a pile of paperwork, documents, measurements, and photos to prove that Isma is entitled to a wheelchair, and to determine the size that he needed. Last week we received a message to say that the chair was ready, and to invite Isma and his mum to come to a group presentation today.



On Monday night I travelled out to San Marcos. Yesterday morning I visited the family and arranged the trip. Today we set off early to catch the bus to Cordoba. Funny the little things that one doesn't think about... I hadn't imagined that Isma has probably never been to a big city before. He loved the buses and lorries, and he laughed and laughed when we took him on the escalators in the bus station! Cilsa were giving out equipment to about twenty recipients and they had made a little event out of it, with celebratory cake and music. Our wheelchair was the smallest in the line. Isma seemed quite pleased with it, and I would estimate that it will take him all of about five minutes to figure out how to make it work. Having saved his mum's back on one hand, we have probably given her a whole new set of things to think about, starting with child-proofing the house, and issuing shin-guards to the rest of the family.

We're back! Thanks very much to the people who contacted us to let us know that our blog was down. Now we know that there are more people reading it than we had imagined! This encourages us to keep writing it.

More Human biology classes in the childrens' home:

Isaias, aged two, is prodding my abdomen. "There's a baby in there" he announces, with all the authority of a toddler displaying his superior knowledge.

Kevin, aged three, is scandalised. "Have you eaten a baby?" he accuses.

Moral dilemmas... If I had said yes, I could have solved all my discipline issues in one easy move; but somehow it just seemed a bit unfair...

Ex-war correspondent Kate Adie chooses "The Kindness of Strangers" as the title of her book. It is also a quote from a play, but don't ask me which one; it's a while since I did English literature. I found myself thinking about it at seven o'clock the other morning, lying in a strange bed in a strange house, where I had been invited by people whom I had only met the day before.

I arrived in the little town of Pichanal in darkness at ten o'clock on Wednesday evening. Pichanal looks like a dive by night, and is not greatly improved by day-light. Situated on the cross-roads of two major routes south from Bolivia, its reasons for existence mostly include drugs and contraband. The man in the bus ticket office gave me directions to the one hotel. The people in the hotel welcomed me. Actually they seemed a bit confused to see me. I realised at breakfast the next morning that the other residents were all male Argentinians, migrant factory workers, and I guess they don't see too many lone pregnant foreign females. But the sheets were clean, and the shower was hot, and to be honest, that's about the extent of my accommodation requirements.

The next day, I walked to the school, where I was received as an honoured guest. Groups of children dressed up and performed little plays and dances in my welcome. One of the teachers showed me round the indigenous (Guaraní) community which the school serves. Another teacher invited me back to her house at lunch-time, and yet another came and took me back to school for the afternoon. Afterwards I caught a ride to Oran, another larger settlement. Here I was met by a speech therapist, who showed me round the city, and invited me back to her house for the night. In the morning, the same lady took me to a children's home, and on to another school, where we were warmly received by more welcoming strangers, even though we had showed up unannounced on the off-chance that someone would be available to show me round. Lunch-time, and again I was invited home, and fed a mountain of spaghetti and sauce, before being given a lift on the back of a motorbike to catch the bus back to Salta.

In a world where "man's inhumanity to man" is given a hyper-inflated status for being the more news-worthy, maybe it's time to celebrate the real value of so many un-noticed instances of "the kindness of strangers".

Since we're pondering the unsolved mysteries of life, I thought I'd add two more to the melting pot for consideration.

As a woman, the perennial question to which I have never received a satisfactory answer is this: What is it that other woman find to do in public toilets that is so much fun and takes them so long? It's not like they're even doing their hair and make-up because in order to do that, one needs to exit the little cubicle and go to the open area where the sinks and mirrors are. (Not that I'm an expert on hair and makeup, but I'm usually the one waiting to wash my hands behind the person applying eye-liner).

The second is this: What is it that other people find to do in cash-point cubicles? The other day I went to the ATM and there were three people in front of me. "Oh good" thinks I, "won't have to wait too long, gives me plenty of time to buy a bus ticket..." The three of them took over twenty minutes. I took about thirty seconds, including fifteen seconds checking the cubicle to see if there was a hidden button to turn the thing into a flight-simulator. In fact the whole exercise of extracting money and buying a bus ticket only took four minutes. Which was lucky because that was all the time I had left after queuing for the cash-point.

Geed up and encouraged by my vagabonding episode in Buenos Aires the other week, I'm plotting an even madder trip to the northerly province of Salta, involving sixteen hours on two buses, leaving tomorrow night, to a little place called Pichanal. In Pichanal is a school, where they have been working on a model of inclusive education for the last couple of years, and I am going to meet with the director. Today I spent some time looking for information on accommodation in Pichanal. After trawling 200 hits on the web, I narrowed it down to two potentially useful websites. One had a section entitled "Hotels in Pichanal". It said (in Spanish) "We are very sorry, but at this moment, no hotel, room to rent, inn, hostel, or motel has been added to our website. If you would like to suggest one, please click on the link below..." Good-oh. The other site had the words "Pichanal" and "hotel" in fairly close proximity to each other, but since the rest of the site was in an Eastern European language, possibly Polish, I wasn't entirely sure what it was saying about either. Here's hoping it'll be alright on the night....

Time for a new heresy. I think it's a good thing to air our heresies, and I also think that we don't do it enough. I suspect that the reason why we don't do it enough is for fear of what the dear brethren might think of us. Such fear is a bad thing, since it denies us the opportunity to deal with our questions in daylight. Unfortunately, fear frequently turns out to be justified, since judgment and un-grace are heaped upon those perceived to be "not quite as saved / sound / sorted" as the self-appointed judges:
"If grace is so amazing, why don't Christians show more of it?" (Yancy, 1997).

At the moment in the Christian community, in the UK (don't know if it's happening in other places?) there is a brouhaha occurring on the subject of "substitutionary atonement". As would be expected, the community has responded with its usual level of maturity, and is thus polarized between the red corner and the blue corner, having opted for war over dialogue. "Horsey" novelist Dick Francis once said:
"Entrenched belief is never altered by the facts" (Francis:"Hot Money").

Without wishing to wade onto the battlefield, to which I could add very little anyway, an over-simplistic understanding of substitutionary atonement might go something like this. God is judge, and he judges us according to his standard, which happens to be perfection. Not surprisingly we all fall short of the mark, since we are characterised by imperfection, otherwise known as sin, and all sin matters. So all are deserving of punishment. However, God is love as well as judge, and having found us worthy of punishment, he also provides the solution. In the person of his son, Jesus Christ, he came to earth as a man and willingly took our punishment upon himself (hence "substitutionary") and bore our sin's condemnation in his own body on the cross. Thus judgment and love are inseparable in the act of the crucifixion.

The Bible tells us that Jesus was both fully God and fully human. This is important for thinking about substitutionary atonement. If we think about the analogy of a judge for a minute. A judge finds a person guilty and orders them to pay a fine. If the judge, instead of fining the guilty party, imposed the fine upon a random person who happened to be sitting in the courtroom, then that would be blatantly unjust and could not be interpreted as loving in any sense. However, if the judge fined the guilty party, but then undertook to pay the fine him/herself, then that could be interpreted as an act of love. Hence Jesus being fully God could choose to pay the "fine" himself on behalf of humanity, even though he owed nothing.

Now up to this point, I might not be the greatest theologian, and my understanding may be limited and simplistic, but, for my own purposes at least, I'm doing OK so far. Here's where it goes wrong and the question kicks in. What is going on with that cross? At this point the judge analogy blows apart. The judge imposes a fine, and decides to pay same him/herself. S/he rises, crosses the courtroom, and to the bewilderment of all, and the gratitude of the defendant, hands the corresponding sum to the prosecution. Bows, applause, Daily Mail has a field day, all live happily ever after.

However, this analogy can only work if the judge and the plaintiff are separate entities. If the two were one and the same, then no money would actually change hands since the same person would both impose the fine and write it off. If the judge felt like it, they might take the money out of their wallet, hold it up to the court, and put it back in again to show the extent of the price paid, and forgiveness received. But this would be a symbolic demonstration, and not a necessary facet of the forgiveness itself.

Yet here we have God in the person of Jesus, both plaintiff and judge, succumbing to torture and execution, apparently in order to appease himself. How on heaven or earth does that work?

I don't actually need an answer, or not this week anyway, which is fortunate since I don't imagine I'm going to find one. What I am asking for is a space to think about it, and for any contributions that anyone wants to add to the soup. I suspect that this "God became a man" thing is too important to be tied up in crazy theories or boxing rings, and that we need to find other ways of living with it, and ultimately with Him:
"I am one of those who think it good that the church has never formally defined 'the atonement', partly because I firmly believe that when Jesus himself wanted to explain to his disciples what his forthcoming death was all about, he didn't give them a theory, he gave them a meal" (Wright, NT: "The Cross and the Caricatures", 2007)

Human biology classes begin at an early age in the childrens' home.

Isaias, aged two, is prodding my abdomen saying "baby... baby... baby?"
"That's right", I tell him; "There's a baby in my tummy".
Next thing, he's trying to stick his head under my jumper to look for it.

Facundo, aged six asks "If it's in your tummy, how is it going to be able to come out?"

How indeed...

Bank holidays can be kind of tedious around here. When it's cold, everywhere's shut and public transport goes into skeleton mode. When it's warm, half of the population crowd into the one park in Cordoba, and the other half of the population sit in their cars and queue to leave the city at crawling pace. We're rapidly coming to the conclusion that we would be better off working on bank holidays, and having a day out when everyone else is back in the office.

Today it is snowing in Cordoba, which is quite unusual. Heating technology here involves lighting the oven. It does sort of work; by lighting the oven and closing the doors, we can wear fewer layers (four) in the kitchen than in the rest of the house (six plus woolly hat). But we are finding ourselves imagining what it might be like if the windows fitted properly and the house heated itself up at the flick of a little switch. Our carbon footprints have never been so virtuous.

From my unscientific observations, I have identified the important difference between Cordoba and Buenos Aires (other than the fact that Buenos Aires is thirteen times bigger than Cordoba, and not snowing). It is this: In Cordoba, when a pregnant woman gets on the bus, an earnest, slightly geeky looking male adolescent about four rows back will automatically offer up his seat. In Buenos Aires, when a pregnant woman gets on the bus, no-one moves a muscle, until a middle aged woman, who also happens to be a standing passenger says in a loud voice "can someone give the pregnant lady a seat", whereupon another middle aged woman about half-way down the bus will stand up with a "sorry love, hadn't noticed you". In my "six months gone" state, I have experienced these little scenarios many times in the last few weeks. I'm sure a sociologist somewhere will have a theory. Meantime, I am happy on two counts: one that chivalry is still alive and well, albeit expressed in different forms; and two that it will have stopped snowing by the time young Bean is born.

A last minute invitation, an even later decision to accept it, and I spent this week vagabonding round Buenos Aires, living out of a rucksack and sleeping in a different bed every night. Reminded me of my wasted youth. To be honest, I had a ball, catching up with good friends, meeting new people, visiting projects, hopping on and off buses and trains, and criss-crossing the crazy city.

The main purpose of going was a two day conference, being organised by a friend, to present the United Nations Disability Convention which Argentina has signed, and to start the process towards ratification. Day one was "in house" for advocates, self-advocates and NGOs. For my purposes, this was well worth while; the sessions were interesting, the discussion animated, and I met some useful people to follow up afterwards. Day two was much more high-powered. Most of the people from the first day attended, but the presentations from the front consisted of a succession of panels made up of politicians, senators, deputies, and judges discussing the implications of the convention in broader terms. The main thing that I learnt on day two is that I need an urgent crash course in Argentinean politics since I had no idea who most of the up-front people were, or what they had done to obtain their job descriptions. The final session of the day was a series of testimonies by disabled people which, after the parade of dignitaries, was very refreshing to come back to earth and hear some normal people talking about their real lives in understandable terminology.

Making the most of the trip to the big bad city, I went to see our good friends Ramon and Fran in Rafael Castillo, stayed the night with them, and popped in briefly to say hello in the home where I used to work. I went to Lanus to see another friend, Lucrecia, who has just realised her ambition to set up a day-project for people with learning disabilities. This was inaugurated three months ago, so I was able to visit the brand new functioning project. I went to Palermo to see my "sister" Cristina, where we stayed up half the night drinking tea and talking. The next day I took a series of buses to La Plata, where I enjoyed catching up with some Latin Link colleagues, followed by visiting the Cobeñas family who as well as being wonderful people, are involved in some real "sleeves rolled up" life-changing self-advocacy work; I just wish I lived 700 kms closer. I stayed the night with them in La Plata, and the next morning embarked on another succession of trains, buses and automobiles to San Miguel where I visited a sheltered workshop, impressive for the professional setup of their factory; and also a day-project for people with higher support needs. Finally I met with Professor Adelma, who is an inspirational lady, involved in the disability movement in Argentina for forty pioneering years, and still characterised by her energy and vision to bring about social change.

Now I'm back in Cordoba and vaguely attempting to make sense of the many random scribblings on little scraps of paper, which after a night on a moving bus is proving too much for my tired brain. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow....

We're at that time of year where everyone's coughing and sneezing and if you haven't already got the black death it's only a matter of time before someone gives it to you. Argentinian colds seem to be particularly evil, or maybe our puny little English defense systems just haven't developed the appropriate antibodies yet.

This baby has a lot to answer for, I had to take my bike in to the shop this week, and have my beloved racing-handlebars swopped for some upright ones because I can't reach down to the brakes any more, which was starting to feel like a bit of a safety hazard for doing business with Cordoban drivers! So now I'm in "granny-sit up and beg" mode, but at least it means I can keep cycling for a while longer, hadn't anticipated that consequence to my increasing fatness. I've also just bought a pair of dungarees, after completely running out of clothes that fit me.

I've got a side-project on at the moment trying to organise a wheelchair for a little boy in San Marcos, not directly connected with the children's home, but a family of limited resources and a lot of kids, one of whom has cerebral palsy. He's seven years old and his mum has to carry him around everywhere. She's been trying to get a chair officially through their local services for ages, but Argentina is based on who you know, and who they know, and if you don't have the right people then the "official" channels are arduous, bureaucratic, and often lead to dead ends anyway. A friend of mine managed to wrangle a wheelchair for someone else a few months ago in Cordoba, so I'm trying to go through the same sources and I think we've now got a basic "yes" in principle. I had to go back and see the family this week and weigh the kid, take a full-length photograph of him, and a photocopy of his certificate of disability etc etc, but it's looking hopeful.

Stuff moves slowly here, and there's no joining up between services. In the hospital where we visit, there's a guy there at the moment who's had his leg amputated, but no-one's actioned anything on him getting a prosthesis. Apparently the patient's supposed to take responsibility for organising it, except that he's currently in hospital having had his leg chopped off... and round and round we go. I guess it's not a great deal different to the UK; on paper we have "equal entitlement", but in real life, the rich and articulate are able to access services, and no-one else really exists unless they chance upon an advocate with the right contacts who can argue for them.

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.

I know, this is one of those "I believe it's a baby because you tell me it is" sort of grainy black and white pics, which if we're honest looks quite a lot like a bean, but really could be just about anything. This particular bean is ours, taken this morning. Almost definitely male, he is currently at four and a half months, with all limbs and vital organs in residence. This picture is his face, on the grounds that it is probably the one he will be the least embarrassed by when he's fifteen.

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.

We made the most of our friend Paul's visit by escaping for a couple days to visit the Iguazu falls, on the borders of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. Iguazu is a national park, and the location of a range of huge waterfalls. In fact, in some measurements they are actually bigger than Niagra, but of course they aren't as well known because they are in South rather than North America.


Experiencing the sheer power of the water was absolutely amazing, partly because they have had a very rainy summer in the north-east corner, province of Misiones, and there was about four times the seasonal average volume of water coming over the falls, making it all jolly spectacular. It also meant that a lot of the walkways were rather wet, we got soaked several times which is all part of the experience really.



This shot is of San Martin fall, taken from the Argentinian side. This is where the guide took us having told us "now we are going to see some of the lesser falls". We saw both the Argentinian side and Brazilian, and were also briefly in Paraguay, although the city on the Paraguayan side is rather a dive, and only really exists because of the contraband, which moves openly across the border in astonishing quantities.



This footpath sign was one of our favourite "English" translations. It meant to say "Don't cross the barriers", but we think it's probably better as it is. Another good one was a sign inside the little tourist train which read "When the train is in motion, please do not stick your extremities out of the yellow lines".



The wildlife in the national park could be out of a childrens' picture book. Some of the colours were even brighter than our friend Paul's yellow raincoat, especially the butterflies, and the toucans. We also saw wild guinea pigs, coatis, and a whole cloud of black vultures. There are also six kinds of wild cats, including jaguars and pumas, but they're night hunters and I imagine they keep themselves scarce when the place is full of visitors in the daytime. The park closes in the evenings to preserve the habitat for the wildlife.

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.

What is it like to learn another language in a foreign country?

It is like putting a tent up in the rain.

It is also like taking a bath in a hurry when the hot tap flows extremely slowly.

Eventually, you get there!

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".

"Ding". It's four in the morning and I'm wide awake. What on earth.....?

"Gottit" says my mind, "The starfish story". You what......?

The starfish story was my trademark for a number of years. You probably know it, it goes like this....

One morning a man got up very early and went for a walk along the sea shore. The tide was going out, leaving behind it hundreds upon hundreds of starfish stranded on the shoreline. In the half-light of the morning the man could see that he wasn't the first person on the beach, a young man was there before him. As the older man drew closer he could see that the young man was working his way along the shore-line, picking up the stranded starfish one by one and throwing them back into the sea.
"What are you doing?" asked the older man
"I'm putting these starfish back before they dry out" said the younger man
"But there's hundreds of them, you'll never be able to save them all."
"No" said the young man "but I can still make a difference to this one" and he went on throwing the starfish back into the sea.

It's a great story, it's still a great story. Why it woke me up at four o'clock on the morning.... Is it a word from the Lord, or do I need to stop eating cheese at night? Maybe time will tell...

This week I found out what a hot night out in San Marcos looks like in the "off" season (San Marcos being the village where the childrens' home is). It was about 8pm, I'd finished work for the day, and gone out for some air. I was wandering around the village in the drizzle, looking for some entertainment, preferably in the form of ice-cream, but the streets were deserted and most of the shops were shut. On a corner of the plaza I found an ice-cream shop open; things were looking up. So I went in, to be met by about 20 local characters from the village, sitting on upright chairs around the walls, watching the National Geographic channel.

Our friend Simon has recently renamed his blog "Where Everybody's Crazy". Working overseas, it is easy to move into "rose tinted"mode and to think of the UK as a hub of sanity and civilisation. This is of course not true. It's just that UK-brand craziness feels normal to us, because it's ours and we know how to react to it, whereas here we are learning to deal with a whole new species of nuts. So just to prove the point that no culture has a monopoly on loopyness, today's story comes from England. Thanks to the Hertfordshire constabulary for (unwittingly) providing it, and to my mother for passing it on....

The road that my parents live on has been closed all week for work to be done on a water main.  There is one lane left (mostly) open for access to the business estate, but the road is totally closed at the other end, so all through traffic has been diverted.  Hence there is not a lot of traffic, and what traffic there is travels at about four miles a fortnight, and because the diversion signs were initially confusing, quite a number of drivers end up turning around in a side street part-way down, and going back the way they came, further slowing down the already crawling queue.

"So yesterday morning, just before noon, two policemen brought their mobile speed camera vehicle and parked it in its designated spot on the grass in front of our house. Having set it up, they normally leave it unmanned to run for a couple of hours or so - and that's exactly what they did yesterday.  Bless them.  Maybe they couldn't read the signs on the barrier blocking most of the road about five yards away "Closed except for access"." 

The church-plant in Barrio Sacchi has been growing slowly but surely over the last year. When we had the inauguration a year ago, there were about a dozen regular attendees, of whom six of us were from outside the neighbourhood. In recent weeks we have regularly been around 25-30 people, of whom all apart from the original six are from within Sacchi itself. Last weekend we had a little anniversary event, and it was good to look back over the last year and see where we have come. The kids club on Saturday afternoons regularly attracts around 40 children, all from within the neighbourhood, mostly from non-church families. Recently the church has also started putting on activities like volleyball for the older young people which has also generated a good response. In the church itself there is now a Bible-study once a week, a regular music group, home-made song-books, and a new-look shiny functional bathroom. Sacchi is a small self-contained community with some specific social needs, where one needs to move slowly and generate trust, so the fact that people are responding really is a sign of encouragement. We celebrated by inviting friends and family to a little service, a big cake, and a fantastic music group, Gauchos for Christ, who write and perform Christian music using traditional Argentinian folk styles. (The "Gaucho" being the traditional Argentinian cow-boy figure, beloved of national folk-lore).

By an ironic twist of fate, or possibly someone's bad sense of humour, I find myself on the re-organised Latin Link Argentina team exec. I'm not exactly first choice material for execs. My list of pet hates starts with meetings, admin, and paperwork, so the prospect of the coming year being punctuated by meetings, meetings about meetings, meetings about meetings about meetings, and discussions about why no-one has actioned the minutes since the last meeting, is not one that I am looking forward to with any joy. (Apart from the deep and lasting sort that is able to sustain all who have accepted the salvation of Christ, which if we are honest, is sometimes so deep that I'm not quite sure where I last saw it....)

Apart from lacking in anything resembling leadership skills, I also have some major failings in the area of dealing with paper. My brain works on a strictly need to know basis. If my brain thinks it needs this information which is about 5% of documents received, it remembers what it said, what it looked like, and where I put it. If my brain can't think of an immediate use for this information, i.e. the other 95% of the time, then I have to try and house it in my patented PLD filing system. PLD is a simple system, consisting of three categories: the Pile on the desk category, the Lost without trace category, or the Direct to Dustbin category. The major advantage to this system is that anything that has managed to spend 6 months or more in the P or L categories, when it resurfaces, can usually be consigned direct to D. And in any case, I won't have any recollection of having received the paper, what it said, or what I did with it, if it wasn't immediately recognised by the "need to know" filter.

Producing documents if anything, is even worse, because it also contains an element of stress. Even after only one meeting, we have made ourselves a little list of documents to produce or revise, none of which will be remotely relevant to anyone's life, and therein lies the element of stress. Even though I know that few people will read it, and that those who do will wonder why they did, I know with the same amount of knowing, that I will spend hours and hours of my life producing the things, going mad at my computer when it doesn't do exactly what I want it to, getting the wording right, the layout, the format, the spacing, because I am totally unable to act as though what I am doing wasn't important. The ratio of time and emotional energy in the production to the time and emotional energy in the reading will be impossibly lopsided, and with good reason.... because by and large this stuff doesn't matter. And yet I will want the recipients to read, digest and care, not because one word of the content is remotely relevant to them, but because of what it has cost me to produce it, even though I know with all of my heart that if the same thing had landed in my inbox, I would have sent it Direct to D.

Taking all this into account, it makes one wonder why a compassionate God couldn't come up with a job that I actually have some of the skills for, like cleaning toilets, looking after kids, or roller-skating to Siberia against a headwind.... ("Do everything without arguing or complaining...." Oh yeah alright then, but there had better be good biscuits....)

1. Both are the second city of their respective countries, both are similar size, several times smaller than their respective capitals.

2. Both are located to the north and west of the capital.

3. Both have a hate hate relationship with the capital.

4. Both are surrounded by rather attractive countryside, with hills close by, i.e. the Peak District, and the Sierras de Cordoba.

5. Both have a rich historical past, the region of Cordoba as home to the Camechingon peoples, and later known as Cordoba, a colonial capital founded by the Spanish, and Birmingham as a market town based around Birmingham castle following Bronze age origins.

6. Both have a strong multi-cultural mix, both past and present.

7. Both have been important academic hubs. Cordoba has the second oldest university in Latin America founded by the Jesuits in 1613. Birmingham was home to the Lunar society around 1765, which set the pace for the British industrial revolution.

8. Both have experienced scenes of disturbance and uprising, the logical flip-side of academic moving and shaking. Hence Birmingham's Priestly riots in 1791, and the more recent popular uprising in Cordoba of 1969, known as the "Cordobazo"

9. Both have significant industrial heritages.... Cordoba in the manufacture of aeroplanes, trains, cars, textiles, chemicals, and more recently technologies, and Birmingham in toys, textiles, iron, steel, guns, transport, and of course Cadbury's chocolate.

10. Both have a thriving middle class, and pockets of real deprivation. And in both cases it's the middle class who have the most to say about being poor.

11. Both have had sizable investment in regeneration of their respective historical and commercial centres in recent years.

12. And most importantly of all, both have the one accent in their country which every comedian needs to perfect if they want to be taken seriously on the stand-up circuit.

Friday was supposed to be a nice quiet easy-ish day after being in the childrens' home on Wednesday and Thursday. We had a doctors appointment at 6pm, and people were coming around for an asado (BBQ) in the evening. So we spent the morning slowly, I walked the dog, did some shopping in advance of the evening, leaving the drinks and a few other things to buy later, had lunch, bit of a siesta.... At 4.30 we thought we'd make some coffee, do the washing up and start preparing stuff for the evening. At 5pm the dog arrived home squealing, with an absolutely massive gash in her chest, it was so big and deep and wide-open we honestly weren't sure if she would survive, so Martin held her down and applied pressure, I phoned our usual vet, who gave me an emergency number for someone else, who in turn organised a different guy to come round. He turned our house into an operating theatre, put the dog out, shaved her, cleaned out the wound and stitched her up, she's got three rows of stitches, one layer deep inside, then another layer a bit further out and then finally a third layer at skin level. Luckily it was her chest rather than the abdomen so her vital organs were protected by the ribs. We have no idea where or how she did it, but she's always jumping over fences and walls, she's convinced she's a puma, so we can only assume it went badly wrong and that she landed on something, like a railing possibly, in mid-leap. We missed our doctor's appointment, the vet left at seven leaving the house covered in blood and fur, and the dog still unconscious, with people due to arrive at eight and only half of the shopping done. So we did an emergency clean, an emergency shop, Martin lit the fire, I chopped salads and we were just about looking normal with the dog coming round kind of dozily when the first person arrived, which was luckily not till 8.30, this being Argentina and all. The asado went great in the end, Martin's getting it off to a fine art, and he always receives lots of kudos for being a non-argentinian who has learnt how to do a good Argentinian asado. The dog managed to open one of her stitches slightly just as everyone was leaving soon after midnight, so we had to stop her bleeding, and then we kept getting up all night to check on her, but by the morning it seemed to have knitted itself, yesterday she spent the day lying around looking poor and sorry for herself but the wound's only leaking slightly and she doesn't seem to be in immediate danger. She's still interested in food which is a good sign, although she's so greedy I think it would take more than nearly bleeding to death to put her off her dinner!

I've been nearly writing this entry for ages, so I thought I'd better bite the bullet and actually put it together, even though I'm not sure exactly how it's going to turn out. One of the things I've been thinking about is attitudes to "health and wealth" teaching in churches both in Argentina and in the UK, and I'm coming to the conclusion that even churches who appear to be at totally opposite ends of the spectrum, seem to end up saying and believing pretty much the same things.

For the uninitiated "Health and Wealth" is the tag-name given to a brand of Christian teaching which says that God wants to give all his followers good health and material prosperity, and that if we don't have good health and material prosperity then that must be our fault because we are variously failing in obedience, in faith, to tithe, to "claim" what God wants to do for us, or that we are otherwise separated from God through our unconfessed sin.

There is some evidence for health and wealth teaching. After all the Old Testament in general, and the pentateuch particularly, is littered with exhortations to obedience, and promises of prosperity as a result of obedience. Jesus himself said that the Father knows how to give good gifts to his children. When Solomon asks God for wisdom, he is given not only wisdom, but also material wealth as a reward by God for asking wisely, so we can presumably understand therefore that God would recognise health and wealth as falling under the heading of "good gifts" which the Father knows how to give.

No, the flaw in the scheme is not that it is entirely untrue, but in that it attempts to expound one bit of the plot as though it were a systematic model for the entire play. The thing very quickly falls apart when we notice that some of the most obedient people were some of the least materially prosperous, and thus in a caricatured world we might find ourselves asking whether John the Baptist, the apostle Paul, or the Lord Jesus Christ were terribly lacking in faith, or if they had just slightly miscalculated their tithe. We might also sneak a glance at Jacob who became materially rich, but was also deliberately given his dislocated hip as a blessing from God. And going back to Solomon, sure he was given great wealth, but as a reward for asking for wisdom, suggesting that the wisest thing is not to seek material riches.

Overt health and wealth teaching tends to be the domain of the "livelier" churches, both in Argentina and the UK. Here we hear quite a lot of fairly starkly "health and wealth" theology. We have heard that "the only reason why people ever die is because the church isn't praying enough, and if we really had faith we would be down at the hospital ordering sick people to get better". We have also heard that the way to be prosperous is to give more money to the church, and that if you are poor it is because you are not giving enough money to the church; or that if you are faithful in your tithe then you have the authority to ask God for anything and it will be done. There is even a church here which refers to its offering envelopes as "the keys to the blessing".

In the UK at least, we tend to move in more conservative theological circles, and people in conservative theological circles tend to get a bit squeaky about such teaching, arguably with good reason. But I'm starting to wonder if we of the conservative church might in the final instance actually covertly hold the same beliefs that we appear to look down on.

Why do I say that? Firstly we need to understand that the position of the church in UK society generally belongs to a higher social strata than in Argentina. This means that where Argentinians are aspiring to "health and wealth", the conservative UK church generally is healthy and wealthy, at least by comparison, and therefore doesn't need to look to God to meet those aspirations. However, take away the health or the wealth to which a conservative UK Christian has become accustomed, and watch what happens. "God's got to heal her, he's just got to"; a friend whose wife was having surgery (why?). "Why is God making me go through this?"; a friend during a long period of unemployment (why not?). And when Martin had his road accident a lot of people said "Why did God allow this to happen?" (What divine right grants us protection from breaking our necks, especially if we're going to walk out in front of moving Ford Escorts?)

Which makes me wonder if somewhere we of the conservative church haven't sold out to a respectable conservative middle class UK form of "health and wealth" teaching which goes something like "God wants to bless you, his followers with good health and material prosperity to the level at which you have become accustomed".

In the case of overt "health and wealth" theology, we put our faith in that which we want God to give us, and in the faith of covert "health and wealth" theology, we put our faith in that which God has already given us. In some cases the latter might be even more dangerous than the former, since we have also frequently forgotten that the gifts were his in the first place. In either case I would suggest that the result is about the same, give or take a nuance; that we have lost sight of Jesus, because we don't trust that we are safe in Jesus, probably because we have no idea what it means to be safe in Jesus:

"The centrality of Jesus has been subject to continual usurpment by money, buildings, hard work, good works, Myers Briggs, efficient organisation, computers, food, the Bible, church activities, principles, religion, theology, virtue, sex, sexuality, party spirit, meetings, soundness, politics, fame, talent, tradition, single-issue fanaticism, alcohol, and family to name but a few" (Adrian Plass, in "Jesus: Safe, Tender, Extreme")

Now I'm thinking I should stop right here if only because it's going to take me half the night to put this into Spanish. But I haven't finished thinking about this yet, so post a comment, send an email....

Hi all. Sorry the long silence, we were away: couple days in the childrens' home, followed by nearly a week at the Latin Link Argentina team conference, followed by couple more days in the childrens' home. Now we're back. It's a testament to the strength of local community here that when I went shopping for food yesterday morning, the lady in the veg shop said "We've missed you all this time". When since did anyone in Tesco or any other "friendly local hypermarket" even notice, let alone give a monkeys, that I didn't show up for a week or two?

I'm a little concerned that the blog entry that's generated the most response has been the one about toilets... But I probably shouldn't be really... after all if you were posh you probably wouldn't be friends with us or reading our blog in the first place. Today I'm afraid I don't have a toilet story. But I do have two pieces of good advice for your next visit to Argentina. One: buy soda. Two: don't get a bank account.

On soda. We've just discovered soda. It's great. Soda gets delivered to the door, by a guy called a "Sodero", from a little truck (remember the British milk float?). It costs 50 centavos (that's 9pence) for a litre and a quarter. It comes in a reusable bottle thus eliminating plastic waste, just hand it back and they swop it for a full one. It has a proper valve so it never loses its gas. It can be mixed with all manner of things to create your own range of fizzy drinks with as many or few calories as you like. And you never need to pay another penny to those evil Pepsi / Coca Cola empires again. Perfect.

On bank accounts. To be fair I've only been twice, so it might not be a fair test. The first time I had to pay in 30 pesos to someone's account (£6). I stood in the queue that said deposits, until they told me that this was only for large deposits, so I stood in the queue for small deposits, until they told me that I needed the correct change, so I stood in the queue for general services, where they told me that they don't give change here ("but you're a bank...."). Luckily at this point the security guard took pity on me, and wrangled change out of someone from a back office. Third piece of advice: Security guards are the most knowledgeable members of staff, don't be put off by the gun. The second time we had to pay in 200 pesos to someone else's account in a different bank. We had been given a CBU number, which we were assured was the magic number we would need. So we asked the security guard which queue to join; the general one. The lady said "that's fine, you can go straight to the cashier". The cashier said "I can't do this without an account number, you'll need to take a ticket to see the man at the desk to find out the account number". The man at the desk said "I can't do this, I'll take you to see another man at the other end who can find out the account number". The man at the other end found out the account number, and he handed it to us, on a print out containing the other person's personal information, including every detail pertaining to the account with their recent transactions and current funds available, and sent us with this in our hands back to the cashier to pay our money in.

Moral of the story? Stick to soda, it's safer.

"An Englishman goes to church rather like he goes to the toilet: with the minimum of fuss, and preferrably without explanation" (our friend Bernie, opening a Bible study a few years ago)

Visitors to Argentina soon discover that every public toilet is attended by a Rottweiler, dressed up as a female person. Her main responsibilities involve handing a carefully measured length of toilet paper to each customer, in exchange for a coin; and saying "pa-se" when a cubicle becomes free. To be fair, if I'd been doing that for a few years, I can imagine that I might become a bit growly.

This week the Rottweiler in the minibus station has come up with an alternative diversion much more sophisticated than biting people's ankles. She now requires each prospective toilet-user to announce publicly exactly what they are planning on putting into the toilet, so that she can then decide whether to point them to the cubicle where the flush uses a lot of water, or the one where the flush doesn't work too well.

By luck or by the abundant mercy of God, just over the road there is a little coffee bar, where for the modest price of a small coffee, patrons may also use the toilet for free and for nothing, and most importantly without explanation. I am so English!

Luckily the journey to San Marcos is a nice one; a view of the mountains out of the right hand window, and a lake from the left. I have done it so many times I nearly know every bend in the road. Luckily the little buses have air-con.

At the moment on Tuesdays and Wednesdays I am in the childrens' home. I was originally just working with four kids, but then I started a new system of giving out a sweet or a marble for good work. And now I suddenly seem to have about sixteen kids lining up for extra school-work. I did worry for about two seconds about the ethics of whether I could be accused of bribery, until a friend said "How many kids do you know in the UK who would be prepared to do half an hour of school work in exchange for a toffee or a marble...?"

I have been using a lot of the material from Alfalit, and augmenting it with activities that I have invented, and some others trawled from the internet. I'm surprised at how little there is in Spanish on the web, given that Spanish is the third language in the world after Chinese and English.

This week I was able to give out proper Alfalit work-books to the kids who are working on basic literacy and numeracy skills. I was amazed at how delighted they were to receive their own books.... I'd never thought of a kid being pleased to own a text-book. Here's a few photos that we took to send to the people at Alfalit...

The guy in the top photo is Santiago. He is about to do first grade for the third time, but we think this time is going to be different. He is one of my keenest students. He's desperate to learn joined up writing, which wouldn't have been my highest priority for him, but because he's so keen, I'm teaching him and using it as a vehicle to teach him some other things along the way. Don't ask why he's wearing his T-shirt on his head: he's a kid, I have no idea!

Then he took my camera from me and snapped some terrible shots of me looking like a crazy teacher. Least said about that the better I think.

The three girls are working together here on numbers, basic number bonds, counting on our fingers... not got onto toes yet. Somehow all three have managed to receive a "pass" mark for several grades of maths classes without learning that if I hold up two fingers and my friend holds up another finger then that'll make approximately three fingers between us.

The guy in the cap is Gabriel. He is also about to do first grade for the third time, and he finds school work really difficult. Gabriel's never owned a book before. When I gave him his, he just sat and stared at it for ages, saying "that's my book". Trouble is, he's so proud of it, he doesn't want to spoil it by writing in it, which kind of wasn't the point...

What I hadn't figured was that all the other kids were going to want a book. And when I said "you guys can already read, these books are too easy for you" they said "but we still want one". So this week I've managed to get hold of a stack of little word-search books on special offer... I introduced word-searches to the older kids over Christmas, which they enjoyed, so hopefully these will keep them busy for oooh, about two minutes maybe....

Happy new year all. OK, I'm a few days late, but I do mean it sincerely. Christmas and New Year were spent eating cow with friends, and watching the fireworks at midnight. The photo on the left is of Giuliano aged 2 sharing his Christmas toys with Martin aged 47.

Prize for random conversation of the first week of 2007 goes to the waitress where we stopped for food on the way home the other night. We thought we'd have a large bottle of beer between us:

Hazel: ... and a large Quilmes please (Quilmes being the usual beer in Argentina)
Waitress: I don't have a large Quilmes
Hazel: Which beers do you have in large size?
Waitress: I don't have any large beers
Hazel: OK, can we have two small Quilmes then please.
Waitress: Wouldn't you prefer a large Quilmes instead?
I thought I must have misunderstood or misheard something, but no, I am assured that what I thought I heard is exactly what happened.

New year's resolutions. I stopped making those at about the point where I became old enough to doubt that I might achieve any sort of saintliness this side of heaven. One very practical thing that I would like to do sometime soon is to put the rest of our website into Spanish. Funny, it was only a generation or so ago when missionaries were chastised for spending too much time writing letters and the like, now it's pretty widely accepted that at least part of our "ministry" is about communication. Our friends and team leaders here, Hans and Priscilla have just written their first blog comment, starting by stating their intentions to be in better contact... it's at www.saltasnippets.org Another friend, Simon, now working for WEC is writing a superb blog, which can be found at blog.simon-cozens.org One of his best entries is his discourse on why every missionary should blog (can't remember what date that was... Simon....??). I also reckon that every missionary needs to be reading blogs, particularly blogs that are outside our own context/ denomination/ mission agency. Trouble is there's a lot of stuff out there and if I try and read it all I'd never get anything else done and the old guys might end up having a point that "communication detracts from the real work" so I'm making myself a little list of a few good ones to keep up with... our friends Dean and Paula are doing great stuff in South Africa, they're at dpfinnie.blogspot.com And if you are reading or writing a good-thoughtful-interesting-challenging blog feel free to hit the comment button and post up the link.

The noticeboard in this photo says "The Cordobans are restoring our own cathedral". That makes me so happy. Not so much because the cathedral is undergoing a facelift (although it surely needs one), but because of the pride and conciousness behind the words. It makes me happy for the same reasons that I am an avid buyer of street newspapers; "The Big Issue" in the UK, and "La Luciernaga" in Cordoba. It is the difference between the learned helplessness of "I tell you my problem and I wait with my hands open", and the empowerment in "I have owned my problem and now I am owning my solution". We have been told that the roots of learned helplessness stem directly from the teaching and behaviour of the Catholic church, which I have no reason to doubt the historical accuracy of this, but today the phenomenon is far more widespread than just the Catholic church. And now we see the Catholic church modeling something completely different. I wonder if it will catch on?

create your own visited countries map

This is a silly game... if you click on this link it will take you to a website where in about ten seconds flat you can create your own map of countries that you have visited: tick the boxes, and the relevant countries will turn red. This looks particularly impressive if you have visited some big countries... stick a toe into China... or like me, into Argentina, Brazil, and the USA and you have a nice lot of red. Unfortunately, small but exotic doesn't show up too well, so for creating your own virtual empire in red ink you probably want to avoid Fiji, Bermuda or Monaco. Heck, who wants to go there anyway...? Come to Argentina, the people are friendly, the food's great...

An unmarried pregnant adolescent. One of the most marginalised groups in society, both then and now. Wonder how many churches or Christian Unions would welcome her in today? Amazing to think that God did that on purpose.

We were at the prison yesterday for their Christmas service. It was a good time. Two people commented on Martin's neck-brace. The first said "How terrible". The second said "How nice". The first guy is a pastor, the second guy is a worship leader who is missing a leg, and I'm guessing he knows some things about living with paradoxical realities.

Which transports us from Christmas, through Easter to the Resurrection, and the greatest paradox of all time. "Then I saw a lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing in the centre of the throne...." (Revelation 5:6)

Have a great Christmas!

Looking back through the last several entries, I realise that I have not written anything about work of late, so I started worrying in case people think we aren't doing any, so this is a little blog about work.

Last week and this week I have been out at the children's home in San Marcos. There's a page about the children's home on our main site with some pics if you want to find out more. School broke up for the summer holidays, and the plan is that I am going to spend a couple of days a week "catching up" a few of the kids in the home before the start of the next school year. These last two weeks I have been using some new literacy material from Alfalit. Alfalit have a website, at www.alfalit.org (You may find the front page of their website rather patronising, in a "helping the poor helpless" sort of way, but if you get beyond the front page, they are a key organisation in literacy work in Latin America, and their materials are pretty solid.) I have two kids who have never been to school and have no idea what to do with a pen, and another two kids who have missed a lot of school and have some massive gaps. There's another lad who I'm not quite sure where to start with, but I ought to be gathering up sometime soon, and another girl who hasn't been picked up yet, but she's next in line particularly for numeracy.

At the moment I am working with all the kids individually. Initially I tried to do group activities, but their needs are very different, and their concentration is not that good, so they distract each other too much, which means that I'm now teaching them one after the other. This is pretty intense. When I am not teaching, then I spend most of the time outside playing with the kids, or hanging out with the older ones. San Marcos is in a great location, so once a trip, I try and escape for an hour or so and have a walk, which is a joy and delight to be out of the big city and enjoying the hills or the river.

Back in Cordoba, we are visiting in the Hospital Rawson on Thursdays, which I wrote about in a previous blog entry. Today we met some new people, and had some good chats, as well as visiting "old" friends who have been in for a long time. One of my ongoing tasks is to produce some sort of simple gospel presentation in leaflet form which we can use in the hospital, which isn't in tiny print, doesn't use unhelpful jargon, and doesn't use an antiquated version of the Bible. We started by going to the Christian bookshop, but all of their material failed on at least two of the three counts, so the next line was "Hazel, you're good with a computer..." At the moment what I am working on is an incongruous mix between "Two ways to live" (bland, simplistic, but accessible) and the Nicene Creed (beautiful but completely inaccessible). Trying to reduce the gospel in its entirety onto a folded sheet of A4 in large print has given me a new respect for the writers of both the Nicene Creed and Two ways to live, even though I loathe the triteness of the latter.

At the weekend, we were at Barrio Sacchi on Sunday, and church in the evening. Last Sunday in the afternoon I was doing some preparation for teaching the kids at San Marcos, during which I made the important discovery that the material which my finger is made out of is less robust than the closed cell foam which I was cutting letter shapes out of. In the background, sometimes the foreground, and sometimes blocking out the sun altogether, we are mired in two lots of admin, one with the immigration office, and the other over health insurance, although on the immigration front, we think we might have finally collected enough rubber stamps. We were there on Monday, and they've now told us to come back mid January.

Tomorrow we are taking the day off!

The first time we took our dog to the park, she had never seen ducks before, or water deeper than the puddles in our road when it rains. These days her favourite activity is swimming after the ducks in the pond. She has a lot of stamina as well now. Luckily she never manages to catch any, because when she gets too close, they flap away, filling her face with water in the process. But she never tires of trying. I don't take her every day, because I think the ducks don't really enjoy the game as much as she does. Sometimes we go to the other end of the park, to give the pigeons their exercise...

Here's a thought... Whoever invented the term "doggy position" wasn't a dog owner. True doggy position is a dog lying on their back, with their legs waving in the air and tongue lolling to one side, waiting for someone to rub their tummy.

I was cleaning under the bed, (sometimes it happens), and a huge black thing flew out.
"Eeeek it's a bat" I said.
"A rat?" said Martin, mishearing me from the other room.
"Yum, dinner" said the dog, leaping up enthusiastically.

The creature came to rest on the wall, and we realised that it was neither a bat, nor a rat, (nor dinner) but actually a huge moth. It stayed long enough for Martin to measure its wing span; 15 cms, and it didn't even object when I took photos. When nighttime fell, it took itself off out of the bedroom window.

If our church is growing and successful, is that God's blessing upon us. If the Jehovah's witnesses down the road are growing and successful (as they are in Argentina), is that God's blessing upon them? If our church is struggling, is that a Satanic attack, or God teaching us perseverance, or just that we're doing it wrong?

The other day I was supposed to go to a meeting, but I didn't get to the meeting because my bike broke on the way. It took almost exactly the length of the meeting to fix it because everything went wrong, until the moment when it was definitely too late to go to the meeting, when it all fell into place. Was it that God didn't want me to go to that meeting? Or that Satan didn't want me to get there? Or because bike parts are of low quality in Argentina, and therefore I should not have left home without enough money for a taxi? (Was that God teaching me that sensible people make a plan B, or was that Satan blinding me to the need to make a plan B, or do I just need to have my brain a bit more plugged in for next time the inevitable happens?)

Today I had things I was planning on doing, but then it really rained and the whole place was under water. Was that because my plan was the wrong plan and God didn't want it to happen. Or because my timing was out, so God was postponing it to his time? Or because it was the right plan, and therefore Satan didn't want it to happen? Or because it always rains in Cordoba at this time of year?

What does God really think about what happens? What is the relationship between the physical and the spiritual? Is everything ordained, or does stuff just happen? Tricky isn't it.

When Martin survived his road accident a lot of people said "God is good". When he came through his surgery without lasting disability, a lot of people said "God is good". If he hadn't survived, or had become permanently disabled, would God still be good? What about other people whose lives haven't been spared, is God still good. Today 24,000 people will die of hunger-related causes. Yesterday 24,000 people died of hunger related causes, and tomorrow another 24,000 people will die of hunger related causes. Is God still good? Twenty years ago 50,000 people died every day of hunger related causes. Does that mean God is twice as good today as he was twenty years ago?

Now, right here I want to say loud and clear that I firmly and fundamentally believe that God is good. What I am taking issue with is taking "things going well from a human perspective" to evidence that "God is good".

When chaos strikes we fear that God might not be good after all, and therefore we have to find the tiniest shred of evidence to ease our troubled minds. A couple of months ago, a friend came up with a heartwarming little story about some kid who rescued his family in New Orleans as evidence that God was good even in that disaster. Well yes. But lets not lose sight of the fact that 1,800 people died, quarter of a million people were made homeless, many of whom are still displaced, and $81 billion dollars worth of damage is still being repaired. While the little story is nice, if that's the best evidence we can come up with for God being good, then we might be forgiven for thinking that he is also very small by comparison to the event.

If God is good, then it would make sense that he is also consistent. And therefore the Bible might be a useful starting point. The Pentateuch's kind of handy and straightforward here, it shows us how God related to his people, and shaped their history. When the Israelites in the desert did as they were told, God defended them, and when they disobeyed, God punished them. As the religious and social life of the community develops, teachings are given which incorporate rewards for obeying, and punishments for disobeying. As they stand by the Jordan, Moses in Deuteronomy is clear that in the promised land, obedience equals being blessed, and disobedience equals being cursed e.g chapter 11, chapter 28. Which makes it nice and easy to preach. You want stuff to go OK? Obey God. Stuff going badly for you? Obey God and it will go well.

Which is just fine and dandy, until we get to the likes of Jeremiah who screw that theory up good and proper. There is a pretty direct correlation between Jeremiah doing exactly what God tells him to, and Jeremiah finding himself beaten up more than once, imprisoned, thrown into a cistern. Since God is consistent, what he says in the Pentateuch would still follow by the time that we get to Jeremiah, so where he says "obey me and things will go well for you", we have to say that "things going well" from God's perspective might include having your head flushed down the toilet, which probably isn't that much fun if you're the one wearing the head. Not exactly what we would understand as a "blessing".

If God is consistent and good, then we would expect him to behave within his character. So when God tells Hosea to take a prostitute for a wife, then this is also within God's character of being consistent and good. As a side issue, I would be interested in any church or Bible study group who would accept it as being "of God" for one of its members to have a relationship with a sexually promiscuous non-Christian. In fact I know of at least one person who is currently outside the church because of their reaction to his girlfriend. So we might therefore imagine the treatment that Hosea received from his contemporaries, as well as his humiliation from his wife. The most normal argument is that because Hosea´s marriage is used as a metaphor, God is good since he has the big picture. However, if God is consistent, then he must be as good in his relationship with Hosea as with the rest of Israel, otherwise he would be being inconsistent. So we have to say that when stuff happens that we think of as being bad, then not only might it be due to a direct intervention by God, but it might also fall within God´s definition of "things going well for you".

So now I´m kind of back where I started. What is the relationship between God's intervention, and stuff that happens? If things seem to be going well then that might be God's intervention... or it might not. If things seem to be going badly then that might be God's intervention... or it might not. I´m reminded of Richard Harvey at All Nations who used to say "Yes, but is that the right question", and I have a sneaking suspicion that if I am finding myself playing some sort of divine hide and seek, then it might be because the question itself needs some work. I´m also reminded of a quote from Nancy Eisland in "The disabled God" (1994) who says:
"An ordinary life is filled with blessings and curses and it is sometimes hard to differentiate between the two."

And I´m also reminded of a Martin Joseph song from the 1980´s called "Treasure the question". As a new young Christian student in the late 1980´s the one thing that our teaching definitely did not encourage us to do was to "treasure the question". As good modernist evangelicals, questions were to be used as launching pads into pre-prepared answers, and in spiritual whist, the pre-prepared answer was deemed to trump the question and end the game. Suggestions that the pre-prepared answer might not be entirely adequate in the face of real life, often resulted in the questioner being treated as an embarrassment, and subjected to "ministry", or being isolated altogether for fear of contamination. I think that one of the most positive things that the postmodern era can bring is about being able to "treasure the question" and enjoy the adventure of not knowing, with honesty and authenticity.

This week we have gained a new residential status. We are now known as "precarious residents". Which is probably an improvement on "illegal immigrants", as we were last week after our visa ran out (no-one tell the Daily Mail), and possibly slightly more permanent than "tourists" which is what we were the week before. Next week... who knows?

Positive... A Swiss person times their pasta to be ready within two minutes of their guests arriving

Comparative.... An English person boils the water but waits until their guests arrive before adding the pasta.

Superlative.... An Argentinian person waits until their guests arrive before going shopping for the pasta.

Tramites is the word we use here to describe the process of "bureaucracy", i.e. filling in forms, collecting rubber stamps, going to offices, lining up for hours, being sent across the city to other offices, being told you have the wrong forms, being sent back to the original offices... etc. The tramites in Argentina are special, not just those for immigrants, they permeate through many aspects of ordinary life as well. They are "affectionately" known as "los tramites del arbol" (the bureaucracy of the tree) after a famous comedy sketch, about a man who wanted to plant a tree in front of his house, and found that he needed to get permission, fill in papers, stand in queues, collect rubber stamps...

On Thursday, we went to the immigration office, and stood in a line with our paper work. This consisted of our birth certificates, which had been apostiled, translated, and seen by the Argentinian consulate in England, then re-translated here, and then certified by the college of translators; and a letter from the Baptist convention, which had taken eleven months to write, and had then gone to the ministry of exterior relations for certifying. What we didn´t have was our UK police records, because we had only just applied for them, and it takes about six weeks to get them. However, our Argentina visa runs out next week, so we went to plead for grace and mercy to let us proceed on a temporary basis until the police records arrive. (These of course will also need to be apostilled, stamped, translated, certified etc when they arrive).

Luckily the man in the immigration office was friendly, and he accepted our plea, and decided that we are allowed to proceed to the next part of the visa process. This involved going to the police headquarters on the other side of the city for fingerprinting. When we arrived, it was like an explosion at a jumble sale, long queues snaking their way around the offices, heading in different directions. So we thought we´d better ask which one we should join. "Come with me" said the man, and led us past all the queues into an underground office, where another man was busily inking the fingers of the person in front of us. We had three sets of finger prints taken each. They provide a washing-up scourer to get the ink off afterwards.

Then it was off to the justice department, on another side of the city. Here, we took a number in order to be called to a desk and given the paperwork to fill in, consisting of two forms; one long and one short. The catch was that the short form needed to be filled in eight times. Carbon paper hasn´t yet become fashionable in the justice department. We filled this all in, then we had to go to a bank, pay in some money and collect a receipt for same, then via a photocopying shop, where we had to have the completed forms photocopied twice, along with our passports, and then back to the justice department, where they took all the paperwork from us and sent us for.... more fingerprints. Next week, we have to go back to the justice department to collect our Argentinian police certificates on tuesday, and back to the immigration office with all our paperwork on Wednesday.

Reading this, it sounds like that was a bad day. By no means! We finished elated jubilant, victorious and triumphant. One, we had achieved everything that we were supposed to have achieved without becoming ensnared by any "catch 22´s", and two, it only took a day. Which as any Argentinian knows, is almost a miracle. We´re really hoping that next week goes as well, in which case we would be several massive strides on our way to having proper visa status.

Now I´m busily translating the stuff that I´ve already written on this blog from English into Spanish. One thing about missionary writings it seems to me is that there are very clear demarcations between who it´s "to" and who it´s "about", and it was starting to bug me that our communications are becoming that way too. So we´re trying to blur the boundaries and put everything into two languages, starting with the blog. If I had thought about that in the first place, I might have used simpler English and made life easier for myself.... "Peter has a dog. The dog has a bone. The window is open, The door is yellow..."

I had a strange experience a few days ago, which I´ll probably get into trouble for writing about, so this is me writing about it... I was cycling home through a quietish neighbourhood and I passed two transvestites sitting on some steps. And that seemed like a really odd sight to me, and I couldn´t work out why it seemed so odd, until I realised that it´s because we always meet some of the transvestites when we go to the Hospital Rawson among the HIV or AIDS patients, so I had kind of associated them as being at the hospital in my head, and completely lost sight of the fact that they don´t all live in the hospital and most of them live in normal houses in normal neighbourhoods, and drink coke outside on the steps on a warm day.

So now I´ve written something else that I need to translate. Luckily I know the Spanish for transvestite. Actually it´s the phrases that we use without thinking that cause me the most grief, particularly the metaphors... I can already see myself deeply regretting "blur the boundaries" for example. Ho hum...

So far, Hazel has so far written all the blogs so far, I thought I would put a quick one in.

Each day I am becoming a bit more lively. The operation completely wiped me out for a while but I am now beginning to get my strength back. Yesterday, I even rode my bicycle for the first time since the accident!

Today, I am working on the "comment" button so we can get some feedback from all of you out there. Watch this space. It should be arriving in a day or two.

Thank you all for the wealth of support we have both received over the last few months. Knowing that so many people have been praying for us has been a great comfort.

You will all be hearing from me a lot more now in our blog.

Cheers.

Some more ideas coming out of the disability conference that I was at last week. If this doesn't make any sense, then you may want to read the other blog entry relating to this conference, or drop me an email.

Today I am writing about theology, disability and Bible translation. These thoughts are being developed out of an exposition of the encounter between Jesus and the disabled woman in Luke 13 which was probably the best session of the entire conference. It was given by a Brazilian woman, Iara, who is a pastor, a gifted speaker, an insightful theologian, and has a physical disability.

Iara brought a totally fresh perspective to the text, my inadequate summary goes like this: She started by painting the context from the perspective of the woman, who probably had a form of scoliosis, which generally starts at about age 12, i.e. also around the time that a Jewish girl would have been preparing for marriage. So this girl probably couldn't have married. Marriage signified status, rights, land, descendants, inheritance; but instead she becomes an outcast, with no status; in the narrative she is not even given a name, identified only by her disability. Contrast this with the moment where Jesus calls her a "daughter of Abraham", making her the only woman in the Bible who is given this title. To be a daughter of Abraham signifies belonging, rights, land, descendants, inheritance; a restoration of all that she has lost, and inclusion in the Kingdom of God.

Listening to Iara reminded me of a quote from Martin Goldsmith at All Nations College. He said "It's not that our theology is insular in any way, it's just that the only theologians we study are Westerners..." To which we might add white, middle class, middle aged, non-disabled, male... The Bible is so rich with different characters, voices, and perspectives, how much richer our experience of studying it becomes when we can hear from those voices and perspectives, rather than the familiar homogenous approaches of always.

Anyway, from here, we found ourselves dealing with technical issues. In the translations we were using, disability is conflated with sickness, both in the text, and in the title added by the editor. The conference therefore decided to write a letter to the Bible Society on this point, which I don't agree with. The reason why I don't agree is that this letter is a reaction to one passage with one editorial problem. They have not asked themselves whether there are related issues to be addressed throughout the Bible, and what really needs to be done about this. This means that over time, they are likely to find themselves re-sending this letter each time they find an unhelpful piece of editing, and over time they will probably see some similarity in the responses they receive... "Your comments have been noted", code for "and we plan to take no action whatsoever". I think in their rush to say something/anything, this conference has missed a real opportunity to have an impact, to become comprehensively involved in making disabled voices heard throughout the wider processes of translation and editorial of the Bible.

Bible translating and editorial are the subject of much scholarly debate, and I'm not about to add very much to that here, but I'm pulling out the issues which I see as being specifically related to disability.

On editorial. As an oversimplification, editorial additions such as titles, are outside the text of the Bible, and therefore an editor has freedom to say what they want. Obviously it helps if titles added by the editor have some relation to the content, although this is not always the case! Where an added title uses unhelpful terminology, this could be due to the version being outdated, where language has changed over time, (this highlights the need to be producing new translations to take account of evolving language). Or it could be due to the editor not being aware of the issues, and thus in need of some education or access to a team of consultants. An example of this is in Marks gospel, chapter 2, where the story of the disabled guy being lowered through the roof is given the added title "Jesus heals the paralytic" even in most modern versions in both English and Spanish. People who are older than I am might remember a time when "paralytic" was a helpful term to describe someone with a spinal injury, I don't remember that ever being the case. In fact we have a friend in the UK, who happens to be a wheelchair user, who the first time she read the story in Mark 2, honestly believed that it was referring to a drunk, because she and I have never used the word "paralytic" to mean anything other than "eight pints too many".

On translation, as another oversimplification, translators have less freedom than editors. The job of the translator is to act as a bridge, to be accurate to the ancient text, and to render it into language which is clearly understood by the contemporary reader. SIL (Wycliffe Bible Translators) say that:

The ideal translation should be…
• Accurate: reproducing as exactly as possible the meaning of the source text.
• Natural: using natural forms of the receptor language in a way that is appropriate to the kind of text being translated.
• Communicative: expressing all aspects of the meaning in a way that is readily understandable to the intended audience.

Going back to the guy in Mark 2, he is referred to as "the paralytic" within the body of the text as well as the title. When I pointed this out, I was reminded that it is more complex to change the text than the title as we have to be true to the original documents. I totally agree, and my knowledge of Greek is pretty limited, so I would need help to figure this out. We need to look both at the Greek, and at the social context of the time. If the word in the original was also outdated, inaccurate, and offensive to its audience of New Testament times, then "paralytic" is exactly how it should be translated in order to preserve the same impact. If however, it was merely a neutral term used to describe the guy as having a spinal injury, then "paralytic" would be the wrong word, an inaccurate translation because it is negatively loaded in a way that the original text is not.

Now I'm about to get into a philosophical area that I don't know anything about, so please read this next bit as a question which I would like to dialogue on rather than a fully formed opinion... I am wondering about the interface between the text and the translator, and how they impact on one another. The reason why I am wondering this is because in the Bible, Jesus goes out of his way to include the excluded, and he reserves his harshest criticisms for the establishment and hierarchy. For someone to have done enough studying to make a contribution to translating the Bible, it would seem to me that even if they started life in an "excluded" group, the process of attaining that level of study signifies becoming assimilated into the establishment and hierarchy (this is as much the case here as in the UK, especially since Latin Americans will often do their doctorates in "the West"). Hence, I am caused to wonder how far Bible translators are really able to identify with Jesus in being a voice for including the excluded, and therefore what impact this has on the translations which we hold in our hands today.

All of which leads me back to the point that I made in the first place, which is that we need to be hearing from the full richness of the voices in our midst; in theology, in translation, in all aspects of church and mission, and until we find ways to do that, we will continue to confine ourselves to an impoverished gospel.

This week I was at a continent-wide conference on disability organised by EDAN, who are an ecumenical network. I think they're something to do with the world council of churches. There were about forty people there, from around the continent. That tells me two things. One, disability is an under-thought-about area here. Two, like most conferences, this one suffered from an over-inflated sense of its own importance.

There were some great people there, it was fantastic to see some of the work happening in Cuba particularly, which seems like it's a million years ahead of most of the rest of the world in this aspect. In fact the best thing about this conference was being with disabled people, and hearing from disabled people in leadership, particularly disabled women in leadership.

The question that I didn't manage to answer at any stage was "what are we here for?" For example, we spent quite a lot of time formulating, and arguing about the semantics of various "statements" of belief and intent. I wonder what the ratio will be of the person-hours that went into those documents, to the person-hours that will read them in the future. I also wondered what relationship this conference has to our day to day lives. How does the fact that I was here this week impact on me or anyone else at 4.30 next Monday, or 11.30 next Thursday? I think that's probably my general feeling about conferences; we're so hooked into acting as though our little gathering was of global importance, that we end up not having the impact that we could have had if we'd had a more realistic appraisal of our sphere of influence. The irony is that if we weren't so busy acting as though we can change the world, then we might actually be able to change the world.

I'm currently mulling around lots of thoughts and ideas, so I guess that's what I was doing there, whatever else was supposed to be the official purpose. These are some of the things that I am thinking about... they're not very developed yet, which is why this is on the blog rather than an article on the website. I'll probably turn it into an article at some stage, particularly because I'm about to write a lot of stuff in English, which will exclude many people from reading it, who ought to be given the right to respond. Our plan in the medium term is to have our website available Spanish to make it more accessible to our friends and colleagues here.

1. The introductory session was about violence and disability in the bible. It was a solidly developed overview, I appreciated it very much. We took a wide definition of violence, defining exclusion, making people invisible, not allowing people to speak for themselves, acting as though people didn't exist, as acts of violence. I kept coming back to these points during the conference, especially because I was rather concerned that people with learning disabilities were notable by their absence. Not only were they not there, but they were also rarely mentioned; at one point we were given statistics, divided into people who are blind /deaf / with motor disabilities. I expect that people with learning disabilities weren't barred from coming, but they hadn't been invited, and they weren't there, even in the statistics, and their voices weren't heard. This is the same in the UK, people with learning disabilities find themselves excluded both from the "mainstream" of society, and from the very organisations which claim to be a voice for inclusion. By its own definitions, this conference was committing an act of violence in acting as though a group of people didn't exist. That the conference itself didn't spot this I suspect is related to the stereotype that violence is only really violence if it is committed by white on black, man on woman, or non-disabled on disabled person.

2. In the same session, we made the point that when we say we are working for inclusion in one context, if we are not prepared to admit it in other contexts for fear of what the "rest" might think of us, then we are committing an act of betrayal, which is another example of violence. I was jolted back to this point on the final day, when another of the missionaries present stated that although they agreed we should use gender inclusive language of "people" rather than "men" to talk about pastors, they still used the word "men" in their newsletter "because of the circles that we move in". I'm trying to see both sides of this. It might be a supreme act of irony that their supporters are unknowingly supporting an inclusion that they would not believe in. It might be a pragmatic approach for a greater good, as in Rahab shielding the Israelites (Joshua 2). But in the context of our opening session, it feels quite a lot like a travesty, an act of violence, a betrayal of women everywhere, of women leaders in particular, and especially of the two disabled women pastors who were there at this conference, by rendering them nameless, invisible, pretending that they don't exist.

3. In the middle of what was otherwise a good lecture, the speaker (non-disabled) stated that "the purpose of disabled people is to test the faith and the humanity of the Christian community". If the speaker had been a disabled person, I wonder if they would have posed the question as to why non-disabled people exist, and what answer would they have come up with? Despite all our professions of equality, it seems like the conference still wanted to embrace some hierarchy; the purpose of non-disabled people is to be conformed to the image of God, the purpose of disabled people is to test how far the rest of us are conformed to the image of God.

4. One encouraging moment was a presentation on developments in Cuba. In particular I was struck by a photograph taken at a conference of disabled people in leadership. The thing that struck me most was the number of people in that photograph - a good thirty or forty people, with disabilities, in Christian leadership. If that conference had taken place in the UK it could have been held in a phone-box, with space to spare. In fact it could have shared the same phone box with a parallel conference for women leaders in mission, and still had space left over, but don't get me going on that one. Unfortunately, the situation in Argentina, and I guess most of Latin America, isn't as forward thinking as Cuba. One of the things that I learnt this week is that there really is almost nothing happening here in Cordoba. I thought that I just hadn't yet met the right people, but from what I have found out this week, in this city of a million people, there actually isn't anyone to meet. I am trying to see ways forward, and to experience this as an opportunity rather than a problem, but if I'm honest my first reaction is "here I am Lord; send someone else...."

We had a very positive checkup at the Hospital Privado yesterday. Doctor Campos was pleased with the progress that Martin is making, and doesn't need to see us for another month now. When we reached the "any questions" bit, Martin asked "when can I ride my bike?" the patient doctor clapped his hand to his forehead, and raised his eyes to the heavens. Then he responded, well you shouldn't, but you can. Martin hasn't tried it out yet, but he is eying it, and making plans...

Blaise Pascal, Mathematician in Pensees (1660) "Now, what do we gain by hearing it said of a man that he has now thrown off the yoke, that he does not believe there is a God who watches our actions, that he considers himself the sole master of his conduct, and that he thinks he is accountable for it only to himself.? Does he think that he has thus brought us to have henceforth complete confidence in him and to look to him for consolation, advice, and help in every need of life? Do they profess to have delighted us by telling us that they hold our soul to be only a little wind and smoke, especially by telling us this in a haughty and self-satisfied tone of voice? Is this a thing to say gaily? Is it not, on the contrary, a thing to say sadly, as the saddest thing in the world?"

Luke 17:20 "The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, "Here it is", or "There it is", because the kingdom of God is within you."

The romantic life of a missionary... Today we spent the morning in a queue in the immigrations office, only to be sent to collect some more bits of paper from another office across town, who then sent us to get our original bits of paper translated again because our translations done in England don't count, despite being stamped as legal by the Argentinian consulate in England. This afternoon found me piecing together in chronological order the phone calls and emails which occurred between ourselves and our insurance company prior to Martin's operation. I guess it's all part of the experience. Sometimes it's kind of hard to see how any of this stuff relates to the kingdom of God, certainly feels way removed from the "boldly going" of Hudson Taylor and the others that they taught us about at college.

This weekend I made a monumental discovery. There are huge turtles in the duck-pond in the park. To understand the size of this discovery, you have to picture the scene a little.... This is a city the size of Birmingham. In this city, there is one smallish park shared between all these people. In the smallish park, there is a smallish man-made duck-pond, which also serves as a boating lake. It is filthy, it can be located by smell. And yet on Sunday morning, I saw five or six huge turtles like floating casserole dishes, covered in green slime, sunning themselves just under the surface of the soup-like water. It's hard to believe anything could survive in that environment. I guess a creature hardy enough to weather the last ice age shrugs its shoulders at rusty bicycles and the odd shopping trolley.

Today we were at the Hospital Privado having the dressings and stitches removed.

"Wow they look great", I said, indicating the narrow clean scars across Martin's neck and hip.

"No", said Dr Campos "The point is that you can't actually see them".

Fixing our bed is a bonding experience. Unfortunately the bed itself is lacking certain elements in the way of bonding, but "fixing the bed" has resulted in a succession of people from church making their way to our house. We have got through gallons of juice, coke, coffee, "mate" (indescribable Argentinian herbal infusion), and bucket loads of biscuits all in the name of "fixing the bed".

On Sunday afternoon Josecito, wife Silvia, and two of their kids came round. He started the job, but unfortunately he didn't have any tools. It is possible to do quite a lot with a bit of wire in Argentina, but fixing the bed proved to be beyond the limit. Josecito works three hours out of town in the week, and when he left, he managed to take some of the bolts from the bed with him.

On Wednesday morning, Ana and Chiquito came round with a bag of tools. But they weren't fixing the bed, they were just leaving the tools for someone else to come later. But Josecito had taken the bolts from the bed, and he's not back in town till Saturday. So I had to go and buy some new bolts ready for when Oscar came round to fix the bed.

On Wednesday evening Oscar came round. He drilled some holes, and chiseled out some grooves, and prepared all the pieces. When we tried to put it together, the middle bit, i.e the base, dropped out through the side pieces, limiting its usefulness as a means of suspending the mattress. So we took it all apart again, and left it against the wall so that he could come back tomorrow.

On Thursday evening, Oscar came round again. He drilled some more holes, and put a patch over one of the bits that he'd chiseled out yesterday, and fitted some dowling plugs between some of the pieces. And then it went together. It's a little precarious, he has promised he'll come back and re-inforce a couple of the slats, but we did sleep on it without incident last night.

On Saturday and on Sunday, they do no work at all,
So it was on a Monday morning that the gas-man came to call.

We haven't dared tell anyone that the cold tap in the kitchen has stopped working...

And of course, if we weren't such English plebs, we would just roll our sleeves up and get on with applying a bit of wire like everyone else.

Well that's kind of it really. A snake in our kitchen. Only a little one, more worm than snake sized, but undisputedly a snake. With a little snakey head. Took me by surprise, I didn't even know there were snakes in the city of Cordoba. I mean I suppose I knew technically that there might be, even the UK has snakes, but snakes in the UK don't normally go around disturbing innocent folk at lunch. I tried to put it outside with a dustpan, but it didn't seem to like that idea very much, because it hid in the skirting board. And it's still there as far as I know. I looked it up on the internet, and I don't know what it is really. Probability suggests that it's not harmful, but I'm still hoping it finds its way outside before it does too much growing.

The dog helpfully made herself scarce. And Martin's been asleep most of the day. We were out with some friends at a BBQ last night to celebrate his resurrection from the Hospital Privado, which was good fun at the time, but probably falls into the category of running before walking if we're honest, so today he's been perfecting his ability to remain in a horizontal position.

Monday 9th October... Not only were Dr Campos and his friend obliging enough to come and find us downstairs in the cafe this morning, but we even had our consultation there around the table, holding up our x-rays to the light from the window while we sipped coffee.

They showed us the x-rays which we'd had taken yesterday, they are very impressive, showing the operation site with the bone-graft, and titanium plate. We weren't really sure how it all fitted together, but now we can see the bone graft where his vertibrae used to be, and the titanium plate about 8cms long, running over the top of everything down the front of his neck, held in by three screws like medical mecano (cousin of Frankenstein...)

The medics are very pleased with how it has gone, looking at him as an artist might admire their own work. Apparently this is a bigger version of the operation that they normally carry out as it involved replacing three vertibrae where it would usually only be one. They also said that they have never come across anyone who had the nerve to the larynx on the wrong side before. Someone else has already suggested that this might be Martin's IT wiring.

Martin's walking is much better, a sort of stiff legged waddle. The hip is causing him the most pain where they took the bone graft. Dr Campos said "we'll leave him with a sore hip that as a reminder to look both ways before he crosses the road". Makes us think of Jacob in the book of Genesis (32:25 if you want to look it up.)

And with that, they let us go. We had to go and sign out in admissions, where we were kissed and hugged by the office staff there (only in Argentina... we love it!)

So here we are at home, where the dog was delighted to see Martin. We have to go back to outpatients on Friday to have the stitches removed from the neck and hip, and he will be wearing the neck-brace for the next three or four months while it all solidifies. The next job is to get the bed fixed, we're currently in "mattress on the floor" mode, after our orange-box bed collapsed a few weeks ago. Someone was going to come and fix it over the weekend, but timing is often kind of fluid around here. Mañana.....

"A few years ago, I had a scary encounter with a masked man, wielding a knife. I remember him with gratitude though, since he was an orthopaedic surgeon to whom I paid thousands of dollars to correct some problems with my left foot." Philip Yancey in "Rumours of another world"

Skills and aptitudes can be used in many ways, depending on circumstance, context and opportunity. While we were waiting for Martin to come out of surgery on Thursday, our friend Ana said that a kid from a villa (shanty town) who proves to be good with a knife might be sent out to hold people up at cash-machines, while the same kid if his parents could afford to wait while they learn a trade might become a butcher, and the same kid if the family could afford to see them through years and years of studying might have to opportunity to make it as a surgeon.

Today I arrived at the hospital to find Martin raring to get out and see the world. So we asked the junior doctor if we could go down to the coffee bar, she said "it's probably best if you don't tell anyone". So down we went. His walking is improving, at the moment it's a sort of sideways shuffle, a cross between Quasimodo, and a crab with bunions.

Sometime later, Dr Campos and the posse arrived in Martin's room, and found us missing, so the junior doctor told them where we were, and came to fetch us. We headed up in the lift back to the ward, at the same time as Dr Campos et al were heading down in the other lift to the cafe, c.f. Hoffnung "half way down, I met the barrel coming up..." Unlike Hoffnung's barrel though, we missed each other completely.

When the medics eventually caught up with us, we were surprised to see them dressed in mufti. Apparently they do a brief round of their own in-patients at weekends unless there's an emergency, so they called in to see how the walking etc was going, and then they were off for a game of tennis.

This is a little diary of our experiences over the last couple of days at the Hospital Privado...

Wednesday 4th October

Wednesday afternoon Martin was safely (sanely?) admitted to the Hospital Privado. In the end this was mainly due to good will on the part of the hospital, as the insurance company, a bunch of muppets who shall henceforth be known as "lets go find another insurance provider", were still messing around until lunch-time today.

Priscilla, Dany and I went with him to make sure he didn't escape. He has his own room, 302 on the third floor. There was a little picture of a cherub on the wall. Priscilla said "he's there to protect you", Martin said "he seems a little immature for the task in hand".

A succession of medics came and poked and prodded. This was followed by a visit from Dr Campos, who brought the rest of his team to meet us. Martin was delighted when Dr Campos said he was allowed dinner tonight, and fluids till midnight, poor guy had understood he was going on starvation.


Thursday 5th October

We arrived at the hospital at 0700. Priscilla went to give the outstanding unit of blood, I went up to see Martin. He was waiting to be unattached from his line so that he would go for his shower. They took him down to theatre at about 0815, and told us to come back in about four and a half hours.

We went and drank coffee, walked the dog, drank more coffee, and were back in the waiting area at 1230. Ana arrived at 1300. Nothing happened. We asked at the desk, but they didn't know anything and they can't communicate with the theatre. Time crawled slowly along. We drank more coffee and played guessing games in English about the other people in the waiting room.

Finally, at about 1645 Dr Campos appeared in his theatre greens. "He nearly killed me" he said "But it went really well, and he's just been talking to me in Spanish". "Martin talking spanish?" We said, "That's not an operation, that's a miracle". Dr Campos told us that the operation took seven hours instead of the usual five because they found a nerve running somewhere where the anatomy books don't, so they had to do the whole operation around it and under it without touching it, like one of those kids' games. Martin's never been one for following the rule book...

Despite the difficulties Dr Campos and the team seemed pleased with themselves. Martin was also rather euphoric, combination of the drugs and the sheer relief of finding all his bodily parts intact. They had orginally warned us that he might need some time in intensive care, but in the event, he went back to his room on the normal ward with his various tubes and drains attached, and by the evening he was eating jelly! He has some attractive bruising around his head and nose, where they'd clamped him into place, and his hip is sore where they took the bone graft, but so far at least the neck is not hurting him at all.


Friday 6th October

Today we're both pretty tired, but things have gone really well. All the positive aspects of Martin's natural stubborn-gittery have come into their own. This morning they sat him up, and took out most of his drains and attachments, so he's just left with one line into his arm now, and he's eating fine. Dr Campos and the guys came to see him this afternoon, they are definitely in self-congratulatory mode very pleased with how it's gone and how he is doing. They stood him up and tried out some walking, and depending on how things go over the weekend, they're hoping to be sending him out early next week. Priscilla and Dany came in this afternoon, and we have received so many emails and phone calls from family and friends on both sides of the pond, we feel very cared for indeed.

Hospital Rawson is one of the last places on earth that I would want to end my days. It is the public institution for long-term and terminal conditions here in the city of Cordoba. Hospice care has not yet taken off in Argentina, so many people with cancer, AIDS or cardio-pulmonery disease will spend their last few months in a hospital ward, even after treatment has been stopped. The government health system is strapped for cash, they spend as little as possible on "hopeless" cases, so in the Hospital Rawson it is normal not to be able to find a working wheelchair, or blankets and pillows.

Just across the road in the children's hospital, churches and secular charities fall over each other to stock the playroom and put on shows for the kids, but at the Hospital Rawson volunteers are a rare commodity. Our church has had a programme of hospital visiting for a couple of years, which has not been particularly well supported, but Patricia and I have been going together to the Rawson once a week. Recently we had a campaign to encourage more church members to join the "team", and it was thus that five of us met in the doorway of the hospital last Thursday.

As we were sitting on a bench giving our new members a brief introduction to the hospital, an elderly nun approached and asked what we were doing. When we told her, she said "my dream has been realised" and the tears poured down. What was her dream? This amazing lady has been walking these corridors on her own for more than twenty years, sitting with patients as they die, praying with people, befriending the families, helping to find basic resources like clothes and toiletries. She even used to live here, until she lost her sight and moved out to a convent, but she still walks these corridors. Her dream and her prayer is that there might be a team to take over her work when she has gone. I don't think we could even begin to match her single-handed perseverance of the last two decades, but may God send workers and make us faithful to the tasks he has prepared for us.

In the wee small hours of the other night I found myself musing on cancelled operations, Argentinian titanium plate companies, and English insurance companies. It was thus with an ironic smile and a sense of national pride that this little thought came into my mind:

Argentinians might be experts at creating chaos, arriving late, leaving stuff till the last minute, and general disorganisation, but if you want a proper Muppet Show to screw things up completely beyond all possible redemption then you still need to BRING ON THE ENGLISH!

When Ruben, our pastor here, started apologising for the disorganisation on the Argentinian side, I shared this with him. He said "my idol is falling". "Let it fall" said Martin.

The Tale of the Titanium plate, part 2. I walked into town this afternoon to finalise the purchase of the titanium plate. When I produced our insurance certificate, the secretary (different secretary to this morning, but obviously trained in the same place..) said "Oh, I understood you were paying in cash". We're talking about a thousand English pounds here, which is five thousand Argentinian pesos.
So I said "no, our insurance company are going to do a transfer directly into your account".
And she said "But we don't have a contract with this insurance company so I can't allow you to do that". So I said "If you don't want to accept our business, I have another quote from another company that I can go with"
Then I left her with my mobile phone number and she said she'd get back to me. And I said you have one hour or I'm phoning the other guys. And then I left.
When I had got about three blocks up the road, my mobile phone rang. And she said "If you just come back a minute I'll give you our account details". So hopefully now we really might have a titanium plate, but only if the insurance company manage to get themselves together to make the payment on Monday. Watch this space...

The tale of the Titanium plate. I got on my bike and went round the city and collected three quotes for titanium plates. Or rather two quotes, as one of companies has their stock held up in customs in Buenos Aires and aren't sure when it will ever be released. Customs in Buenos Aires is a whole other topic of conversation. Anyway, waving my quotes triumphantly, I continued on my bike to the Hospital Privado to ask the doctor which one we should go ahead with. At the door my way was barred by the secretary, so I explained what I wanted. To which she said "But the doctor doesn't choose, you have to decide". At this, I wondered aloud whether I should base my choice on tossing a coin, or on this seasons colours... "hmm" she said "the doctor's not here right now, but maybe his colleague can help you". Luckily the colleague decided that the thing to do was in fact to phone the doctor. And now we have a titanium plate. Or rather we will do when I go back into town to complete the paperwork this afternoon.

The spring rain started with a bang yesterday. Or rather with lots of loud bangs and flashes of lightening. After being dry for the last four months the predominant atmospheric ingredient has become brown dust, so the coming of the rains is very welcome. Rain here isn't half hearted, you have about three seconds to get under cover before being completely soaked to the skin. Our road floods to about a foot deep in half an hour, and bags of rubbish can be seen floating merrily down. Luckily we have a slope up to our front door and it hasn't yet reached futher than half way up! And because Cordoba is in a bowl, the storm is all around us, making the forked lightening all the more spectacular.

Here's something I was formulating earlier... I was just reading something in Spanish by a Rabbi here, Sergio Bergman, on the inclusion of disabled people in communities. He presents inclusion as an issue of "Shalom", my poor translation would go something like this... When something touches us personally then we have to respond to it in order to be at peace; but if it is something that we either don't perceive, or perceive to be a long way away, then we don't experience there being a relationship between this issue and my peace - I don't need to resolve this in order to be at peace. Therefore in order to create an inclusive community, we need to find ways of disturbing the peace not of those who are already activists, but of people who don't have the issues on their radar. He says "the theme of inclusion (of disabled people) will be resolved by those who don't yet have it on their agenda".

If we haven't managed to put a "respond" button on the blog by the time you're reading this, please send us an email and I'll make sure your response is put up. Cheers.

Hey look I can make this blog thing work. The next plan is to add a couple of buttons so that people can respond or ask questions or whatever. But we haven't done that yet, so if you've got anything to say, for now you'll have to email it to us, addresses on the front page. Speaking of front pages, we're also working on that, it's functional but not attractive yet, I think... bit like a dentists waiting room, does the job but hardly feels like home. Ideas and suggestions....?

Here's a little conversation I had with a 13 year old a while ago which I've been dying for an opportunity to share...

13: Your husband doesn't speak much Spanish does he?
Me: No, he's just learning
13: How do you speak to each other at home if he can't speak Spanish?
Me: Well if there's only the two of us we speak to each other in English
13: Why?
Me: Because that's our language and it's the one that we both speak best
13: Yes but what do you talk about if you can only speak English....???

Have a good day!

Welcome to our new blog feature! This is for ideas, quotes, stories, controversial theological opinions, rants, issues that we're thinking about, and generally things which we'd like to share with the world but probably wouldn't make it onto anything as formal as a newsletter or a developed webpage. We're also hoping that this might be an interactive feature, with opportunities for other people to ask questions, and express opinions. We hope you enjoy it. Have a good weekend!