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.