Martin & Hazel Frost

Way back in the mists of 2012 I was stuck behind a slow lorry on a trunk road, so I pulled slightly across my lane in order to see what was happening in front of it, and then I pulled back in again. 

Two minutes later I was pulled over by the police and accused of illegal overtaking.  I said that I didn’t overtake, I wasn’t accelerating, I wasn’t indicating, and indeed if further proof were required, I was still behind the lorry!  The police officer said “Ah, but you were thinking of overtaking”, and he gave me the ticket.  So I went to the driver and vehicle office and appealed the ticket on the grounds that I wasn’t overtaking and that as far as I was aware, thinking is not yet illegal in Argentina. 

That was 2012 and I never heard anything of it again.  Until a few days ago when I got a phone call to say that I owed lot of money from an unpaid fine and that if this money wasn’t paid by two days before the phone call then I was going to be taken to court.  So I asked for more details of the supposed fine, and suggested that it also might have been more useful to have phone me before rather than after the cut-off date.  And she said she didn’t know any more (reading off the script in front of her) and that I should go to Rentas (provincial government office). 

The next day I went to Rentas.  Rentas is a typical government establishment, housing a bewildering selection of bureaucratic services.  I took a number and waited for a couple of hours until my turn came up.  The lady at Rentas confirmed that the fine was indeed related to the 2012 incident, which would suggest that my appeal had been refused, but unfortunately she didn’t have any further details, and for those I would have to go to Godoy, which is the driver and vehicle office where I had made my 2012 appeal on the other side of town.  Since government services only work in the mornings, and since I had already spent the morning at Rentas, I had to wait till the next day for Godoy to open. 

The next day I went to Godoy, which is similar to Rentas in that I took a number and sat and waited.  The man in Godoy informed me that my 2012 appeal had been refused.  So now we know that thinking has been banned in Argentina.  He had no idea why my appeal had been refused since there was no written explanation, just the word “negated”.  There was a pleasing coherence about the whole thing; in order to confirm that thinking has been banned, the judge would also need to be consistent in the way that they made their decision; such as might have been produced by a random action such as tossing a coin.  So with that cheerful thought, when the man asked if I wanted to offer a new appeal but I decided that I was happy to understand that thinking is now illegal in Argentina.  And I had already wasted enough time on this. 

Fortunately the fine was by now so old that the Province of Cordoba are offering a hefty discount to encourage people to pay old debts, so they took off all the interests and charges, and left me with the same number as the original fine, now worth significantly less owing to three years of 40% inflation.  Which if you ever wanted a way of encouraging people not to pay their fines for years on end… but we’d better not explore that too deeply since thinking is now banned. 

The man in Godoy told me that I could pay the fine by card at Rentas.  So the next day I went back to Rentas, took a number blah blah blah.  At lunch time when my turn came up, the lady said, you can only pay by card.  And I said that’s what I intend to do.  And she said, but the system is down, so you’ll need to come back. 

So the next day I went back to Rentas, etc etc.  And the lady said, ah but your fine has had the Provincial discount applied to it, so we can’t deal with that here, you’ll need to go to the Banco de Cordoba, provincial bank.  And they’ll be shut by now, so you’ll need to go there tomorrow, but the bill that you have here has a cut-off date of today, so you’ll need to come here early tomorrow, in order that we can print you a new bill with a new date and be in time to get to the bank before it closes. 

So the next day I went to Rentas, and then the bank, and now we all know that thinking has been banned. 

The academic year started last Monday.  True to form, schools closed again on Tuesday.  Usually that’s for the teachers’ strikes which are scheduled for the start of most academic years.  This year it was because it was raining.  They decided that they were going to shut for the whole of the rest of the week owing to rain.  Except that on Wednesday it wasn’t raining, and on Thursday they opened again, possibly owing to the complaints from many parents who hadn’t yet heard that thinking has been banned, or were possibly just looking forward to their kids being somewhere else after the long summer.  So hopefully this week we might even manage five days of classes. 

Here are a bunch of photos from our latest trip to Miramar last week.  We lost the first day, owing to flooding which made it impossible to get out of San Francisco, and in any case we found out later that both of the routes into Miramar were also blocked with water.  It was still pretty grey when we eventually decided to go for it, so we threw the camping stuff into the car, with every intention of finding ourselves a cabin or a chalet or anything more substantial than a tent.  What we hadn’t realised was that Joni had set his heart on sleeping in his tent.  So we camped.  Luckily the weather took pity on us, and although we didn’t see the sun for three days, it didn’t quite rain either. 

            

The owls were amazing, and unusually this one even sat still and looked quizzically at me as I pointed my camera at it…

Straited heron, more camera-shy than the owls, but still managed a couple of shots…

The pink dots towards the back of this one are spoonbills, a first for me…

Collectively described as a Mexican wave of Plovers?

Now here we are back in the city and today is the first day of a different kind of exodus; the great return to school after three months of summer.  I took the first candidate to school at 7.30, the next to a different school at 08.00 and the third to the pre-school department at 10.00.  The good news is that even the two who thought they would rather not have gone, came home in positive frames of mind having had a good day, so hopefully they might feel a bit more encouraged to get out of bed tomorrow.  When the dust settles, starting times will be at 07.30, 08.00 and 09.00 respectively, but the earlier two will take themselves on bicycles, so eventually I might even be able to do something more useful with myself than tromboning around town. 

“It’s that time of year, when Spring is in the air… “  (Spitting Image song, and it’s funny how March still feels like spring to me despite having lived in the southern hemisphere for the last decade), when we have to think about filing in the dreaded annual review form and trying to define goals and strategies for the year ahead.  I instinctively react against writing strategies.  Then I ask, why would having a plan be a bad plan?  Especially if the alternative is no plan.  And then I realise that my problem isn’t with having a strategy, but that I want to distance myself from ideas that I have perceived from (let’s set up a straw man situation here and call it) “a  certain strand of commuter belt churches” around what it means to be strategic in mission. 

In my church of straw men, there are two main models of mission strategy.  The first is sometimes referred to as “mission mobilization”, and it involves gathering lots of Christians together to talk about mission.  This model appears to measure its success according to air-miles travelled, countries visited, and number of Christians attending each conference.   I confess I find this model quite difficult to take seriously, so I expect I must be missing something because lots of people seem to have bought into it.  My key question would be how much mission actually happens as a direct result of such events?  This is probably the mission equivalent of the question about how many of the people who went forward at the old Billy Graham rallies were still in churches five years later?  Ah yes, but wouldn’t it all have been worth it just for one?  How about the parable of the shepherd?  True, except that the shepherd had only lost one sheep, and he dedicated all his energy to finding the sheep, not to putting on a show for those which weren’t lost.  In a situation with lots and lots of missing sheep, might not a few more be rescued by putting scarce resources to less self indulgent and more imaginative use?

The second model is more compelling in that it does include doing some mission.  This model is often couched in language of “being strategic”, particularly referring to targeting “key” or “strategic” others.  It frequently involves variations on a theme of sending people from location A, to identify “key” people in location B, to train them to go and “do” mission in location C.  As models go it has practical merit.  We start to see developing ideas of sustainability, ability to be replicated, and particularly how it might be useful where people from location B are more welcome in location C than those from location A – Latin Americans versus Europeans going into north Africa for example.  

However, if we start at the top, because the top is also where the model starts; control is seated within location A.  Money comes from location A, and the people sent from location A recognise the “key” people of location B according to an image of that which is valued in location A; usually qualified, connected, articulate, educated people who are already doing well in both secular and religious contexts.  These “key” people are then given access to training and funding in order to replicate themselves in “mission”. 

In this model the teaching and modelling contradict each other.  The teaching says “Jesus went to the people on the margins”, “Jesus sought out the people who society forgot”, “Go and do thou likewise”.  But the location A people doing the teaching are usually themselves establishment types who have sought out establishment candidates from location B.  So, when location B people finally make it to location C, which will they apply; the teaching or the practice?  Will they roll up their sleeves and get grimy, or will they make friends with a bunch of people like themselves and tell them to go look out for the poor? 

This second model reminds me a lot of the economic policy embraced by the UK national government back in the 1980’s.  Known as “trickle down”, the idea was that providing tax cuts to the richest was somehow going to put money into the hands of the neediest.  Admitting the failure of this policy was one of Margaret Thatcher’s biggest climb downs.  So it is something of a wonder some thirty years later that mission strategists still manage to act as though targeting the well connected would be the best route to put the gospel into the domain of those on the margins.  I suspect that the main reasons for the continued popularity of this model could be quick results and good photos, both of which are helpful for ensuring continued funding – power resides in location A remember.  It is quicker and more photogenic to design a trajectory into ministry for someone already well connected then for someone with whom our early goals might include finding them sober and persuading them not to drop fag-ends on the lawn. 

And those two models are I suspect the reasons why many (most?) mission organisations are essentially monocultures, even including those organisations whose members come from different passport issuing states.  And also why so much of what is referred to as “mission” in our current local context turns out to be little other than pastors replicating caricatures of Christian tourism and serial conference attendance which they have seen modelled (it’s Tuesday, must be Holland). 

So, having anathematised a straw man in nine hundred words, it would be fair challenge to ask if I have any alternative with which to replace him.  And, as it happens, I do.  But it is a work in progress, so if I can ask you to bear with me.  The model of mission that I am currently thinking about is Hosea and Gomer.  Yes, and?  Er, that’s it; Hosea and Gomer, a model for mission strategy. 

OK, still bearing with me, how are we going to unpack this? And where are we going from here?  Here is my raw thinking. 

Hosea was the guy in the Old Testament minor prophets who God told to take an unfaithful woman (possibly a prostitute) as his wife, and then to take her back again when she was unfaithful. 

First of all, I am probably not suggesting that folk should marry a prostitute in order to operate in mission.  This story works for me on several different levels.  In the first instance it was initiated by God.  God told Hosea.  If I am starting to plan the year with “my goals” then I am in danger of forgetting that mission is God’s mission and he will do what he will do.  Of course that gives us a whole bunch of other issues (in addition to the one about what sort of God asks someone to take a prostitute for a wife), like how do I know what God wants from me, especially when he doesn’t often reveal his plans, and particularly not a whole year in advance because I’m trying to fill in my annual review form. 

Then it works as act of inclusion towards Gomer.  Despite her promiscuity Hosea takes her as his wife, and then takes her back as his wife. 

Then it works as a challenge to those around who already considered themselves to be God’s people.  In the book of Hosea this challenge is made particularly explicit by God’s spoken prophecy against Israel being given in parallel with the acted story. 

Then it works to demonstrate something of God and his character to the wider watching world; God is sovereign and his will will be done. 

And finally it reveals something of God to Hosea himself, both as protagonist of the story and recipient of God’s speech-action.

So we have a multi-layered model; God initiates, an act of inclusion and growing for the direct recipients of the action, which serves as a challenge to the church, and demonstrates God’s character to the wider world.  Jesus himself also demonstrated these same layers in many contexts, most of all in the healing miracles, but also in other acts of inclusion like the Samaritan woman at the well, and he also made the same model explicit in his teaching, particularly in the parables. 

And if so, so what?  Well I think we have ourselves the beginnings of a model of mission something close to what Lesslie Newbiggin would have referred to as “acted parables for the kingdom” (don’t ask me for a reference he wrote a lot of books!). 

And therefore?  I wouldn’t want to be so arrogant as to suggest that we are very often close the centre of God’s will, but I do believe that quite a lot of the things that have happened over our last few years here have been about God’s acted parables which He has put across our way, and which we could never in a million years have imagined in advance.  Take an ex-prisoner into your home, along with his insanely jealous wife, and demonstrate what it means to shop, cook, clean and provide for someone who hates your guts for no better reason than that you also have two X chromosomes.  That was a few years ago, and despite it all, we are all good friends, and the prison authorities are also quoted as saying that the main reason for ex-prisoner’s continued success is nothing to do with any rehabilitation that happened in the prison, but that he “found religion” (sic.).  This year we are finding out about parenting a Teen who has no functional memory of what it means to live in a house.  Steps of progress so far have included details such as remembering to shut the fridge after you, and it is probably going to be a long time before we can safely leave any valuables around.  Now define any of that in four numerically measurable “Smart” goals on a piece of paper with a year’s notice… especially given that a year ago we had only recently met Teen and certainly had no plans to foster her!   

Now back to that review form.  How might I define my goals for 2015 in approximately two centimetres of white page?  “Be prepared for whatever bonkers schemes God might put in our path this year”?  And even though at the end of the year we almost definitely won’t be able to say “can we count it?” we are still hoping that some good people like you will want to come along and share the adventure anyway. 

I opened the bedroom door and Danny scuttled in in front of me.  At that exact moment I noticed the scorpion scuttling across the bedroom towards Danny’s bare feet.  I squeaked an expletive.  They both ignored me and continued along their converging trajectories.  At the point of intersection Danny’s foot came down, and you couldn’t have inserted a fag paper between little boy and toxic beast.  But they didn’t touch. 

This is the moment where you realise the fallacy of statistics.  Yes, it is true that alacran (our local scorpion species) stings are rarely fatal.  But if you’re the one it happened to, then as far as you’re concerned it happened to you one hundred per cent.  This time whether by fate or divine intervention, providence was a hundred per cent on our side, and once my heart started beating again, we all lived to tell the tale.  Apart from the scorpion which was dispatched with a swift biff with a training shoe.  An Englishman’s home is his castle after all and having venomous creatures roaming around it is just not cricket, old chap. 

                            

Too tired to think of a witty title, but here are a bunch of photos from our annual summer camp, a week in the hills with no internet, and this year even no phone signal – bliss!  There are some more photos on Facebook if we’re “friends”.   It was a good week, we did the usual array of activities, games, hikes, swimming in the river, climbing up things, throwing kids off rocks, getting up at five in the morning to watch the sun rise and cook breakfast at the top of a hill.  It was a lot of fun, and no-one came home with anything worse than a few scrapes and bruises despite the fact that we would probably be lynched by health and safety in some areas of the world. 

Actually we are quite lucky we did get home at all, and nothing to do with health and safety.  We took a public bus three hours to Cordoba, where we were met by a private bus company in order to finish the trip to the camp-site, being in a remote location not served by mass transport.  We paid the private bus driver for the round trip, and agreed a time for his return a week later.  He didn’t come.  And he didn’t come, and then he didn’t come some more.  So we started phoning the bus company.  To cut a very long story short, it eventually turned out that the bus company didn’t know that we had paid the driver, and he had disappeared with the money.  Fortunately, they assumed responsibility for the situation, came out to collect us, and booked us new tickets on a later bus home from Cordoba.  These things happen. 

It strikes me to have been a fairly stupid move on the rogue driver’s part since the amount of money was probably slightly less than his month’s salary, and of course now he doesn’t have a job.  On the other hand, it won’t affect his references, since mostly employers just check the legal record and he still won’t have one.  In the UK people are blessed with a working small claims court system.  Here everything chugs through the bottle necked justice system, and even a small amount of money will still take two years to reach a resolution and probably cost ten to twenty times the amount of money you wanted to claim in the first place.  So of course nobody bothers and here we have yet another reason why fraud and corruption flourish. 

Meanwhile it’s raining, the car’s in the workshop, I need to replace my mobile phone which died on camp (attention seeking because we didn’t have any signal?) I’m tired, and a bunch of Latter Day Saints are coming round to do comparative religions at four-thirty.  Luckily that’s more Martin’s area than mine so hopefully I can entertain the kids and stay out of the way. 

We (me and the three kids) are off to Scout camp in approximately five hours time.  The site is in Yacanto de Calamuchita, about six hours away, in a valley surrounded by mountains and we will have 700 hectares of virgin scrub land all to ourselves.  We don’t expect to have internet access, probably not even phone signal,, being in a valley.  If you’re a praying type, please do pray for fun and safety for everyone.  I am in charge of the group, we will be 31 in total.  We’re back next Saturday night. 

Danny the other day made himself a birthday cake out of mud.  He stuck two little sticks on it as candles.  Then he sung happy birthday to himself.  Then he ate it (yes really).  Then he threw up.  I’m wondering what they’re going to make of him when he starts in the official pre-school system in March. 

Here are a couple of photos I took on summer scheme this week.  Working as a one-to-one support worker clearly doesn’t pay anything like teaching (in fact at the moment it doesn’t pay at all but that’s another story), but I think it’s the first time ever I have had the luxury of concentrating for a sustained period of time on one kid and thinking about what it means to work on meeting his needs, and therefore I am even more convinced than ever of the value of supporting disabled kids in mainstream settings if it is done well (and of course it is that “if” that causes so much controversy)

He loved that game with the floats, in fact he went back about five times for more! 

The electricity went out for seven hours, and it rained all afternoon.  The kids had a lot of fun enjoying the Venice effect on the roads around our house:-

Joni discovered that his puffy jacket makes a great buoyancy aid, and he enjoyed the whole craziness of floating down the road. 

What sort of irresponsible parent would allow these poor kids to play out in the road? 

“We made our own fun in them days…”

The police arrived at the door late last night, which was a bit of a shock to the system, unused as we are to parenting teens.  Now I know how our mum used to feel “what have those kids been doing now?!” 

The policewoman wasn’t sure she’d come to the right place; “are you responsible for a minor, (name)?”  looking like she fully expected us to say she’d come to the wrong house.  But we admitted that Teen is indeed in our care.  Nothing to worry about, but she’s been knocked off her bike and needs collecting from the hospital. 

I went off to the hospital, found her largely undamaged and in the custody of two police officers.  I had to sign their paperwork in order to secure her release.  The police officer said “she told me you were English and I didn’t believe her”.  Teen’s mistake had been to volunteer the information that she normally lives in the teen hostel.  Police had then assumed that she had run away, and therefore anything she said after that was going to be taken as a lie, particularly some ridiculous yarn about living with an English family.  Everyone knows there’s no English in San Francisco…. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. 

Having secured her release, we drove around and tried to find the bike.  Failed on same, she wasn’t entirely sure exactly where she’d been knocked off.  So we went to nearby friend’s house.  He said bike was in the custody of the police.  San Francisco is really two towns joined together, San Francisco and Frontera.  San Francisco is in Cordoba province, Frontera is in Santa Fe province.  None of the institutions communicate with each other across provincial borders, and the accident had been on the road dividing the two provinces.  So San Francisco police looked after her at the hospital, but Frontera police took the bike back to their station.   Another trip round the city, a bit more paperwork to release the (also undamaged) bicycle and we were all home by one in the morning.  We were greeted at our front door by the director of the teen hostel.  She had been contacted by the police as part of their process of not believing the story of the fictitious English.   Satisfied that “the English” were still as real as when she last saw us, and that Teen was intact and in our care, she went away again.  And we all went to bed.  

In “Vanishing Grace”, Phillip Yancey describes a survey in which a bunch of United States citizens were asked what would be the phrase they would most like to hear.  The most popular result?  I love you.  Second most popular?  I forgive you.  Third?  Supper’s ready.   I think that’s brilliant – “I love you, I forgive you, supper’s ready”; the gospel in a nutshell.  This makes me wonder, if so many people are yearning for the gospel, why do so few respond to it?  But, the Christmas story is still fresh from last week, when an entire nation was longing for a saviour, but when it came down to it, the only people who actually recognised his birth were a bunch of itinerant animal herders and a couple of pagan astrologists.  Israel didn’t recognise the gospel as the good news that they thought they were looking for. 

In casual conversation last week, one of my Scout leader colleagues mentioned “you really made an impression on (visiting Scout leader).  She asked me who you were and what you’re doing here (never manage to lose that pesky foreign accent), and when I told her how ridiculous it is that you have degrees from famous international universities but you still can’t work in Argentina she was amazed that you’re even still here, and she loved watching you work with the Scouts and she was impacted by your commitment and your humility”.  So I discover that people around me can be impacted by the very reality that I am not using my skills.  And I also discover that I don’t want to be known for my humility, thank you very much.  Sulk. 

Danny meanwhile is making his own discoveries on a more existential level.  “Mummy, I’m not a cake, I’m Danny”.  I have no idea from whom or how he could have got the idea that anyone thought he was a cake, but I was happy to endorse his conclusions. 

26th of December in the Frost household. The main Christmas celebration happens on the night of the 24th.  Argentineans do their presents at about five past midnight.  We as a hybridised family join in the food, frolicking and fireworks as good Argentineans on the 24th, and then as good Brits we put out our stockings before we go to bed, and do presents on the morning of the 25th.  So the 25th for us is a bit like any other bank holiday, but with new toys. 

Danny recovering from a hard day’s play. 

Joni in pyjamas got straight back to where he left off running his new train set (second hand from ebay and carted on and off planes trains and automobiles in order to get it across from England). 

The Christmas tree in the middle of the track is after we fell in love with this cool video…

That was first thing this morning. Ten hours later, Joni has managed to put his clothes on and is still playing trains, while Danny managed to get out of his pyjamas and is now stark naked watching television on the computer.  The teen flits in and out with her friends, she is very happy with her new mobile phone (second hand from a local Facebook buying and selling group), although I am conscious that we have an outstanding  tough conversation awaiting the right moment.  Meanwhile, I am reading “Vanishing Grace”, the latest offering  by Philip Yancy, following up “What’s so amazing about Grace?” and wondering what it might mean to conduct such a conversation in a way that embodies both grace and truth.  “The supreme religious challenge is to see God’s image in one who is not in our image…”