Martin & Hazel Frost

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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”.” 

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.