Readin’ Ritin’ an’ Rithmatic

Santiagome!the girlsGabriel
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

Martin and GiulianoHappy 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.

Sisters are doing it for themselves

Córdoba Cathedral San MartínSign on Córdoba Cathedral San MartínThe 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?

Empire building


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…

A Christmas Message

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!

W is for….

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!

Early one morning

Cami in water with duckCami in WaterThe 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.

The Moth

mothI 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.

Divine intervention, Satanic attack, or stuff just happens?

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.