Update from Argentina July 2007

July 21, 2007

Hello,

It has been a long time since we sent out an update. We keep busy with our daily activities and the time passes so quickly. So much and so little has happened since May depending on how you look at things. The pace here is very different than in the U.S, so according to U.S. standards it would appear that we haven't accomplished much, but by Argentine standards – we've done a lot!

We did finally get to Posadas, the capital city of Misiones, and get all the papers we needed to file for our residency. It took just two more trips there since the last update to get it all completed. We filed our paperwork at the Gendermedia (military headquarters where the immigration office is located in Obera), and received temporary residency until December 23, 2007. We should get permanent residency when we obtain our FBI background checks from the U.S. and submit them to the Argentinean Government for approval.

As far as the building goes out on the farm, we are still waiting for the builder to get back out there and put the roof on the barn and then Dane will purchase the wood and start building the second storey floor and the walls. Rain, wind, and other projects have delayed the builder from getting back out there, but we expect them to be back out there next week. Dane purchased some gravel and sand to make a concrete floor in the barn/house, but the dump truck got stuck on the road trying to deliver it, so Dane had the driver dump the gravel on the neighbor's property. When Dane tried to move a trailer load of the gravel the next day, the trailer got stuck (just so you know Dane will not admit to being stuck – he says that if he were stuck, he would not have gotten out). It took Dane nearly a whole day to get the trailer out, but with a winch and a tree and his perseverance (he kneeled in the mud for hours and inched the trailer out) he finally freed the trailer. Then we had rain for a week. The sand was delivered this past week and put on one of the other neighbor's properties. Dane will have to spend some time taking small loads of both the gravel and the sand down to our property when he his able to get back out there. Because of these difficulties, we have decided to build the barn/house out of wood instead of brick.

Dane found another spring on our property one day when he was cutting down monte. It is about 30 meters from where we are building the barn, so it will be great for watering the animals when we get them. The water comes out of the rocks in two different places and flows down into two pools. The overflow flows downhill to the other stream with the waterfall that feeds into the river Bonito. We are going to incorporate the building of the animal pens around this spring, so that the animals will have access to it, but will not be able to contaminate it.

Dane got his generator system built for our electricity on the property. He bought a 13hp gas engine and a local auto parts store donated a 24V bus alternator. He bought a pulley, some belts and two huge 400amp deep cycle 12V batteries. He built a frame for all these things and a local electric motor shop wired it all together. It runs pretty quietly and he looks forward to testing its capabilities as soon as he gets the inverter that he has ordered. If the system works as planned, we will move out to the farm barn or no barn. We are so ready to get out there.

Dane did get the water pump for the 4Runner. A man from an auto parts store here sent Dane's water pump by bus to Buenos Aires and they matched it and sent it back by bus. The whole process took about a week and a half, so we weren't without a vehicle for long. The windshield was also loose on one side and the vibrations made it crack down the middle, so Dane took the windshield out the other day and then reinstalled it with new sealant. He did a great job and now he knows how to install windshields. He said it really wasn't that complicated a process.

We got a wood burning stove for cooking and heating the house and water. We are all really enjoying it. The winter here has been unusually cool, so we have a fire going in the stove most of the day. It keeps the house warm and I can keep a pot of hot water for washing or for using as drinking water going all the time. We have been able to eliminate a lot of the paper trash that we have as well, since we use it for kindling.

Dane hired Noelia (the woman from the real estate company who has given us some Castillano lessons) to go around and get prices for building materials and other things that we need on the farm. The language barrier and the Yankee factor (sad note to all you Texans: in Argentina and probably most of South America – YOU and all North Americans are Yankees, pronounced jankee) was making shopping for materials difficult. Here they think that all North Americans have lots of money, and probably rightly so. Seeing the poor people here and the way they live makes even homeless people in the U.S. appear rich, considering all the programs available to help them. Anyway, Noelia has gotten lots of information for us which has helped tremendously and will, Lord willing, get us out on the land sooner.

Dane has been very busy with work from Brown – McKee and the children and I have been busy with schoolwork and housework. After six years of struggling to get done we have settled into a great homeschooling schedule. The children begin their work in the morning and are done by lunch every day. All it took was time restraints for each subject and our concentration problems seem to be solved. We now have the entire afternoon everyday for cleaning, running errands, or studying Castillano.

We continue to learn and to be humbled by our experiences here. We have visited our neighbors, the Sosas, on the farm above ours a couple times. They are simple people that would appear poor to most, but I don't believe they are. Mr. and Mrs. Sosa have twelve children, but only five are still living at home. They live in a small wooden house with a dirt floor and no electricity. For light at night, they run a line to their truck battery to power one light bulb in the middle of their house. When we were there one evening they served us cookies and bread with lunch meat. Mr. Sosa and one of his daughters sang hymns while his son, Javier, played the guitar and his other son, Andres, played the accordion. It was really nice and it made Dane and I realize that things are just things. With this house planning business, we say we want this and we want that, but in the big scheme of things, all is vanity.

The funny thing about not knowing a language very well is that a lot of words are difficult to distinguish between and if you mispronounce a word, you may in fact be saying a word that means something totally different. For instance, mimo (pronounced mēmō) means "mime", but mismo (mēsmō) means "the same". Other words that have been difficult are: hambre – hunger, hombre – man, and hombro – shoulder. We continue to make all kinds of funny mistakes. We are always laughing at ourselves.

Well that is all I can think to tell at the moment. We hope each and every one of you is doing well, and we love to hear from you. Here are some miscellaneous pictures that you may enjoy.