Mission Memory: Rincón

The first area I served in was the quaint little pueblito of San Jose del Rincón (map), province of Santa Fe, Argentina. I was only there for three months and my memories of the place are a bit of a blur generally. I felt like my brain was on overload as I adjusted to the culture and struggled to learn the language. I never really learned my way around the town as I traipsed behind my senior companions who walked so briskly through the sandy streets that my shin-splinted legs could not keep up.

Some of the more wealthy people from the city of Santa Fe have nice vacation homes in Rincón, but most of Rincón was populated by the poor, many of whom lived off the land and the river. The house we lived in near the cemetery was not much more accommodating than a tent and was made of cinder blocks and plaster. It had a corrugated metal roof and a suspended ceiling made of thin styrofoam. We had no windows, but rather metal shutters on the openings where windows should be, securly latched together with a piece of wire. (You can fix anything in Argentina with wire.) Part of the house had a rough concrete floor, but the rest was dirt floor.

We had a refrigerator that didn’t work, but we kept our food in it anyway. We also had a bomba electrica (electric pump) that sent water from our well up to a large storage tank above the house which allowed gravity to feed the water to the sink, shower, and toilet. The toilet was typical, but the waste went to an underground pit in the yard known as a “pozo negro” (black-hole) that frequently backed-up through the shower drain.

The shower water was heated in a “calefón”; a five-gallon metal bucket with a heating element in it much like the heating element on an electric stove. It had a plastic spout and valve on it, so you had about a five minute shower if you turned the water off to soap up.

The one charming aspect of the little house that I remember with delight was the grape vine trellis over the front patio…but even that collapsed in a terrible lightning and thunder storm that had me believing it was the “end of days”.

I remember writing home every week about our latest adventures with Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom inside of our little “pench” (Americanized version of “pensión” meaning apartment). Perhaps it was more along the lines of the plagues of Egypt than the Wild Kingdom really. We had rats running along the ceiling beams and pooping down on us from above at night. We had spiders with round quarter-sized bodies, but legs that extended out so far that its entirety was larger than my hand. We once even had a scorpion in our bathroom. The mosquitoes tormented us day and night with their ear-buzzing and blood sucking. It was so hot and humid that we’d lie in our underwear with a thin sheet over us to keep the mosquitoes off of us, but they’d still get us through the sheet.

Speaking of bedding…I didn’t know I was supposed to bring my own bedding, so for a few weeks I had to improvise by using a dusty old curtain to cover me while I lay on the sticky bare foam used as a mattress. I ordered a fitted-mattress sheet and a sheet from Hermana (Sister) Delia Diaz, a nice church member lady who lived in the neighboring town of La Guardia. She was the local Avon lady so she ordered the sheets out of her Avon catalog. They were supposed to be white sheets, but when the order arrived they were pink with an awful flower print. I used those pink flowery sheets my whole mission, much to the amusement and possible concern of my compañeros.

We had an infestation of carpenter ants for a couple of days. We discovered them nesting in the ceiling. I removed one of the foam panels and poked my head up into the space and emptied a full can of Raid on them critters. It literally rained ants in our kitchen for half an hour while we choked on the airborne chemicals. Dead ants covered every square inch of our countertops, desk, and floor.

If you think that was gross, it gets worse…

Another time we had infestation of little frogs. We’d have to wash our dishes before we used them because frogs were all over them all the time. One time I had poured myself a fresh cup of milk and as I was drinking it down, I saw a frog frantically trying to swim upstream to avoid being washed down my gullet.

If you think that was disgusting, it gets even worse…

Our shower water started to reek something awful. For two weeks, the stench got worse and worse and the terrible smell clung to our skin. We thought maybe our well had gone bad, but the water storage tank above the roof was clean on the inside. One Sunday morning as I was showering before church I looked up and saw one of those dang little frogs on top of the bucket. Suddenly I realized with dread and horror what the source of our stink was. Carefully I took the calefón bucket off its nail hook and lowered it to the floor. With trepidation I removed the lid only to be overcome with the noxious fumes of a bucket full of boiled and re-re-re-boiled frogs.