“Can’t you at least try to sound British?” demanded Mrs. Hall in a maddeningly condescending manner.
“No, I can’t!” replied Nelda with the most American “a” possible.
Mrs. Hall would grind her teeth and grudgingly give her Colonial pupil high marks because her performance was unobjectionable in all other respects.
Nelda’s feelings were somewhat soothed by the attitude of Mrs. García, the school’s Anglo-Argentine founder and principal, who was thrilled to have a living example of the wonderful variety of the great English language.
In the afternoon, the school followed the national education program. Nelda’s first teacher was amazed that she achieved perfect Spanish in less than a month and La Nell was forced to dispel the idea that they were in the presence of a linguistic genius. She explained their long absence and that re-immersion into Argentine culture had brought it all back.
The school uniform was typically British: white shirt; dark green tunic, sweater, blazer, neck scarf and hat; green and silver tie and knit belt; gray pullover and knee-high socks; brown leather shoes; and abominable green bloomers for physical education.
David’s orbit was more elliptical and extended all the way to Olivos, in the North Zone where his school was located. It offered a first-rate U.S. college preparatory education. Initially he lived in a boarding house during the week and went home on weekends. The pension was a large two-story house run by a single middle-aged German surnamed Vieler whom David suspected of being a former Nazi officer, a hypothesis supported by the Mauser rifle mounted on the drawing-room wall. Over a dozen boys from the interior lodged there, half of whom went to Lincoln and half to other schools. There was one bathroom on each floor and showers were taken according to a strict schedule. David was fortunate enough to have a room all to himself on the top floor, and shared breakfast and dinner with the other lodgers. An elderly Swiss or German woman was in charge of cleaning and cooking. She summoned them to meals by rapping out “Zu Essen!”8 There was a train station nearby, Estación Borges, but it did not carry passengers as it belonged to a freight line called Tren de la Costa9, so the landlord drove the boys to school in his Estanciera,10 holding the steering wheel Continental-style.
David finally decided that he would rather live at home and make the trip to school every day by public transportation. This merely involved walking three blocks to catch the 7:28 a.m. train, riding to the end of the Roca Line at the Constitución Terminal, catching the subway to the Retiro Terminal, taking a train from the Mitre Line to the Olivos station, and then walking fifteen blocks if time allowed and the weather was fine, or riding a city bus that dropped him off two blocks from school. The reverse process got him home at 4:50 p.m.
However, David did not mind this seemingly onerous program. On the contrary, he took advantage of the opportunity to acquire an intimate knowledge of the place he wholeheartedly adopted as his own. It was fabulous to live in a world-class city. He studied maps and buildings, thereby developing his native bump of locality even more and gaining a working knowledge of a variety of architectural styles. This fascinating melting pot, of a predominantly European and Middle Eastern mixture, connected him with the whole world. He felt a heady sense of freedom: for a few pesos he could go just about anywhere.
Ben’s duties covered an area perhaps not as long as David’s but considerably wider. He visited all the pastors in the South Zone individually to hear their concerns and learn what he could do to help, and his duties in the Convention and the Mission often took him to the Capital.
The Associational pastors were an outstanding group of gifted, energetic and committed men, most of them close to Ben’s own age, many already known by him, some all the way back from his first term. One of these was Daniel Gaydou, who had moved from the South to lead the church in Adrogué and was generally considered the most handsome pastor in the nation. He and his wife Dolores now had three stair-step boys. The middle son, Alberto, was Nelda’s age and usually delivered the messages sent to the parsonage because the Mission house did not yet have a telephone. The infrastructure was old and woefully inadequate, often forcing people to wait for years to get a line. The Bedfords joined the local church right away and the rest of the family attended there while Ben made the rounds of the other congregations and was often invited to preach.
A Monument to Cooperation
As when they were assigned to Comodoro Rivadavia in 1959, the Bedfords were commissioned to start a new church in an area with no Evangelical presence. Apart from tremendous prayer support, the experiences were very different.
In Comodoro they had been forced to “wing it,” so to speak. There was no plan and only one family of believers to help. They visited neighbors, handed out fliers and put an ad in the newspaper, meeting first in their home, then in rented quarters and finally in their own church building. When they left after three and a half years, there were two thriving congregations and a school. This time around there was an abundance of planning and support. Within one year, where there had been nothing, a vigorous thirty-nine-member congregation was meeting in its own building.
At their annual session in December 1964, the nineteen churches of the South Zone Baptist Association unanimously voted to begin a new work and requested that Ben be its pastor. They decided that it should be in the Quilmes District, specifically in San Francisco Solano, a place that in the space of ten years had gone from being mostly open country to a city of nearly one hundred thousand inhabitants.
The town’s name was due to the fact that its lands had been bought by the Franciscan Order in the mid-1700s and used for plantations called Chacras de San Francisco.11 They were sold to two private individuals in 1826 and in turn by their heirs to the Tulsa Company in 1948. In December of that year the Government of Buenos Aires authorized their subdivision and sale as well as the foundation of a town. At that point, it consisted of a collection of empty blocks and dirt roads covered with thistle patches, dotted here and there with lonely little houses. There were no shops, no schools, no medical or postal service, no police and no fire department. As people flocked to Buenos Aires in search of work during the industrial boom, workers began building their houses. The brick-and-mortar type of construction allowed them to do so in stages. Many started with a basic living area and bathroom and, once they moved in, they could use the money that had gone to rent for gradual expansion. The town square with the first park was built in 1958. In 1963 the neighbors formed a commission to work toward municipal autonomy.
A church-planting plan was soon put into action. The project kicked off with a ten-day revival on the main street. Permission was obtained from the owner of an empty lot to set up the Association’s tent, which could hold up to 200 persons. The nineteen churches took turns watching the tent overnight, setting up the chairs and sound system, and preaching. They all pitched in to visit the neighbors, hand out fliers and paste posters on walls. Attendance was very good and decisions of faith were made every night.
The next step was to set up a smaller tent loaned by the Emanuel Baptist Church on the permanent site and begin to hold regular services. The lot was only two blocks away from the paved main street and had been bought at a very reasonable price from a widow who belonged to the Quilmes church, pastored by Juan Cornaglia. Materials from shipping crates donated by the Ford Motor Company were used to build a small temporary wooden building. A new missionary family, the Davenports, contributed the container in which they had brought their belongings and it was used as a Sunday School classroom.
Construction soon began on an 850 square-foot auditorium, which required approximately 9,000 U.S. dollars. The Mission loaned $2,000 and the Association and budding congregation raised the remainder while labor was contributed by the new believers and members of other churches. The Woman’s Missionary Union (WMU) of