Looking Back: Life and Work in Argentina

From June 1885

“LIFE AND WORK” IN THE ARGENTINE REPUBLIC

By the Rev. J. W. FLEMING, B. D., of the Scots Church, Buenos Ayres

POSSIBLY it would interest and even instruct some of the readers of “Life and Work” to hear something of its journeyings in a “strange land.”

You, as you read the Magazine in your compact parishes, villages, and even cities, have little conception of the extent of country over which “Life and Work” must sometimes wander before it reaches the reader who is anxiously looking for it. Think first of the six thousand miles it must pass over ere it reaches Buenos Ayres; the waiting for a steamer to bring it; the delay after receiving it before we can have our Supplement pasted in. Then comes the distribution. Some copies we are able to place in the pews, but these are the smallest number. Others we send to their homes from the Sunday School. From both these preliminary distributions there is a further dispersion, many copies being sent by town friends to country friends. One lady, for example, takes as many as ten copies, and several others hardly fewer, to send away to all parts of the Argentine Republic.

But we have ourselves a headquarter, where a large number of Magazines are despatched by post every month. These, if one could follow them, would be the most interesting. Very out of date you would think them, I daresay. As, for example, to receive the January number on the 5th March, as I have just done. But, when all other literature is equally behindhand, one comes to notice this. Now and then we have it brought home to us forcibly enough, as when a dear friend has been taken away at a time when, perhaps, we have been the gayest among the gay. Not to know of our loss for a long month after our friend is in the narrow home, is indeed an intensification of bereavement that can only be realised by those who have felt its force.

But to return to the Magazine. Our first difficulty was to know to whom we could send it. Population is far more fluctuating here than in Scotland, where generations have passed down the family name. Addresses were difficult to get, and the worst of it was, that the homes of those people who were most in need of the Magazine – those who were living far away in the “camp,” cut off from every religious ordinance – were just those whose addresses were hardest to find. But little by little our information has increased, and not once do I remember the Magazine being afterwards stopped. It would be strange if it were.

Very varied are its journeyings. Over the broad river Plate to the Republic of Uruguay, up the rivers Uruguay and Parana as far as steamers ply, away a thousand miles to Tucuman, “the garden of the Republic,” and another thousand west to the slopes of the Andes, go our monthly issues of “Life and Work.” Southward, too, five hundred miles, and as many south-west to the newest populated lands, we send our Magazines, always with a Local Supplement of two, four, six, eight, and this month nine pages, a messenger of the gospel and a bond of union, bearing the assurance to those in the busy city, or those in the remote camp, that they are not forgotten by the Church that many of them can attend so seldom.

Looking Back menu

1907: Tribute to James Smith, Church missionary in Argentina

1925: Scots in Patagonia

1954: Outreach in Patagonia

From Orkney to Buenos Aires: how one Scot traced his father's early ministry in Argentina