Halfway through January already! Here are a couple of updates on recent stories for people who have been following via blog or newsletter or both.
We won one fight; our Scouts have been given use of the municipal bus for our summer camp in February. That has been an ongoing saga since the local council agreed to provide the bus way back last July, and then out of the blue at the start of December tried to withdraw the offer by claiming that it was never made. For a month we attended the council offices almost every day, and were passed from pillar to post, fobbed off with promises of meetings and phone calls, which mostly didn’t happen. So finding ourselves in January and no further forward, I took charge of things and decided to finish the job once and for all. We had nothing to lose, and even a big fat no would be progress in that it would be a proper answer that we could move on from. So I rolled up my sleeves and went to war and after two fairly frank meetings, we had a bus. So now we are finishing raising the funds. Tonight we have a folk evening, known as a peña in Argentina, so we have been hard at work all morning, and will continue working hard until the wee small hours tomorrow, hopefully with a goodly haul as a result.
Teen’s paperwork is still an ongoing battle, to the extent that we couldn’t even register the baby. Teen is missing from the care system but at least she does have an ID card albeit out of date, whereas Baby doesn’t officially exist at all and won’t exist until either Teen’s situation is progressed or Boyfriend regularises his immigration status – he has temporary residency which ran out last June and apparently renders him incapable of fathering a child (go figure!). He won’t be able to move his case on until March because the relevant office is on holiday till then. Meanwhile Teen is making progress, Baby is thriving and has put on 300 grams this week. I suspect we need to be driving a difficult balance between applauding Teen’s progress and pushing her to do more; together with knowing when to get involved because they need our involvement, versus when to stand back and let them figure things out for themselves because they need to do that too. Good news is that Teen has mentioned that she would like to go back to school this year, we weren’t even broaching the subject at this stage so we were surprised and thrilled to hear it. So over the next month or so we need to be thinking together and finding out what sort of support might be available to facilitate that.