Author: Hazel Frost

San Francisco to Salta is 972 km by road according to our atlas which is probably a reasonable enough estimate.  Twenty four hours (twelve there, twelve back) strapped into a moving sardine can in the company of a three year old is something of an endurance test for all concerned, despite the fact that he was pretty well behaved most of the time.  My proudest moment was on entering Salta province and catching the first glimpse of the mountains… “Look mummy, those are big hills.  They are for climbing on”.  That’s my boy!  Sadly son, the best chance you’ll have of actually climbing a hill resides in the UK, ironically enough.  This has nothing to do with height, or danger, but culture; here there is little culture of climbing hills, so it is hard to find people to go with, mapping is poor to non-existent, and in many cases access can only be gained by taking a machete to the thick scrub growing up the sides.  The few hills which gain the dubious privilege of being designated tourist attractions are rewarded with a layer of concrete; all the way up to the car-park at the summit.  But I promise we’ll find something to climb on next time we’re in the UK. 

Before we reach the hills of Salta, a goodly chunk of the journey is taken up crossing the province of Santiago del Estero, where a significant proportion of Argentina’s Arabic/Middle-Eastern population are located.  Argentina is largely a nation of immigrants, although most groups have been here for three generations or more and racial integration here in general has been better achieved than in Europe or North America.  However, there are many areas of the country where certain surnames dominate and the people are still thought of as being predominantly from, e.g. Germany in the province of Entre Rios, Italy in Buenos Aires, Wales in the Patagonia, and, in this case, the Middle East in Santiago del Estero.  We can only imagine the first Arabic peoples fleeing war and hunger, arriving in Argentina’s immense territory and surveying its vast and varied topography; from the lakes and glaciers of the south, the arable wetlands of the East, the high Andes mountains to the West, and the eternal plains of the fertile pampas in the middle.  Bewildered by the sheer sensory overload of it all, perhaps a small voice from the back pipes up “That bit has sand… it would remind us of home” and off they popped to Santiago del Estero.  Thus it was with some astonishment that we discovered this year that the entire length of this hitherto desert province had been transformed into an oasis of green, but back to that in a minute. 

Santiago de Estero is one of the poorer provinces (being not very fertile I would guess), and it appears that the police department isn’t over-funded.  On a couple of occasions we witnessed a police road-block complete with orange cones, manned by two officers.  The first officer steps smartly out, and with a “don’t mess with me” face brings the traffic to a halt.  He then goes around to the drivers side window of the leading car, leans in and says – I kid you not – “My colleague here needs to go to the next village, can you give him a lift?”  We enjoyed watching this little performance happen to the car in front of us, and then a few villages further on, we found ourselves in front and thus became the designated police transport.  “Yes” is probably the most sensible response, given that “no” would likely lead to having the car taken apart and us being fined for some imaginary minor infraction.  In any case we had room, we were going his way, we do quite often voluntarily pick up hitchhikers anyway, and the young officer more than paid for his ride by entertaining our child in the back.  I took advantage of the opportunity for some local information, and asked him what had happened to Santiago province to make the plants grow.  The short answer; it’s been raining for months.  Climate change is pretty easy to identify in places like this where previously weather patterns had been so predictable that folk knew from one year to the next which dates they were expecting it to rain, and by how much.  Maybe those Arabic forefathers were able to look further into the future than we’re giving them credit for. 

Not completely related, or actually maybe it is, the other thing I noticed going through Santiago were the campaign placards; Agro-toxins kill our orange trees.  Now I reckon if you genetically modify soya seed, and then you spray the fields from the air with poisons designed to kill everything except the genetically modified soya seed, it probably isn’t a great surprise that your spraying takes out more than just the weeds in the soya field.  So I’m asking why it apparently didn’t occur to anyone before to wonder what would happen if there was a bit of a wind on spraying days, or where the chemicals would end up after they filtered through to the irrigation canals.  I’m not a great sociologist, but I’m guessing the simple answer is that the orange trees belong to the poor guy whose field backs onto the land owned by the rich guy who grows the soya, and that the real challenge will be one of persuading the rich guy to give a damn, particularly in the current economic climate where soya is making the already rich even richer despite the whining about levels of taxation. 

So, eventually we leave Santiago del Estero behind us, the hills come into view, and a couple of hours later, so does the city of Salta.  Salta city is a loud urban sprawl, whose aspect is improved by its backdrop of surrounding mountains (although one might say that the aspect of the mountains would be better improved by the removal of the urban sprawl… I guess it’s a question of preference).  Salta isn’t any less attractive than any other city, but it is a city, and not being a great shopper I’ve never really figured out what I’m supposed to do there having sampled most of the coffee shops and looked in most of the museums.  Certainly I wouldn’t go more than twice without good reason, especially while so much of the rest of Argentina still lies waiting to be explored.  But beggars don’t always get to choose, and a meeting had been arranged so to a meeting I went. 

I do believe that some meetings are a necessary evil, which is why I’m committed to being there… but some of what happens seems to come down more on the side of the evil than the necessary.  How much of this could be done by email?  Probably most of the “information sharing” bits, and definitely anything where we are merely reporting “lack of progress” (per-lease) which would mean we could better use the working time for, uh, well, the items that actually need working on.  Partly it’s a cultural thing.  Here “being busy” and “doing stuff” is what is important, whereas my temptation is always to analyse; “yes but what are we being busy with… could that doing stuff have been done more efficiently…”  Maybe at some stage I’ll learn to be happy that I’ve been busy all day, rather than asking whether I’ve achieved anything.  Anyway, that was that.  The good points as always; people and ice-cream… there’s a couple of folk who we only ever see in Salta, one in particular who I really love to catch up with so it was good to drink tea and do the washing up with her; and we make it our mission to sniff out good local ice-cream anywhere we are and Salta’s no exception.  Joni had fun chasing the cats around the house (they quickly learned to make themselves scarce), he also enjoyed discovering a whole new range of Thomas toys, Thomas books, even Thomas on his bed, a different plaza to go out to, and best of all, a new ready made audience including young people who were more than willing to be bossed around by a three year old mini-dictator for a couple of days. 

And then we piled back into the sardine can and drove twelve hours home again. 

I had great plans to write a blog all week only it kept on not happening. Partly I was busily doing all the normal stuff that we do all week, and also because I was writing a talk for today for the kids club. Martin and I went dressed as shepherds, complete with sheep and a campfire, on a day shortly after the death of Jesus, and we reminisced about how we had been there at his birth, and the man he grew up to be. I haven’t seen the photos yet so I’ve no idea how we looked, but it seemed to go OK.
So, having ploughed my way down the list of jobs and activities for today, I thought I’d write a blog this evening. I cut the grass while it was still light, and unplugging the strimmer from the socket, I was met with a barrage of sparks and the house fused. Not only did the house fuse, but the fuse box died in the act of fusing. In Argentina, a very common phrase to hear is “se rompió”; which means “it broke”. Having spent the years of my youth having it impressed upon me that “stuff doesn’t just break itself”, it used to surprise me the ease with which people here say “se rompió”. Having been here a few years, I now know that this is Argentina, and really, things just do break themselves, and the fuse box “se rompió”.

Saturday night is a particularly rubbish time to find oneself without electricity, so Martin went off to fish out our tame builder friend, who in turn rounded up another neighbour who apparently works for EPEC, the electricity company. He came round and gave the offending fuse-box a good biff with a hammer, and now it works again. As Martin says, if we’d hit it, it wouldn’t have worked at all, so we can only assume that this is a special EPEC-trained sort of biff. Apparently this is only a temporary fix and we need to buy some new bits and get it done properly, but hopefully it’ll survive at least to keep the fridge running for the next few days.

And so finally, I am writing the blog that I didn’t write all week, but I’m not going to be writing it for very much longer because it’s after midnight, and we’re planning on driving up to Salta tomorrow for a few days setting off soon after dawn has cracked to make the most of the early morning cool, so, hope to catch you sometime towards the back end of the week when we’re here again.

Working on developing alternative communication strategies with the kids at school, in the context of watching my non-disabled off-spring multiplying his verbal skills, I’m beginning to think that any child who learns to communicate ought to be awarded a PhD just as a matter of course.  Before we even start thinking about planning the content of any message, we must already have some concept of the nature and purpose of communication in order to be motivated to do it in the first place.  Following that, if we are to successfully convey even the simplest idea we first must have the ability to attract and maintain the listener’s attention, and if we have any intention of allowing our partner to respond to us, then we also have understood something of the rules of reciprocity and turn-taking.  And this is just to start with, it only gets more complicated from here as even the most trivial exchange is laden with content and choices to be made;

– Look Joni, where has Wibbly Pig put his banana skin?

– On his head! 

In a three word response my toddler conveys that he knows that I’m speaking to him, that I’ve asked him a question, and that he clearly understands the content of that question; “where” requiring a location-based response, as well as who – Wibbly Pig, and what – the banana skin.  He also selects the correct preposition, the correct possessive pronoun, demonstrates that he can match nouns to parts of the body and arranges the words into their conventional order, all in the split second between my asking and his answering.  And of course this is but one of hundreds of exchanges in which he will participate in different contexts, with different people during the course of every day, in his case, in two languages.  And all this in a much shorter time, and frankly with a lot less fuss than most people take over their doctorates. 

My little friend from the village did me proud this week.  When I first started working with him over a year ago, I created a set of cards containing photos of key family members, pictures representing the animals on their small-holding, and some others relating to everyday objects that I thought he might find motivating; biscuit, drink, football etc.  We looked at them a few times during my visits to his house, and then this year he went off to school and I stopped having much real input into the content of his schooling.  Now I’m in school at the same time as him for two days a week so the other day I fished out the cards that I had put away in a drawer, took them along to school, and scattered them on the table in front of him to see how he would react;

He carefully picked up each card and examined it closely, made the relevant animal noises for each of the farm pictures, pointed to the different members of his family, and finally selected the biscuit picture to give to one of the members of staff sitting next to him.  Thus he drew himself a little crowd of other members of staff all wanting to see what he was doing, and then asking him about the different members of his family, and the animals on their land.  It’s the most interest I’ve ever seen him take in any table-top activity so far, and the most interest I’ve ever seen any of the staff take in him. 

I’m trying not to lay my opinions (professional or otherwise) on with a trowel at the moment having already nailed my colours to the mast a couple of weeks ago as far as school is concerned, but I really hope that this little event and my little friend’s demonstration of his abilities might have opened the way towards some radical new ideas here; like this kid has potential; it is worth trying to teach him; many non-verbal kids do have something to say; it is worth the effort to help them discover and use the right materials to say it with; home-made resources can be just as good as anything high-tech or imported…  Now achieving that would be a real triumph for both his and my non-verbal communication.  Doctorates all round? 

I can’t decide if life’s busy or quiet, I think that probably means that it’s chugging along at the same sort of pace as ever, and I’m tired. I had my first good pasting today at school from the person I was supposed to be working with. She’s a lot bigger than me, I gave up trying to protect her person or the school’s property in favour of my own (slightly battered) skin at the point where she ripped a metal cupboard door off and tried to hit me with it. Brings back memories of another place I used to work… I don’t do challenging behaviour, it wasn’t my strong point in the other place and it isn’t now either. I’d really like to be working with the guys who barely receive any attention because they are unable to cause enough trouble for anyone to notice their presence… but of course school don’t think they have any difficulties with those kids precisely because they aren’t demanding attention, so instead they’ve given me the select little group of the students that they know they can’t handle. Luckily classes finish soon, and then I’ll have a couple of weeks where the only kid I’ll be in charge of is my own, before summer scheme starts, when I’ll spend the subsequent two months turning into a mermaid, or more likely a wrinkly prune, in the local outdoor pool in the company of a (mostly) different bunch of disabled people, and my ever-present little friend from the village.
Meanwhile my DIY wheelchair insert is taking shape in our garage, albeit slowly; partly due to time constraints, but also because of having to let each stage dry for a few days before moving on. Martin’s in Cordoba, should be well on the way back by now in fact. Boy and I took the dogs for a good walk this afternoon, cue much squelching in mud and splashing of stones into the irrigation canal (Joni throws the stones and dog dives enthuseastically into the water after them). Day concluded by throwing one muddy child in bath, followed by food, stories, and bed.

Someone sent me the link to this video, which may be way too cheesy for you guys who are already up to your necks in corny Christmas gimmicks, but we don’t get anything like that here, so I quite enjoyed the couple of minutes of festive cheer (and the quality of the singing’s pretty good too);

This is a picture from a local Stationers window. On the Right you can see a calculator. In the centre, standing up is a can of pepper spray. To the left is a taser gun. All around are various trinkets including a car, fan, cash till etc.

Thankfully, in the main, San Francisco is peaceful and I do not feel the need to carry any protection. There are areas I would not go, especially at night but then, I hesitated to go to Hatfield Town Centre in the evenings. One of my Lodgers was robbed three times there.

However, it is an interesting reflection on what is socially acceptable here compared to the U.K.

For some reason my kid seems to think I don’t do enough tidying up (maybe because I don’t?) so he set to and reorganised his own bedroom. 

He piled most of his bedding into the bottom of the wardrobe, which wasn’t a bad plan since summer seems to be here to stay and the nights are becoming pretty warm of late. 

Then he emptied the contents of his chest of drawers and the clothes and shoes from his wardrobe into a big heap at one end of the bed. 

Then I’m guessing he stirred it all around a bit. 

And finally he fell asleep on top of his handiwork:-

Question is, did he think this was a better system, or is he just threatening me with what he might do if I don’t keep the house in order? 

At the moment I’m trying to bring together the ingredients for a high-tech communication system for a kid who desperately needs one.  First component, we have accepted an offer of a working laptop from the UK, so we need someone who’s coming this way to bring it for us.  We can’t post or FEDEX it because even if it doesn’t get stolen on route (and sadly that appears to be on the increase here of late if our experience can be generalised), it will almost certainly be impounded in customs in Buenos Aires who (again from our experience) are likely to charge us 50% of what they think it’s worth in addition to "storage" costs meaning that we might as well have bought a new one here.  Hence it needs to travel accompanied as someone’s hand baggage.  Second component, I’ve located here in Buenos Aires a guy who has been innovating in the area of adapted technology and alternative communications for the last twenty years or so.  He designed the first virtual keyboard in Argentina back in 1986 in fact.  I’ve heard good testimony from someone who’s met him, and looking at his website I definitely need to fix up a trip soon.  A few years ago I would have relished a jaunt to Buenos Aires, now I think heck, nine hours each way on the bus, not to mention having to get round the city… cost… time… family… commitments; maybe I’ve become old and boring. 

So anyway, when I’ve managed to figure out how to bring together UK laptop, Argentinean virtual keyboard with a scanning feature, and a couple of foot-operated switches, I think we might have the basis of an absolutely fantastic communication system for my prime target, and then it will “just” be a case of teaching her to use it, although if she’s as bright as I suspect she is, that will probably be the easy part.  Till then, I’ve gathered some magnetic letters, and our favourite household-appliance repair man has cut me a magnetic whiteboard from the side of a dead washing machine.   I need to tape the sharp edges of same, and then we will have the basis of a low-tech communication aid.  I’m also thinking if I stick some magnetic strips to the back of some of the pictures that I’ve already been using then it might be a useful resource for some of the other kids in the group too.  Meanwhile in our garage at the moment there’s a whole pile of cut-to-size carton pieces which I’m hoping will form the basis of an approximately CAPS-esque wheelchair insert for another kid just as soon as I’ve paper-maché-ed it all together.  Sublime; ridiculous; but which is which? 

Late this morning, I’m just leaving the special school on my bike, about to go home and do a few things prior to our kid coming home from nursery in his usual whirlwind of energy and chaos, when the phone rings.  It’s “my” family from the hamlet; my mate kiddo has split his head open, they think it’ll need stitching, any chance that I might be able to come and collect them?  Give me ten minutes to get home and swop the bike for the car and I’ll be on my way.  So that took care of the next little while.  I broke the speed limit pretty well all the way there not knowing what I was going to find, but on arrival it quickly became clear that he was fine; good wide cut to the back of the head, stitches definitely required, but nothing very serious. 

Even with my Jenson Button impression, it was still an hour between me leaving my house and us arriving at the hospital.  Then we had to wait for another hour despite there only being one person ahead of us, who was seen within five minutes of our arrival.  I suspect most (all?) of the medical staff went on their lunch break at that point.  Service to the public isn’t always a strong feature of “public services” here in Argentina, but I’ve written about that before.  This gave me plenty of time to observe the cleaning staff, two women who were “mopping” the floor, (read “sloshing water”) around, rather than under, the chairs, tables, trolley beds etc.  Apart from making me wonder when (if?)those areas are ever cleaned, the best bit was the psychological warfare; they were working in parallel corridors, each of which leads to one of the only two exits in the A&E, and both were equally determined that the public should not walk down “their” corridor during the cleaning process, despite various members of the public wishing to exit the building.  I guess that little bit of sport is probably the only interesting part of their day so maybe we shouldn’t begrudge it to them. 

Then we were attended to and the offending head dutifully sewn up.  I really hoped that we wouldn’t be kept in for “observations” re head injury, since it was clear to anyone who knows kiddo that he was just fine, but of course the doctors don’t know what “normal” looks like for him.  Fortunately they agreed with my assessment, so once the blood was cleaned up we were released on our way, and he’s now safely home sporting a chef’s hat affair made out of a roll of wide bandage (I can’t imagine he’s tolerating that by now, but he still had it on when I dropped him off). 

Why am I telling this story (apart from the fact that it took up half the day)?  Because it really made me think about how isolated these guys are.  They only live half an hour from a large, middle class town, in the wealthiest province in Argentina, but that still makes it an hour to the hospital by the time someone comes out to get them.  Today we were fortunate that it hasn’t rained for a couple of weeks; if it had rained yesterday, the last three kilometres to their house would only be accessible by truck.  This was also a minor injury; if it had been time-critical, we would have been playing a game of real-life roulette.  And for every kiddo and his family, there must be thousands like them in Argentina, particularly in those provinces which don’t have anything like the infrastructure that we enjoy(?) here in Cordoba.  For these people, social and cultural constructs of life and death must take on a whole new meaning.  And finally my boggled mind is trying to get itself around the idea that if Argentina is something like the fortieth most developed country in the world (according to the UN 2009), that leaves  another two hundred countries whose populations live a reality of which I understand absolutely nothing. 

Calvin:     BU-URRP! Mum:       Good heavens, Calvin! What do we say after that? Calvin:     "Must be a barge coming through!" Mum:       WHAT do you say?! Calvin:     "That sure tasted better going down than coming up!" Mum:       Three strikes and you’re history, kiddo. Calvin:     Excuse me.

Dad:     What do you say Joni?

Joni:      “Mine, it’s mine”.

Dad:       What do you say Joni?

Joni:     "Here, put it on here!" (points to the table in front of him)

Dad:       WHAT do you say?!

Joni:     Thank you Daddy

I spent last weekend on Scout camp in Devoto, one of the first villages out of here.  It was hot and exhausting, but good fortune smiled upon me and some of the things I normally fill my life with have been cancelled or postponed for this week.  Thus I formulated a grand plan to catch up with a whole lot of admin which I normally never get round to.  I’m happy to report that so far I’ve found a whole lot of other things to do and have mostly managed to avoid the admin. 

This morning I took a rucksack into the repair place to be fixed.  I spent a little while hunting for my other rucksack to decant my stuff into, but having not found it, I grabbed a shopping bag and made do with that instead.  When I arrived at the repair place, the lady said, “oh I wondered if you’d forgotten the rucksack you left here a couple of months ago….”  Explains why I couldn’t find it at home then.  Happy reunion, claimed one rucksack, left the lady with the other one, bought some new insoles for my favourite oldest trainers; should be good for another few months before they actually drop apart I reckon. 

I’m working towards a little project to make a wheelchair insert using appropriate paper-based technology for one of the kids at the special school.  I’d done a bit of thinking about APT before we ever came to Argentina, but when we arrived, I thought that APT was probably just a bit too “third world” for the needs of folk here.  So I didn’t think about it any more and the book sat on my shelf.  However, the special school here manages to be a convincing model of a third-world enclave in a first world city.  If anything this is even worse than being a third-world institution in a third-world context, because I have a whole bunch of demotivated staff who sit around and talk amongst themselves, and when asked why they don’t do x, y or z, move into bemoaning the lack of resources.  They’ve been trained from a bunch of text-books written by people in contexts where resources are never completely absent.  In general I find Argentina lacks creativity, and this is one environment where it really shows.  So, I have a little task, not only to create something at no cost, but also to model the possibility of creating something at no cost.  And I have a prime candidate; sweet little girl slopped into the most appalling wheelchair ever, who desperately needs an insert made to fit her.  My plan for Wednesday was to measure her, but she didn’t show up at school, so hopefully that’s tomorrow. 

I’ve put my cards on the table now as far as the special school is concerned, which I hadn’t quite planned to do at this stage, but circumstances intervened.  The fact is, there is a real lack of educational activity, particularly at the primary end, where the staff quite often spend the afternoons talking among themselves while the kids crawl around the floor.  I had thought if that’s the way it is I need to bide my time and take my opportunities when they arise.  However, the last couple of weeks there has been a supply teacher in, who has worked in other institutions here, and is completely horrified by all the things that I just thought were part of Argentina.  Hence, she’s trying to introduce some changes, and I’ve taken some opportunities to support her.  Which means that if only from purely selfish motives, I’m hoping that between us we can actually achieve something that is recognised as “good” by the rest of the staff, otherwise I’m going to be sat out on a little twig on my own when my partner in crime’s supply period comes to an end.

  This is a chimango, smallish, brownish bird of prey, pretty common around here.  Joni and I saw one being mobbed by a couple of lapwings one time, and I explained that that would be because the lapwings had a nest and they wouldn’t want the chimango to eat their babies.  This made a big impression on him; for ages every time we saw one, he was say in respectful tones, “chimangos eat babies.“  I was tempted to let him think that I might feed him to a chimango if he doesn’t behave, but in the end conscience prevailed and I had a go at a better explanation.  Hence today when we saw one, he told me “Chimango eats baby birds; sparrows hatch baby pigs in the eggs.“ That’s right Joni, sort of… Chimango with overtones of the three little pigs, intertwined with the sparrows which are once again nesting in our roller blinds; I had to rescue a fluffy chick today which had managed to get itself stuck in the gap between the blind and the dining room wall. 

Yesterday afternoon I was out in the village of Quebracho with the kids at my little homework project.  As well as helping with whatever they’re doing at school, I have a selection of vaguely educational activities in my cupboard which they can choose from when they’re done, thus I have introduced them to jigsaw puzzles, colouring books, dot to dots, etc.  mostly gathered from charity shops when we’ve been back in the UK.  I decided a couple of weeks ago that my next plan would be to see what they made of a game, so yesterday I took along a Ludo set.  Some stereotypes make me want to smack the speaker around the head and tell them they haven’t a clue what they’re talking about.  The one about “They’re poor but they’re happy” would be a good case in point.  And yet, seeing those little kids looking like Christmas had come because I’d put a board game on the table… I’m not sure I’d go as far as “they’re poor but they’re happy”, but there’s definitely something about how over-pampering kids sucks out their ability to enjoy small things.  These ones played it and played it till I finally had to throw them out and lock up because I was supposed to be somewhere else.  I’m thinking for my next move I need to track down some dominoes and a “Connect 4” in time for the Christmas holidays.