Martin & Hazel Frost

“That’s mine”
“What’s yours darling?”

“That’s mine”

“What’s yours darling?”

“That’s mine”

“What’s yours darling?”

“That’s my daddy”

This is a pank end. A what? A pank end. What do you mean you don’t know what a pank end is?

Essential modules omitted from the prenatal advice; dressing a moving target, reasoning with a two-year old, and how to develop the gift of interpreting toddler-speak. The interpreting thing takes on an increasingly urgent quality when two-year old teeters on the edge of dissolving into ball of human fury unless parent comes up with the goods forthwith. Once tipped past the point of no return, high decibel screaming ensures that the chances of understanding will be even less than they were before tantrum ensued. It took me quite a while to figure out that “No pank end, no pank end, NO PANK END AAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHH” actually means “I don't want a blanket thank you mummy” and that the definition of “blanket” itself will include any kind of bed-covering whatsoever.

Personally I don’t care if he has a blanket over him or not, despite all the people here trying to convince me that he’ll die of hypothermia in the night or pneumonia shortly afterwards. However, I do care intensely, albeit from purely selfish motives, about the bit where he wakes up cold at 5 in the morning yelling “make it the bed, make it the bed” until mummy crawls out of her nice warm pit to sort him out.

So, mummy went shopping for a new pank end, alias thinnish quilt-type thing, bit like a duvet only not quite, (they don’t have duvets here) with lorries and police cars and buses and diggers and most bases covered for a two-year old transport obsessive. I’ve put it at 90 degrees to the mattress (he’s short so he doesn’t need a whole bed length) and tucked the excess length right under the mattress on one side, so he can toss it back, without throwing it off completely. And he loves it. We’ve had a few little naming rituals where we go through and claim dominion over all the vehicles we can see. And more importantly, we’ve now had two nights in a row where we haven’t seen him till 7 in the morning. Hopefully there will be many more where those came from.

Happy polling day to y’all. Can’t say I mind missing out on the three hours queuing in order to be turned away at the door; the words banana and republic come to mind. But the idea of a hung parliament might make life interesting. Politics here is so complicated that I couldn’t begin to explain that which I barely have any possibility of understanding. So it’s probably fortunate that we can’t vote anyway.
First week of trying to get the village involved in transporting kiddo home from school and it was already off to a bad start. Last week the village confirmed that they would be OK for taking him home this week, starting on Wednesday. I chased the social worker on Tuesday to make sure we were good to go. “Oh that’s tomorrow isn’t it?” Yes, that’s the traditional order of the week. “I’ll get back to you to confirm”. Reminded me of a conversation I had a couple of years ago talking about how a friend here might have resolved a certain situation; “Well, if I was Argentinean, the first thing I would have done is nothing, until I absolutely had to do something…” Sure enough, social worker comes back to me on Wednesday morning to say that the taxi can’t start till Thursday, but kiddo can miss school for one day on Wednesday. I’m not sure I really like this, but we’ll live with it.

Thought occurs to me; has anyone told the family that kiddo’s not going to school today. The question appears to hit the social worker as if I had suggested storming the Bastille. No, she hadn’t thought of speaking to them. Pause while I wonder why she might not have imagined that the family would have kiddo ready and waiting today like every other day unless we speak to them first. Nope, I give up. Unfortunately having asked me to contact the family, she then phoned them herself to say that kiddo wouldn’t be expected in school, while simultaneously I was rearranging my life to enable me to take him both ways… between us we screwed it up and in the end it all became too complicated and he didn’t go.

That was yesterday. Thus 4.30 pm today found me hopping around the house wondering if the taxi was going to turn up, and how mum and the school might react if it didn’t, and whether I ought just to think about becoming a taxi driver as my permanent day-job. I had armed the staff at school with my mobile number in case of disaster. Fortunately everything seems to have gone OK, according to mum when we texted her later to check that they were home safely. One day down, here’s raising a toast and a prayer for next week.

When I was at primary school one time they made us put together a “human machine” all acting as co-ordinated moving parts, which for some reason also involved chanting “chop chop busy busy work work bang bang”.
That kid’s still in school, the transport issues remain unresolved, but the school are keen not only to keep him, but to have him all week as soon as possible. “As soon as possible” will be when we get the funding through from Cordoba province, which is unlikely to be anytime soon. Luckily everyone involved here is Argentinean so nobody will be surprised about that.

The house has been like a railway interchange today with people arriving and leaving from all directions. We’ve had two lots of people fixing things; some on the roof, and the others welding the blind in the office. The owner has been in twice too, once to collect the rent and the second time to check the progress on the roof. Martin went to the prison, and brought a different set of people back with him (Brethren prison-visiting missionary-pastor types, more on them another day I expect). Joni went to nusery as usual. Hazel went off chasing social workers as is also becoming traditional. I’m thinking of designating social worker chasing as a national sport with a scoring system for time taken and kilometres driven before actually catching one.

In between that and making a cake and a batch of bread, I’m also answering the next set of questions for the next Scout leadership training coming up this weekend. “How is my Scout group putting into practise the national strategy for adult resources?” Well I couldn’t rightly say for sure… Leadership training weekends are going to be a bit of a feature this season. Having cunningly not trained any leaders for the last ten years, there are now almost no qualified leaders left in our area. This would be just fine, we do have a fantastic bunch of leaders, just none with a wood-badge (the Scout equivalent of the bit of paper that qualifies people to do things). However, in these days of easy litigation, (oh yes it’s here too in spades, which is pretty scary given the level of health and safety that doesn’t exist) definitions are starting to be tightened around who is a “Scouter” and therefore who can do things; i.e. virtually none of us. Cue mild panic while our region assembles and trains a training team, and then puts a few dozen leaders through a few dozen leadership weekends. What was that thing about “national strategy for adult resources” again?

I’m a bit scared to write this in case making the knowledge public somehow causes something to go wrong. I don’t care if such superstition is unbecoming to my full-time-Christian-worker status, there have been so many hurdles that I’m willing to grasp at any straws going at this stage. So, don’t tell anyone I told you, but that village kid is in school.
He started on Monday, despite not having yet completed the last few bits of outstanding paperwork, and he’s there three days a week for now. The school want him to go five days a week, but they’ve agreed to accept him on a three day basis until we resolve the ongoing transport issues. At the moment the transport is me. Hopefully as of next week, I will be responsible for delivering him to school, and a taxi will take him home again afterwards. For now I actually want to keep on with the delivering him bit because it means I have an excuse to make eye-contact with both the family and the school on a regular basis, as well as ensuring that he actually gets there. The way things are with the village, I figure that it would be too easy for them to decide not bother taking him if it didn’t suit them, but they would probably draw the line at abandoning him there overnight. My plan is that in time the village will become wholly responsible for the transport, but I’m waiting for the right moment, which will be I’ve developed an ally in the school who is prepared to go to war on kiddo’s behalf if things start unravelling with the village. The paperwork should be done mid-May, we still have one appointment to go to, and another form that someone else should be organising for us, although they haven’t come back to me yet; I feel some more chasing up coming on…

At the moment mum is going with him, which I had explained to the school was going to be the case at least to start with. School are handling this very well, obviously it’s not the normal procedure, but they’re prepared to enter into a protracted process of working with both mum and kid in order to enable them to experience gradual separation at a pace that everyone can handle. So, for the moment while kiddo is off doing whatever he’s doing with his group, mum is being kept busy with little jobs like sorting out a cupboard (where I found her today when I arrived) which means that while they are both on the same premises, the choreography is keeping their opportunities for interaction to a minimum. I hope that a knock-on effect might be that mum makes some contacts outside the family. Heck the school could decide that they like what she’s doing and pay her for it, or recommend her to someone who’ll pay her somewhere else. Now that would be a really good result, but let’s not run before we can walk. What we’ve achieved so far is still too fragile to think of it as completely “in the bag”, but it is a victory worth celebrating; two successful days, school and family are all making the right noises and kiddo seems very happy with himself, so it’s only me who’s worrying about where it might fall apart… maybe I should just stop it and celebrate the moment.

There are times when our lifestyle catches up with me; today I’m tired!
At this moment I’m supposedly sorting myself out for a Scout “leadership” weekend, but I’m playing solitaire and writing a blog. They’ve given us homework to do in advance; a series of questions including “define leadership in five lines” “what are the qualities of a good leader?” and “Are leaders born or made?” (Some have greatness thrust upon them…) All of which would be interesting questions, except that my experience of education in Argentina so far tells me that my task here is not to mull around the questions, but to guess the one right answer that the training team has in mind and will spend the weekend presenting to us. It’s probably a good exercise in humility for me to practise smiling sweetly and writing it down in my best handwriting when someone tells me that the correct definition of leadership is Aardvark. What it contributes to my development as a leader may remain open to discussion.

Apart from that, from Tuesday afternoon till this morning the house has been full of Latin Linkers; the other two members of the Argentina team exec came for a meeting, our most local colleague (in Cordoba) came for fun and fellowship, and our newest short-termer came to see what long-termers look like (“stick around long enough and you might end up like these…”). It was good to have an excuse or two to go out for coffee / beer / ice-cream (not all at once) and catch up with folk. Now we’re rediscovering the house, and restocking the supplies of food, coffee, milk etc.

Tuesday I spent the afternoon discovering the kitchen in the Scout hut. A few weeks ago I decided that our kitchen was unfit for anything apart from the rats, mice and cock-roaches whose droppings suggest they had moved in over the summer holidays. I wondered why no-body else appeared to be grossed out, then I realised that I am the senior female, which means that probably nobody else has even noticed. Argentina still operates fairly traditional gender roles. Deciding that changing Argentina is probably a rather too-long-term plan, I spent a couple of hours stripping the layers off to find a fridge, a cupboard, a set of shelves and a draining board. Now all I need to do is to wash the things that need to go back in same. I’ve extracted an agreement from the guys that if I bring it up to a civilised standard, then I can make a rota and nag the kids can keep it that way.

Today we made some good progress towards the “kid from village goes to school” plan. We now have a school (not the same as the first one) who have a place for him in a group of kids his own age. I’ve met twice with the school, and kiddo plus mum went to see it this morning. I’m not sure it’s the best educational establishment in the world, but it means he will leave his house three times a week (to start with) and spend time with other people outside the family. He starts on Monday. The down-side of the plan is that the starting and finishing times clash violently with other stuff that I’m supposed to be doing, which wasn’t what I expected, so for a few weeks I’m going to rearrange our lives, and ultimately I’m hoping to pass the transport job on to someone else at my earliest convenience; after a sufficient period to establish a routine and iron out any teething problems, but early enough that I haven’t become a “fixture”. Anyway, I have another meeting on with the social worker on Tuesday when transport will feature on my agenda items.

Meanwhile, the bread has just come out of the oven, so we’re about to go and start on it. Have a good weekend.

Reading the Gruffalo for the millionth time with our kid tonight. As we turned to the page where the Gruffalo makes his appearance, Joni pointed to the picture and said “Daddy!”

So I asked him “Does the Gruffalo remind you of Daddy?”

And he said “Really Big!”

“Normal” sort of weekend, prison and scouts as usual, church as usual, not a lot to report really, so this is a non-event blog, just us checking in with the world.
Sometimes no news may or may not be good news. This seems like a slightly bizarre example of a non-headline I came across last week;

Obama cuts US nuclear arsenal – but keeps sights trained on Iran.