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.