Moving parts

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?

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