Martin & Hazel Frost

Days in general start at 06.25 I take the dog out for a walk, back in time to ensure that Joni has everything he needs for school, and to give Teen a lift to the secondary school, she walks home later, but we’d all have to get up even earlier if she walked there in the mornings, and I do find it quite beneficial to have that ten minutes together in the car. 

Home again, time to wake Danny up and have some breakfast together, then take him to school on the back of the bike.  This is our normal Monday-Friday getting everyone out to school routine.  Beyond nine o’clock, different things happen according to whatever other commitments might be in the offing.  Today I have English lessons, so having dropped Danny off, I continue on the bike to an English conversation client, who I meet in his family’s office, and then on to the next one, an elderly lady who I meet in a cafe.

English done, I continue on the bike to the other end of town to see a man about a freezer.  The best use I have found for Facebook is local buying and selling pages.  Second hand freezers are fast sellers here; I’ve been chasing after any that have come up for the last couple of months  The guy knocks a lump off the asking price to take account of a minor repair needed, then he glances at my bike, and offers free delivery if I’m happy to wait till late afternoon.  For free, anytime you like. 

Swift detour to pick up fish from one shop and fruit and veg from another, and it’s home to start cooking lunch before the ravenous hoards arrive.    Oven on, and I have just started rubbing together a crumble topping towards dessert when they all appear in the front garden.  Danny is clutching right arm and whimpering in a possibly-broken sort of way.  So lunch is temporarily abandoned in favour of an expedition to A and E. 

This is going to be an interesting experience, because we have recently jettisoned the Seriously Rubbish UK-based emergency insurer (ask me privately if you want to know who to avoid) in favour of a local provider who should be covering us for all health care in Argentina, emergencies and otherwise.  And this is the first time we have used them in anger.  Our ongoing experience with Seriously Rubbish UK is that any attempt to access care would be initiated by several phone calls, and at least one argument each with the insurer by phone and whichever local clinic we were trying to use, followed by giving up the battle at that stage in favour of paying for treatment upfront, knowing that this would result in a protracted process later on in order to try and reclaim the expenses.  For something like the last eight years I have been personally convinced that we could do better than this, but I hadn’t managed to persuade Mission UK, to allow us to try it.  So today was the day when I realised that convinced as I am, we really have made a decision on the back of other peoples’ anecdotes.  I presented our new, shiny, written-in-Spanish local insurance card and held my breath.  And we were in.  Phone calls, zero.  Arguments, nil.  Money changed hands, not a whiff.  Couldn’t have asked for a friendlier service.

The duty doctor in A and E (in the singular – San Francisco is a small place) agreed that he was probably looking at a broken arm, but unfortunately the radiologist (also in the singular) had gone for lunch, so we could either wait or come back at 2 o’clock.  I made a non-medically-qualified decision that he wasn’t going to need surgery so it would be just fine to feed him, and we went home and finished making lunch.  At two thirty we were in radiography.  Quote of the afternoon “I’m not a skeleton, you can’t see my bones”.  The x-ray confirmed a green stick fracture, the duty doctor put a temporary bandage on and told us that the traumatologist will see us for plastering at five, after the swelling has gone down a bit.  So we went home and organised Joni’s homework.  At five, Danny and I went back to the clinic leaving Martin to post Joni off to swimming.  The traumatologist and four nurses put the arm into a cast (“But I didn’t want that”), and we were home by six-thirty. 

Quick phone call to apologise to the freezer-man that when I said we were going to be in all afternoon, I hadn’t reckoned on broken bones.  No problem, he is now on his way with the freezer.  I zip out to pick Joni up from swimming at seven.  A round of drinks and snacks for everyone.  Normally Martin would have a Bible study this evening but a fortuitous mix-up over times means that he is free, so I don’t have to take the kids to the Scout leaders’ meeting with me at eight.  Martin feeds them, I hop on the bike and lead the meeting (score; one camp, two fundraising events and a parents’ workshop).  Home just before ten to grab a quick bite to eat and an aluminium cup of red wine (beggars can’t be choosers).  Sometimes I’m not too sure what I’m supposed to be working towards in Argentina.  And then I wonder when I would ever have time to do it anyway.  Today’s notable achievements; one broken arm:-

and one second hand freezer:-

We didn’t vote.  I did briefly consider registering.  Then I realised that I really have crossed that ex-pat line where I live in a country when I can’t vote and don’t understand the politics, but I also no longer understand the politics in the other country where I would be eligible to vote.  I have tried to follow it on the news, but the main impressions that I have managed to glean are that UKIP are a bunch of fascists, the Greens have forgotten about being green, and everybody else is a clone army of posh gits arguing over the croquet lawn.  None of which seemed like a great basis for casting an informed vote. 

Scout camp last weekend was fun and frustrating in equal measures.  We went by bike to Josefina, a little village around 15 kms away from here.  The 11-18 ages in our Scout group have been going by bike to local camping destinations for the last couple of years.  Good for the environment, and the physical fitness of the kids, it also deals nicely with the fact that quite a few of ours don’t have access to any other forms of transport.  Having taken over the 11-15 group this year, I got to go by bike, hoorah, sleep in my own tent, hoorah, and cook every meal on a fire, hoorah.   When I went trawling around on the internet putting together ideas for activities, it amused me to discover that these days in the northern hemisphere, Scout groups talk about “survival camps” as being something special when the kids have to make their own fire and cook their own food on it.  To Argentinean Scouts, that’s just “going camping”!

   

The bit that is probably going to take me all year to figure out is how to relate to this group of kids.  They have a reputation for eating Scout leaders for breakfast, which is how I’ve ended up with them because they’ve munched through most of the rest of our adult contingent over the last couple of years, and no-one else wants to take them on.  I never planned to work with teens.  But I’m finding that it’s a similar set of skills I think to the ones we are developing in relationship with our Teen – maximise spending time with them, lots of close-watching of reactions and interactions, figuring out when to ignore and when to be robust, and learning to pick the right moment to capitalise on receptivity to any attempted intervention. 

“What was that you were saying to me last night?”  Asked the Teen the next morning.  “I was saying that although we don’t love the idea that you stay at your boyfriend’s house over the weekend, we understand that whatever you do at night time you could just as easily do at three o’clock in the afternoon, and we’d rather you didn’t have to lie to us.  However, what I was saying last night is that you absolutely cannot stay at his house in the week, because you have to be awake enough to go to school, and he has to be in a fit state to go to work, and I don’t won’t to have to go and collect you in the middle of the night, and I definitely don’t want to find you not here when I come to get you up in the morning”. 

There was a long silence.  And then she said “So what you’re saying is that we need to work hard and stay firm in the week, and go out and have fun at the weekend?”  “Exactly”.  And on her face in that second I understood my mistake in assuming that what she has been putting up till now is simple resistance. Astonishing as it may sound, as a kid who life has “happened to”, I am convinced that she had never grasped even so much as the existence of the concept of work-play and responsibilities, let alone understood what we thought we were asking her to buy into. 

Danny’s class wrote a collaborative story this week, so this morning there was a workshop involving parents to come and do some artwork to go with their story.  The story involved a rat, a bunny a fairy, and some cheese.  Everyone else did drawing and colouring, and cutting and sticking around themes of rats, bunnies, fairies and cheese.  Danny’s picture had Father Christmas, three little pigs, a wolf, a reindeer, some ice-cream, jelly, sandwiches, a birthday cake, a car, a train on a track running through the middle, and then he had a little fit because I said I wasn’t sure if we should draw a machine gun.  Taking a positive view, I was impressed that he knows the Spanish for wolf! 

6.30 Wednesday morning we had a film crew in our house.  The secondary school have a media project on called “Camino a la escuela” (route to school) and they are filming ten students from waking up to arriving at school, and then carrying out interviews of family members talking about attitudes to education.  They thought Teen would make an interesting story, so at 6.30 there they were in order to film us “looking natural”.  Normally at 6.30 in the morning Martin would be wearing his pants and I would be wrapped in a towel, so we had to get up early enough to avoid looking quite so natural.  A nice practical illustration of how the presence of an anthropologist changes the story that the anthropologist wants to tell. 

Spent yesterday afternoon taming the Scouts.  This year I have moved up from the 7-11 cub age range to the 11-15 Scouts, who in our group are a particularly uncivilised rabble.  I was surprised at how enthusiastically they got into the idea of constructing tables.  My aim is quite simply for them to start and finish a project, which hopefully might give them enough of a boost to their self-worth to start and finish another one without quite so much pushing and shoving and hitting each other. 

Currently putting the finishing touches to a sermon around Joel 2 and wishing I had taken notes back in 1989 when I sat through three days of Martin Goldsmith teaching on Joel.  Sadly at the time I had no idea what he was talking about, but I expect it was probably brilliant.  Education is wasted on the young.  

Unashamedly stealing someone else’s material because it’s brilliant and because it actually did make me laugh out loud rather than just LOL. 

Brenda was in the fertilized egg business.

She had several hundred young ‘pullets’ to produce the eggs and ten roosters to fertilize them.

She kept records, and any rooster not performing went into the soup pot and was replaced. This took a lot of time, so she bought some tiny bells and attached them to her roosters. Each bell had a different tone, so she could tell from a distance, which rooster was performing.

Now, she could sit on the porch and fill out an efficiency report by just listening to the bells.

Brenda’s favourite rooster, old Butch, was a very fine specimen, but this morning she noticed old Butch’s bell hadn’t rung at all!

When she went to investigate, she saw the other roosters were busy chasing pullets, bells-a-ringing, but the pullets, hearing the roosters coming, would run for cover.

To Brenda’s amazement, old Butch had his bell in his beak, so it couldn’t ring. He’d sneak up on a pullet, do his job and walk on to the next one.

Brenda was so proud of old Butch, she entered him in the Auckland City Show and he became an overnight sensation among the judges.

The result was the judges not only awarded old Butch the "No Bell Piece Prize," but they also awarded him the "Pulletsurprise" as well.

Clearly old Butch was a politician in the making. Who else but a politician could figure out how to win two of the most coveted awards on our planet by being the best at sneaking up on the unsuspecting populace and screwing them when they weren’t paying attention.

Vote carefully in the next election, you can’t always hear the bells.

Our nearest brewery Santa Fe Cerveza has brought out a lager named “Frost”.  We would like to believe that this is in honour of ourselves as fine upstanding members of the community.  A  more probable explanation is that English words are a fashionable way of selling products.  But it looks good on the kitchen table. 

 

Cardboard tube middles of kitchen rolls make a great base for a multitude of kid’s creations.  The rocket and the pirate are Joni’s projects from this week.

Danny is in superhero mode, and this shoebox was just begging to be a castle, so I attacked it with a pair of scissors.  Then I printed out a page of Mike the Knight characters and mounted them on cardboard so they’ll stand up-  Time taken; half an hour, cost; blob of glue and a page of colour printing, his response; priceless. 

I love the fact that my kids enjoy both making things and playing with the things that we have made. 

 

We bought a new wardrobe for the Teen’s room.  She spent an energetic couple of hours yesterday morning shifting furniture around, discarding the second spare bed, and generally transforming the area from spare bedroom alias pigsty, into a Teen bedroom.  I think it represents an important step for her to make the space her own, probably for the first time ever.  

 

Scouts started for the year last week with a “Prueba de Hercules”  (Test of Hercules, I think we might have called it a mini-Olympics or something like that in England).  Joni made his own decision to start as a proper Scout this year now he is old enough at seven.  First weekend camp will be this Friday and Saturday. 

As promised I submitted all my paperwork last Monday, complete with obligatory rubber stamp, in good time for the big meeting last Thursday. 

As predicted, I had to reprint it a couple of times between handing it in and the meeting, in order to incorporate some requested insignificant changes. 

At the meeting, to which I wasn’t invited, I am told they said that my paperwork was in perfect order.  Unlike the paediatrician, who was apparently asked to produce a complete re-write.  On the strength of volume of trees sacrificed, at the meeting, the health provider accepted the case made by the parents and approved the funding for one-to-one classroom support.  So I received a text message late last Thursday evening which said “Ready for work?”  Excellent. 

The next step is meant to be a written plan agreed between myself and the classroom teacher, outlining curriculum content, adaptations, and aims and objectives.  The teacher was not able to see me on Friday, and then Monday and Tuesday were bank holidays (yes, they come in twos these days), so I was told to be at school at twelve thirty today. 

At twelve twenty I arrived, and unsure of where I was supposed to be, I came across the head teacher, who claimed to have no knowledge of who I was, or, more concerning, who the child was, or which class he was in.  She suggested I wait for the teacher to arrive.  When the teacher arrived shortly afterwards, the head appeared to recover from her amnesia.  They stood in a little row of two, and informed me that they had had a meeting this morning, at which they had decided not to start his classroom support for at least another month because they don’t want to damage relationships with the original organisation who had previously provided his support (and subsequently cut it to two hours a week without informing the parents), because the school uses that organisation to carry out other tasks on their behalf. 

I expressed surprise at this decision, and particularly that the mum hadn’t contacted me to tell me about it.  It then transpired that not only did the parents not yet know about it, but that they hadn’t been invited to the meeting, nor indeed were they aware that any meeting had been arranged.  The teacher said that she would tell the mum when she saw her tomorrow.  I said, don’t bother, I’m off to see her right now.  Which probably didn’t earn me any charm points towards the day when or if we ever do have to work in the same classroom, but I was incensed. 

The family live three blocks from the school, so I was in the grocery shop in their front room n under a minute.  “Right” said the mum, “I’m off to sort this out”, and she jumped on her motorbike and I haven’t seen her since.  The Dad, with the weary experience of too many battles fought, said “If you have something else to do today, I should go and get on with it, because nothing will happen right now.  Everyone will have a big row today, and then they’ll call a meeting for another day”.

So that’s where we are tonight, and tomorrow I need to go and find out from the family what happened next and where they are going from here.  Prayer mats at the ready. 

Everyone berates Microsoft, and there are plenty of good reasons to do so, but I have just spent the last couple of days falling in love with Windows Live Movie Maker.  If you thought you were going to remake The Titanic, then you’re in the wrong place.  But for someone with zero experience and even less patience, whose main ambition is to splice a few bits together and add some music to the back, it was absolutely totally what I was looking for.  Clear, obvious and intuitive, I even managed to figure out how to extract a sound track from an existing video on YouTube and save it as an MP3 possibly not entirely legally.  And now I have seven minutes worth of video to tout around a few primary schools over the next week or so, and hopefully recruit this year’s new crop of Scouts. 

The surest sign that you are inextricably acculturated in Argentina?  You have a stamp with your name on it! 

I had to get this made in order to complete the paperwork for the health-care people who might agree to pay me.  Every time I see it it makes me giggle. 

I have yet to understand the fascination with rubber stamps here.  I used to think it was about ensuring the genuine-ness of the signature, until I took my kids to the doctor to complete their school medical papers.  He filled in the form and forgot to stamp and sign it.  So the next day I went back to the clinic and asked if he was there.  Don’t worry, said the receptionist, I can stamp that for you.  She opened a drawer to reveal an array of stamps with the name of probably every single professional who has ever worked at the hospital.  She stamped the paper, and drew a squiggle over the top.  Which leaves me suspecting that the main reasons are probably not a lot more sophisticated than self-importance and looking nice.  Mine is a self-inking variety, and it makes a satisfying ka-chunk sound.

My paperwork went in on Monday, and there is a big meeting that I’m not invited to on Thursday.  After which I should know my fate, or hopefully at least be a bit closer, depending on how many more pieces of paper and rubber stamps they ask for.  Ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk…

I love this.  Sadly I couldn’t manage to credit it to anyone because it’s in too many places so I can’t figure out which is the author.  I found it online this week when I was messing around in a search engine, supposedly looking for something else… Ho hum!

Hey but guess what?  I have a job.  Or I might have.  The late night phone call went “Are you a monotributista?” (that means am I registered as self employed).  To which I said yes.  And she said “Oh, good, I knew you would help me”.   This is a family who I met over the summer, who have a six year old on the autistic spectrum, who happened to be attending the same mainstream summer scheme where I was supporting another six year old also on the autistic spectrum.  We all got on fine and exchanged details at the end, and went our separate ways. 

Now they need a one to one support worker for their kid in mainstream school.  They thought they were all set up for this year but the system has failed them badly. meaning that at the moment the little boy is only actually receiving two hours support once a week.  So parents have gone to war and I have a job. 

I am thrilled to bits.  This year I was determined that I would find a job that fits my skills, and the last few weeks I have been door knocking, networking, talking, Facebook posting, and wallpapering the city with my CV.  Two of my acquaintances here were also posting their CV around after similar jobs.  They both got jobs in a week, despite neither of them having any work experience in the field.  I didn’t get an interview.  When I idly wondered why that might be, one of them mentioned prejudice and discrimination.  A few days later one of them came knocking on my door asking for my ideas on what they might do with the kid that they are supposed to be supporting.  The irony was not lost on me.  So the fact that now this family has sought me out is welcome boost to my frame of mind. 

The bit that isn’t certain is whether their medical scheme will agree to fund me.  Technically they should.  But that doesn’t mean they will.  Or not without a protracted battle.  At the moment we are gathering paperwork to comply with the predictably long list of bureaucratic requirements.  I hope to be able to present my side complete on Monday, after the last couple of days hard graft collecting stamps and photocopies.  And then we’ll see what the health providers will do.  Calling on any prayer warriors out there… thanks!