Getting to grips
Last Saturday morning, Andrés tried to sell me a duck. Andrés is one of our neighbours, aged 12, and my son’s friend. I met him on the path outside my house.
“Do you want this duck? Only five thousand pesos and she’s healthy and lays eggs,” said Andrés with a winning smile.
The duck was black and white, green and shiny, fat and friendly.
“No thanks,” I said.
My son, Laury, was there too. “Oh go on, mum, buy me the duck!” he said, about five times.
My replies ranged from “we’ll see” to “where will we put it?” to “no” to “I said NO!”. (Consistency was never my strong point).
The Duck
I went home. Half an hour later Laury and his dad arrived, holding the friendly duck.
“A bargain!” they said. “Only 3 thousand pesos!”
So duck and I had to make friends (I complained a bit first, though).
I don’t have a pond, and there is a steep terraced slope leading down from my patio. This of course is not ideal territory for a less than agile, not to say dumpy, fowl. Until Laury’s dad dug it a hole, covered it with plastic and filled it up, it was – well, a duck out of water.
a duck out of water …
And perhaps it’s a tired cliché, but this is a bit how I have felt while getting to grips with my work.
I sometimes wonder what people think when I introduce myself at Education Secretariat training days or when I stand up and introduce the early childhood programme to a roomful of parents and fidgeting toddlers, ever conscious of stumbling over words and making grammatical mistakes in Spanish.
Do they think: “What’s this foreigner doing working for a government-funded programme in our country?” If so, they mostly hide it well, apart from a few giggles. Some mothers have even complimented me on my Spanish while filling in the forms to sign their children up, and people have been respectful and helpful towards me. .. but they must find it strange.
Signing up for the early childhood programme in Filandia
Maybe I should fill you in about the programme I’m helping to run. As I said last time, it’s a programme aimed at children of disadvantaged rural families and their care givers, and we will be implementing this programme in five municipalities in one of the provinces. The towns concerned have populations of fewer than 30,000 inhabitants and are located in the mountainous areas (“cordillera”) which are often guerrilla strongholds. Surrounding the towns are villages, hamlets and isolated farms. Getting to and from these places can be difficult, transport is not reliable or cheap, and the inhabitants do not have easy access to many basic services, such as children’s services.
This is the raison d’être of this programme, to provide care to this most disadvantaged section of the rural population. We will be giving weekly workshops with groups of up to 15 under-fives and their carers (mother, father, grandmother, aunt) who will learn about early childhood development and, as a group, generate ideas about how to stimulate that development. And the educator and assistant teams will also be visiting the families’ houses to reinforce the work done in the group in a more intimate setting and to observe the family dynamic at home. All in a supportive and relaxed atmosphere with lots of play!
The programme is based on a policy which underlines the importance of all actors involved in early childhood working together. So we will be calling on health professionals, the police, local councils, cultural services and many more to help us out and get involved. Another component is providing a nutritional supplement to the children and to expectant and breastfeeding mothers.
My tasks so far have been various and challenging. For example, I gave my first job interviews, and it was strange sitting on the other side of the interview table, recognising myself in the initially nervous faces, voices and laughs of the candidates. With the help of the Fundación’s director, I organised and ran a training day about a programme I had only recently discovered. Aided by the accounting assistant, I’ve had to draw up a budget, including salaries for a staff of 14; I have to make sure people are doing their work, and regularly travel to the cordillera towns in order to liaise with the local supervisors (civil servants of the local authorities) and our teams in each place, and to facilitate community meetings. Hard work, but fascinating, and luckily the Fundación’s board is fully supportive.
We start on the 27th May, so in the next installment I’ll tell you how that goes.
I still don’t know where the money is coming from to begin the activity, as the Ministry will not be paying up for another couple of months. There is talk of getting a loan as we are functioning on zero pesos. I have already had to ask for money from Susila Dharma, which is also a novel experience for me! More on that another time.
Meanwhile, I feel like a duck (swan?) moving through the water – quite calm on the surface, but paddling frantically underneath.
Solen Lees
You could name the duck Frieda.