Giving up expectations

Giving up expectations. I think all of us here have been dealing with it one way or the other since Pim’s announcement last week. The announcement that the way Los Pipitos is organized locally doesn’t meet the standards of the national organization of Los Pipitos nor of ‘Stichting Samen Scholen’. Consequence is that the key will not be handed over until the end of December, with the condition that there is a good organized board of directors, broadly supported by active members.

The next thing was to tell the members of Los Pipitos what is going on, and the facts that led up to the decision. So about 30 people (out of about 100) showed up at the special meeting on Sunday. It’s especially hard for the people that did work hard, like Carmen, Veronica and her daughter Carolina, Don Jimmy, Don Preciliano, Betania, Indira, and of course the volunteers that have been helping at the building site or in other ways. Hopefully the message will motivate the people to organize themselves and to give active support, so the school can open in January when a new school year starts. A new beginning is what we hope for. Meantime we continue with the tasks we came here for.

Like the builders with the construction of the school. And believe me, walls are being put up in no time, thanks to the regular crew, but also thanks to a whole bunch of students doing their ’social practical’, some 30 per day. Building a school here is quite different from building a school in Holland. It’s mainly heavy handwork. The Nica’s are pretty much used to manual labour, we Europeans less I think.

Sandra, whose objective is to enhance exchange of knowledge between the Nica’s and the non-Nica’s asked me to do a workshop on the subject of the relationship between the heavy workload and the use of the body. So I did, together with Marjan. The group was bigger than I expected, but we managed to get the attention of a good deal of the group, there was laughter and we actually got some reactions from Nica people. According to Sandra it went quite good.

As for the therapy part, we continued to do house visits, which mainly means walking about ineffectively searching for the kids on the list. Often we hear: address or person unknown. With the perseverance of our Nica guides (Carmen, Betania, Indira) we manage to get into contact with most of the kids. The list is coming to an end and the next focus will be on the workshops.

This topic was also discussed on the meeting on Sunday. We had made some suggestions for subjects, and the people themselves also came with ideas. Next week we’ll start with a workshop on ‘Sensory Integration’, in other words, how to stimulate the senses of your child in a playful way in order to help it with its development. Four days a week the same workshop will be given in different districts. The intention is to work together with chosen districts coordinators and other interested people so they can continue giving workshops in the future.

Then the activities of daily living. That too is quite an experience. As the well where water is being pumped from is sort of empty, we don’t have running water most of the time. This means that we go to a well nearby to pitch water ourselves and carry it to the house to fill as many containers and buckets as possible. We have a toilet flushing policy and we wash ourselves with a ‘bucket shower’ to save water. Fortunately drinking water is being filtered. Brigida supplies us with sturdy staple food and we buy the extra’s ourselves.

Daily life is also daily fun. The group that has been here from the beginning welcomes newcomers warmly, the atmosphere is super, we play games (‘who is the man’), we drink, we party. Weekends are for going to the beach and for going out. Even the ‘oldies’ Wilma and Maria went dancing and were having fun. Saskia, the interpreter, came on Sunday and is finding her way here. Wilma and I will be leaving on Friday (sniff, sniff) and will come on ‘the wall of fame’. Newcomers will follow us up, some ‘old timers’ (researchers) will leave soon as well, another group will go and visit last year’s project in El Naranjal next week ……. people come and people go. I’ll be reading the following blogs with much interest.

Maria