Day 10

Our friends in San Vicente said good bye to us this morning. Meli and Raul, son of Rotarian Raul, drove us the 20 kilometers over to San Jorge, a community of about 20,000. A little bigger and perhaps less prosperous than San Vicente. We were meet at the Rotary club by a small group including the current president, Fabian, the incoming president, Daniella, and Fabio, Jorge, and a few more. Daniella's grandfather was a founding member of ths club 63 years ago and she will be the first woman president. There are 22 members and three of them women.
After the morning coffee we went off to see a special school and workshop. It is a school for those with multiple disabilities,although only two deaf and one with visual impairments. They work with children in the school (48) and also with students who being mainstreamed (20). They come from all of the surrounding areas. In the morning the students work a normal classes and in the afternoon on life skills. The students are given breakfast, lunch, and afternoon snack and for many that is the only food that day. The state pays the teacher salaries and subsidizes the milk (1.80 pesos) and the food (2.30pesos) per student per day. That comes to 41 cents per day per student. The rest of the food comes from donations; usually they get meat once a month, maybe chicken. The facility is moderate, very clean, and somewhat accessible. The first support and push for the primary school came from Rotary. When that school was up and running, they noticed a need for further training and so with Rotary support the second school was started,  about six years ago, the manual training part. For students from 12 to 18 in the afternoon they work in the garden, cut and heat seal trash bags, and produce marmelades from donated fruits and vegetables. There are a couple of stores in town that sell the bags and marmelades, also the municipality buys the bags and distributes them to the community. The money from the sales goes back into the school. The state pays the salary of the teacher and aides and the school shares bathrooms, kitchen, and other facilities with the primary school.  They also have an operation off campus in a municipal building for filling cell packs with potting mix, they plant seeds, pot them up when grown on and sell the plants. There are 18 students in the afternoon manual training. Rotary has helped start a third level of activity which sounds like a sheltered workshop and also some students have integrated into the local work force as a result of their training here.
Lunch was with our host families. I am staying with SanJay and Lilliana. SanJay is a Hindu from India, met his wife in Perugia, Italy and moved here some twenty years ago. She runs a local pharmacy and travel back and forth to Buenos Aires a lot. He has a PhD from the university in New Delhi, but here has developed his own company of agricultural related chemical and pharmaceuticals. Their two sons are both in university in Buenos Aires, one in medical school. They have two dogs, one, an 11 year old Snausher named Tiger and a younger, bigger, exuberant black lab named Samantha.
After lunch we walked around downtown. San Jorge has a huge athletic club in the center of town, with playing fields, tennis, a preschool, indoor and outdoor Olympic sized swimming pools, two large gymnasiums. Most the schools use these facilities. We watched a gymnast class for girls and boys who were being trained by the father of Fredrico Molinari, the famous Olympian. The kids train 20 hours a week and many go on to national awards. Not so many young men because there are ten times more young women in the program.  The San Jorge Athletic Club in known throughout the country because it is funded by a unique lottery system. There is a monthly subscription fee and by lottery people are given time to use the club. There are some 80,000 members although there are only 20,000 people in San Jorge.
We were received in the municipal House of Culture. It is housed in a renovated building on the square. It was a private movie theater with a very popular bar on the side and billiard room upstairs. It was the place to go downtown, but the family fell on hard times and it was abandoned. The municipality bought and renovated it. It has a 260 seat movie theater. There are meeting rooms and smaller lecture halls available for public use for a whole variety of events and programs. The original theater seated 800 and at this point the theater is just the balcony part of the three-story building. The plan is to eventually open up the rest of the building for use. The municipality also has satellite facilities in some neighborhoods for music,dance, theater, and sports. All of this free activity is paid for by municipal taxes. We met with the Secretary of Culture, a playwright and actor, and the managing director of operations.
We went off to a class for tango dancing. The students were from the school we visited in the morning. They performed some folk dances, the tango, and then Pam, Bekah, Joe, and Stuart learned to tango. The young teacher was very good and everybody had a great time, but we're tired after two hours of dancing.
Bekah went off to a local writers circle in the House of Culture. Joe, Pam, and Stuart went back to their hosts and I went out to eat with Fabian. Before we went to  a restaurant I met his wife Claudia and his three girls. Over dinner we talked Rotary, religion, international politics, and about our families and work. Fabian with his brother run the business started by his father. He is a mechanical engineer and I think he works on big agricultural machinery. He has been a Rotarian for only three years.