Day 9

They were extremely accommodating and changed the schedule to allow Pam to visit Shenandoah's sister university in Rosales about two hours away. Joe and Stuart went with her and Guillermo. This was high on Pam's list to do, but we weren't sure how to make it happen, but the folks in San Vicente were great. Bekah and I went with Beblo and Melina to visit a country school. It is the school in Los Sembradores only about 5 kilometers away, out where the railroad used to stop. Most of the land has been sold or rented out to large soybean operations and the old family houses torn down. It is a three room school around a patio with seventy students. The children have breakfast and morning snack and lunch there. The have a kindergarten room, but the rest of the students are mixed from first to sixth grade. Transportation is a big problem and so a parent may bring a first grader and an older child all at once to avoid making more that one trip. Some of the instruction is for everyone and some of it is for individual students according to their level of development. The head teacher was trained and worked at a secondary school in San Vicente, but came here accepting the challenge of a poor school with limited resources. The Rotary has helped with equipment and supplies and Beblo obviously has an attachment to this school and Melina's mother was born out here, forty two years ago. There is a kinder teacher, the main teacher and director and two auxiliary teachers. The major focus is to open mental and developmental doors for children that live in a pretty closed in world. It is amazing that so close to San Vicente where the is some of everything the mentality is so different. They do a lot with stories and songs. They use knitting and handicrafts as tools to teach arithmetic. Bekah was in her element and with everyone seated around her was able to tell one of her stories to the kids in Spanish. We think they got most of it. They do have satellite Internet and that encourages them to dream big. Also they can have computer classes. While we were in the patio for story time some older students printed out pictures of us in the classroom with some pictures of the school and gave each of us a copy. Also they have a unique custom of having visitors make their hand prints in tempera on a sheet of paper and write a little note. They have a ledger of these pages to remember visitors by. The school used to subsist on local community support. Now they get some state and federal support, but not a lot. I got the feeling that Rotary helps a great deal.
We then returned to San Vicente to La Casa de Cultural which house the library. There were two local authors there to meet with us and talk about writing. One older woman, Lidia, writes both novels and children's stories. She has won national prizes for her stories and the two she described were quite wonderful.  She is looking for an illustrator for a collection of these stories and we were able to recommend Vanina who we met in Sunchales. The other writer, Marcela, has two published novels and also writes historical essays and commentaries. We had a good time with them, especially Bekah. This whole week an important international writers convention has been going on in Buenos Aires and the librarian gave Bekah a collection of children's stories written by children, the winners of a national competition.
Lunch with Rosa, Victoria, and her mother. Victoria was a team member to Arizona and team leader to Wisconsin and northern Michigan. We talked about copper mining, pasties, the Great Lakes, and international politics. The food from her mother was cannelloni and outstanding. Poached apples and pisco to finish.
We got a bit of a break before the afternoon activities. The plan for the evening involves the team making American food for our hosts and we settled on meat loaf, green beans, mashed potatoes, apple pie with ice cream. Unfortunately, three of us were off to Rosario, 1.2 million people, the Chicago of Argentina, which messed up the schedule. Also the schedule really didn't allow time for the pies to bake. So at 5:00 Bekah and I went to Equinoterapia which is therapy adjunct and fun for children and young adults with disabilities. It is what we have with " Ride with Pride" in the county. They generally operate on Saturday, have a large field with a riding ring behind a farm machinery factory (donated) and in conjunction with professional therapies use horses for kids with disabilities. The horse wrangler is an older fellow, Raul Ruben Rossi,  who has been doing this for the past seven years and last year got the Rotary Vocational Service Award. Blind children learn balance riding a horse. Autistic children develop a relationship with a big non-threatening creature, and we watched a four year old with sever spinal deformities develop some leg strength, improve his posture, be able to hold his head up, and have a great time in a short time while on a horse with a therapist. A 31 year old was there learning to control his horse developing confidence. He is a graduate of IADIS and works during the day in a larger recycling operation where he get support and a salary. A bit like Vector. There are 15-20 volunteers that do the work,  six of them are professionals in various fields.  They have 16 or 17 horses and do a nice job.
Meanwhile the rest of the team got back from Rosario and started working in Griselda's kitchen. Gris is the host for Pam and Bekah. We picked up Stuart and went to visit the professional Institute CreSer. That is a play on words as "crecer" is to grow or create and "ser" is to be. In a nicely restored old house six professionals have a interdisciplinary center for treating a variety of disabilities. There is a psychologist, audiologist, nutritionist,  physical therapist, pedagogy expert,  and psychotherapist. They work together to diagnose and treat developmental problems in children. They all have university degrees and it is remarkable to see this kind of resource in such a small community. Usually, people would have to go to Rafaela or Rosario. We watched a couple os sessions with indiduals. The doctora was going to be working later that evening with a boy who is deaf and mute. It turns out that each province has its own set of signs for sign language. There apparently is no universal sign language used in the country and so when the president's speeches are signed on tv only the deaf population of Buenos Aires can read the signs. The  last visit of the day was to an academy that teaches English. The school is celebrating forty years of teaching. The students were mostly teenagers with good English. They knew we were coming and had lots of questions in English. Many of the Rotary team members had learned their English there. We were able to talk about life for teenagers in the states, the problems of learning a foreign language, different dialects and speech patterns in different parts of the country, and the value and benefits of learning to think in another language. Nice young people and obviously well taught.
Back to Griselda's house where the pies were coming out after some difficulty in converting english to metric in the recipies and the problem of too many cooks in the kitchen. But all turned out well. All of our hosts and most of the club came and we had dinner with wine and afterwards they had hired a dancer to teach the tango. What wonderful people and how relaxed it all was. There should be great pictures and I think they enjoyed us as much as we enjoyed them and their amazing community. It certainly was an example of the fellowship aspect of Rotary.