Jump right in, folks.
Saturday night I hung out with Fernando, who worked at the hostel I was staying at then, and his friends; I spent a long while listening to them chatter in Argentine youth Spanish without understanding a word (well, I got “boludo”), as they smoked atop the hostel roof, and ate pizza with jam and olives. After a while, I ended up with Fernando and two of his friends at this tiny club behind a restaurant; one of the girls’ friends was playing in a band there. It was drumming music, and it was really cool to hear; Rachel and her friends took me to (La Bomba de Tiempo) Konex on Monday night, which was very similar, but much more touristy. Konex had at least a thousand people; this had maybe 100 Argentine kids, and was very dark. Both were great; Fernando and I danced and tried to talk a little, but his English was about as bad as my Spanish. Monday I moved into my new place. Tuesday and Wednesday were calm.
Since, after all, work starts early.
So my day begins at 6:30 AM, since there’s no room on the 6:30 combi and thus I “have” to take the 8 AM one (thank God). I awaken, shower in the tiny bathroom of Elena’s apartment where I am staying, trying to be quiet so I don’t awaken Omar (he’s nice; I’d just feel bad). (Oh, right — I’m in an apartment on Paraguay, between Vidt & Salguero; it’s reasonably nice.) I make toast on the stove-top toaster, and spread some dulce de leche and some jam on bread and run out the door. I walk five blocks or so to the Bulnes stop on the D line, catch the D subte towards Congreso de Tucumán, and get off at Juramento.
It’s another 15 minutes walk to FLENI, where I get there early enough to read for five minutes while I await the combi. It’s quite prompt, considering that people rely on it to make it to work on-time (or maybe just because FLENI is FLENI), and I sleep on the van on the way there, because dammit it’s early.
Generally I drink a coffee from the machine in the kiosk once I get there — $.75 for a cup, and that’s in pesos. And then I walk back to CETNA, to the school, to Aula 5 which is also Maria’s office. I leave my bag in the back, and talk to Maria about what I’m going to do today.
This week Belén is not around because she’s been sick, and a lot of working with children with special needs involves placing your face very near theirs, so — no Belén. Thus I followed Paola and watched as she played basic language games with Ernesto, a smiling nine-year-old with a buzz-cut and a quick-turning head. He’s a little bit beyond some of the games he was playing, which is to say he knows the date and he knows the day and what it’s like outside, and when you have his attention he can say them. Watching is perhaps not the best word — I was vaguely involved, but peripheral; I was someone to involve when he wasn’t paying attention.
Floortime is different, and that’s what I’m here for, after all; at 10 and 1, I helped Maria with two floortime sessions. The first was diagnostic, and we played with Lucia on the mats, getting her to ask us to eat plastic-food. DIR diagnosis involves watching how children interact, looking at eye contact, noticing whether they initiate or not, observing the type of play, and placing them at levels in comparison to their age — for a gross simplification of something that, I’ll remind you, I’m observing in Spanish. Lucia comes back on Wednesday, and we play with her again — she tosses balls across the room, and we yell for them, “Amarillo! Donde estas, amarillo?” Lucia has troube initiating games, and her play is not symbolic as it should be at her age, but she’s delayed only, thinks Maria, not PDD. Next week, Maria and the fonoaudoloigio (I misspelled that I’m sure; speech therapist) and the OT and the Neurologist and whoever else will meet and discuss a diagnosis.Wednesday morning I had the privelege of watching musicoterapia, Music Therapy, which primarily involved a pretty young woman with a guitar singing to kids who are semi-engaged, but was beautiful to watch. They began with a little song, one for each of the kids: «Hola, Santi, hola y como estas? Con la mano arriba, nos vamos a saludar.» I’ll sing it to you if you ask nicely.
Today Maria sent me home early (well, I’d been there four-and-a-half hours only) because she had nothing left to do, but I spent the morning talking with her about Lucia, above, and about FLENI’s design; I got to watch some of the other kids, and spent some time reading aticles from Greenspan & Wieder she’d assigned me, and one on the changing paradigm of autism therapy. I’m really proud of how well I can get through these articles on autism; I’m also reading Harry Potter y la Piedra Filosofal, which is surprisingly easy going. (I think my written-Spanish is a little ahead of my spoken, eh). At the end of the day, I took part in a class Maria is giving to the young women who are doing a year of training (not quite, but similar to, a residency) at FLENI on Floortime; she talked to them about how development is supposed to go, and showed videos of infants engaging — it’s a really good thing that I know the basic terms here, or this would’ve been impossible going, but once I’ve got «desarrollo» (development) and a few others like «enganchar» (engage, as they use it) or «vinculos» (connections, more or less), I’m understanding at least the generalities of the conversation.
The woman who drove me home this afternoon was one of the others in that session, and we spoke most of the drive, about psychology and languages and how therapy works here. In general, I think we understood each other which is sort of amazing when you think about it.
As has been pointed out, perhaps my internship leans more towards the Global Citizenship part of the CPGC’s mission at Haverford, but I’m learning so much about psychology, and I feel like the people at FLENI are happy to have me there, even if my position functions more as validation than as help. I don’t know if that makes sense; I’m going to take a nap. Tonight Rachel and I are hopefully going to a club for my first time since I’ve been here; tomorrow I am going to the public hospital to observe for a day. Life is interesting. More about social things next time, perhaps.