Third World Green Daddy 26: A year of Sam

In December my son had his first birthday. This was at once an occasion to look back on all the things that we've shared over the past year, as well as to consider the person my son has become, and the upcoming milestones and challenges he'll be facing. One year before, on the night of the full moon and the winter solstice, my son had pushed his way out into the world. He made me a more complete person, reminded Caro of the sweeter moments of motherhood, and brought his teenage sister Gabri back towards a more sane, stable life. He has been a blessing in every sense.

We had a modest party, with my mother, our immediate family (my wife, son, stepdaughter, and nephew), and my wife's sister's family. There weren't too many gifts, which was just fine with me, and seemed not to bother Sam. A few days later, though, Sam's great aunt came by with gifts from that whole side of the family. There were pants,



educational rubber blocks (which have come to be one of Sammy's favorite things to play with),


and a stool that his aunt in Cali made and painted for him.



My mother also brought him a classic book from Chicago, which he proceeded to rip the cover of immediately:


This first birthday marked a lot of big changes in Sam's life as well. For one, he started walking. Maybe two days after his birthday, he became able to stagger up to four or five steps between people, before falling into the arms of the receiving person. He'd long been scooting around on his butt, and he still preferred this method of locomotion up until a week or two ago, but his birthday was when he really started the path to independent walking. Our Christmas season was hectic, with a lot of staying at other people's houses, their staying at our house, and babies and kids running around everywhere. I think this might explain a temporary regression of Sam's, whereby during a few weeks of steady walking progress he decided he wasn't interested in it anymore. But after the holidays he picked up where he left off, and now he runs all over the house on his own.

Since his birthday Sam has advanced on the big boy front in terms of talking and shitting, too. He makes all sorts of sounds now, and sometimes when he says "Da" I think he's actually referring to me. "Mamama" corresponds to about 90% of things he identifies, but I also think he sometimes really means it to refer to his mother. As for pooping, by now he's an old hand at pooping on his potty. He still has accidents, but for the most part our days of washing shit out of his diapers are done for. This is a good thing, as he now eats solid food like a Viking.

Another milestone was his getting off of formula. Since June we'd be supplementing his breastmilk with bought formula, and since October we'd made an on-the-spot logistical decision in Chicago to stop breastfeeding him. But by December he was putting down bottles and bottles of formula every day, costing us something like $50US in formula every week! This coincided with a difficult economic juncture for us, so my wife made the executive decision to start giving him just regular milk. We have relatives that buy formula at a deep discount from Bogota's central street market. Presumably it's smuggled across from Venezuela, or stolen, or adultered, in order to achieve the lower price. I prefer neither to play with my child's health, nor to support the illicit activities that plague our country and fund some of the worst elements of society.

Actually what Sam drinks now isn't straight milk but rather colada, a concoction of boiled whole milk mixed with flour from grains or beans, and a bit of panela molasses (though he doesn't like it too sweet). The amount of flour you throw in is so little that I don't think it adds much nutrition, but it does make the milk thicker. If it were up to me he'd just drink straight milk, as I find it a bit cumbersome to make the colada mix, but colada is a typical thing that Colombians give to their weaned babies, and usually I'm not the one that has to mix it up. I'm actually warming to the colada thing, despite the extra labor involved. On my recent trip to Peru I bought a special Andean mix of quinoa, kiwicha (amaranth), maca (a radish-like root with virile strengthening properties), soy, corn, sesame, and wheat, and we mix this with another flour mix of barley, wheat, corn, rice, and oats. So Sam is now consuming 10 different grains from 6 different botanical families every time he drinks his bottle. I like the diversity of it.

The last big milestone, which we haven't totally embarked on yet, is sending Sam to day care. We've had a full-time babysitter for the past year now, but we think it's time for Sam to get out there and be with other kids (and for us to save some money!). As far as I've been able to understand, Colombia's public education system doesn't really extend to preschool and nurseries. There are nursery schools set up by parents or other groups that get funding and oversight from the Colombian Institute for Family Well-being (like DCFS in the US), which are usually set up for and required to give priority to the lowest-income tiers of society. There is also a plethora of private nursery schools, some of them pretty straightforward, and others with pretentious claims of self-actualizing pedagogy, so your 6-month-old can learn from an early age to believe that his shit doesn't stink.

I've always been an advocate of public schooling, because I think it's a good value, you learn what you need to, and you don't get as much of the superfluous classist bullshit that differentiates private schools. On top of that, public schools expose kids to a wide range of people, from different economic and social backgrounds. Even in the notoriously poor, predominantly black Chicago Public School system, I met wealthy kids, destitute kids, people from broken families, well-adjusted people, Hindus, Jews, Baptists, Muslims, blacks, whites, Pakistanis, and everyone in between. Try getting that kind of social exposure in an East Coast boarding school!

In my experience in Chicago and now in Colombia, it's often seemed to me that private schools are no better than public schools in terms of learning (in fact, many private schools are where parents send their mediocre or screw-up kids that no one else will put up with), and that the main difference is an aura of superiority. In Colombia, for instance, there is a flowering of supposedly bilingual schools (often located on the semirural periphery of cities, with names in English like "Country Day School") that any outside observer can see are a total scam, with poorly-qualified teachers and an unimaginative teaching style, but that make their buck by convincing parents that they're really exclusive, that they'll set their children apart from the plebeian masses. Maybe my kid would be better off with the types of elite social connections that a private school education can bring, but I think people should get jobs and recognition based on their own personal merit, not based on the oligarchs they buddy around with. I've seen in Colombia that even private schools that don't explicitly play this elite class card often produce graduates that just aren't quite as aware of their belonging to a larger society, of the same rules applying to them as to everyone else.

So I would like Sam to go to one of the semi-public preschools. I don't really believe that there is going to be much difference in terms of educational outcomes between one place and another, as long as they all meet some basic guidelines of a qualified, patient staff, some toys and stuff to play with, and other kids to interact with. I don't aspire for Sam to begin a heavy academic indoctrination from this tender age anyway, and frankly I think that even later on, most of his learning (book-learning and otherwise) will occur outside the classroom. If I'm right, then basically school, and especially preschool, is a time to learn how to interact with other people, to live in society. I want Sam to be around normal kids, not the children of the economic or intellectual elite, and certainly not the children of normal mooks who want to put on airs as if they were elite.

This may not be possible in our case, as simple as a desire as it seems. The semi-public nursery schools have limited space and are in high demand, and give preference to people from economic strata 1 or 2. Colombia has a system of economic strata going from an indigent 0 to a super-wealthy 6. You pay different rates for electricity, water, health, etc. depending on your strata. Depending on how our work contracts are panning out, and how many dependents we're supporting at a given time, my wife and I oscillate between maybe a low 3 to a low 4. We're not a priority for any social services, but we don't have enough money to pay for the privatized version of everything! We missed the first registration period, so in the next week we'll have to drop by the two public schools in our neighborhood and see if anyone who had registered didn't ante up the first tuition installment, in which case we'd have an in.

In the worst case we'll just send Sam to one of these private preschools in our zone. Though I'd prefer he do his schooling in the public system, I'm not too dogmatic about it for preschool. I went to a private Jewish preschool in my neighborhood in Chicago before heading on to a K-12 to masters degree path entirely in the public system, and I turned out okay. Furthermore, Sam will only be in Bogota for a month or two more, so what I should really be working on is finding a place for him in our real hometown. Even once he gets to grammar school, who knows if the limited space in the public system will allow us to send him to a public school? In Colombia, the public schools seem not to have room for everyone. They are designed with the understanding that a sizeable percentage of kids will go to private institutions. Nevertheless, we're really going to try to go public with Sam as he moves up the educational ladder. We pay our taxes, and we should be able to reap their benefits!

One last funny thing that we dug up right around Sam's birthday was the OLPC computer. OLPC stands for One Laptop Per Child, a project started a few years ago to provide cheap laptops to schoolchildren in the Third World. It is a really inspiring idea, bringing together engineers, designers, teachers, and learning experts to make a tool that actually helps foster sound, critical thinking. My father and I thought the idea was cool, and one Christmas they had this special deal whereby you could pay for a computer of your own in addition to a donation to one of their programs. Anyway, the computer is petite, kid-sized, and very durable. It has a sealed rubber keyboard, a swiveling screen readable even in bright African savannah conditions, and a powerful pair of Wifi pickups. There are no internal moving parts--no hard drive, no motors--and just two cables within the entire thing. So it's made to last.

Anyway, for years I've had the laptop my dad and I got in our apartment here in Colombia, though it never saw the light of day. A few months ago I thought to bring it out for Sam to play with, but I had a big surprise--the thing didn't turn on! I don't know if Sam was rough on it, or it just wore out with time, or what, but I thought it was pretty funny that my deprived little Third World son was capable of busting the indestructible computer! He even ripped off one of the rubberized keys. So now the OLPC computer is really just a simulation of a computer. It looks and feels like a computer, but it doesn't compute. Nevertheless, Sammy enjoys playing with it, mimicking the hours his folks are on their laptops working.