Turning around

So we've been having a more mellow time lately. I've been indexing the book, Mac and Sidney have been homeschooling but we've also been spending weekends with local folks. These include Veronique an FLS (ESL) teacher in Perpignan who is an activist that spends the weekend at a farmhouse near the village - with her partner, their son, 7 horses, 2 dogs and 14 cats. Superbon fun. Last weekend we went to an Occupy meeting in Perpignan, then to a dinner at a squatted school where 4 families are living, and then the next day to a protest around Palestinian human rights. Then we drove up to the village and hung out for the next couple of days at the farmhouse, with Vero and her crew, a young Palestinian visitor and Alex and Marina. Alex is Veronique's nephew - an artist and he is here with his love, a Spanish woman Marina - also an artist who has two kids in the village. It was Marina who cut Mac's hair really short.

We had an amazing visit with Meredith and Jamie, old friends from NYC. We took full advantage of their car, went to Elne and played on the beach, drove to Spain for dinner and hiked to the top of nearby mountains. They also helped host a party for neighbours, where Meredith brought out her cool,  plastic trombone - much to the delight of all! 
Anyhoo.. here are some photos.

Sid riding le cheval de Frank et Veronique

Meredith with cheese nose

Nearby Canigou is covered in snow. glorious in the mornings!

Robin Hood practice

Veros kitchen

The boys (with Jamie from NYC) in Elne

Sid the kid and the homeschool experiment.

Oh my god, I'm in Perpignan and am using an application that gives me a picture of a kitten for every 100 words I type. But now I have to type 100 words in order to get that picture! Sidney will be pysched. Which reminds me... many of you have wondered how Sidney has taken to being away from his friends and school this year. Some of you have asked - can you just do that... take your kid out of school for a year?  It appears that the answer is yes. The school board was really fine about it as long as we presented a plan for his education.

There's no doubt that he misses his friends at times, but he really doesn't miss school. I worry that he doesn't like school, which indeed he doesn't as yet. But he does like learning now more than he did when he stopped going to school. His love of science and math in particular is intense. He wants to go to a school that's 'all science class.' He's enjoying multiplication and reading. He likes history okay but likes geography more (though that could be due to cookie bribes and quizzes on maps). We can have fun with french. That said he still has trouble focussing sometimes on doing any particular project with Mac, except for science which tends to be hands on. They collect bugs, read about the French Revolution, learn division and read comic books together. Its pretty cool.

Other changes? His imagination has blossomed. I worry a bit that he's totally in his own world without other kids to challenge him and we tend to indulge him. But its okay. He imagines living on cat world, says he's half cat and builds lego for hours. There's a tad too much weaponry and war stuff in his imaginings, but he gets that partly from his dad. He's also shown a newfound interest in 'stuffies' and imaginary pets without other kids around. In addition, he's become really articulate as well and can try to 'make deals' to get toys better than the best Wall Street broker. But he's happy. He's also less gender-binary-driven, in that he can make friends with girls as easily as boys now, and has less gender oriented color preferences that he had when in school.

So... are we keeping him in a bubble that will damage him in some way? I think not. As soon as he returns to school I'm sure he'll get more than enough information about 'appropriate' play.

All in all, he's doing great.  He takes gymnastics and now an art class in the village (albeit in the hippy bus outside the village) And I got four kitten pictures out of this blog posting! (see writtenkitten.net)

Road Trip to the G20 protests and People's Summit

As most of you know, Mac and I spent a lot of time helping to organize the G20 protests of 2010. It was a wonderful and horrendous experience - that I won't go into here. As things were winding down then, we had begun to plan our trip to France. And then we learned that the G20 was meeting this fall in France. Honestly it wasn't intentional. But because of our recent experiences, we felt it was appropriate to attend the days of action etc etc.


As one can imagine,over the last ten years, there have been long discussions in the global justice movement and associated movements about the utility of protesting at summits. Its obvious that they are highly policed, ritualized encounters that often end up with exhausted and imprisoned activists, and little direct impact on the decision-making itself. And yet it seems wrong to ignore the fact that some of the most powerful actors, who are making decisions about the global economy are all in one place, along with a good helping of international media. Anyway, I wont' go on about this. Its a trap, but a trap we entered into. Many of the grassroots organizations in France had opted out of this one - choosing instead to focus on 'local actions' - which seemed to primarily be local manifestations of the Occupy/Indignado/99% movement. So we knew it wouldn't be a big mobilization. We also knew that Cannes, where the summit was happening was a war zone. There was going to be no way to get there. So we headed for the People's Summit in Nice.

We got there a day late, because of our commitment to Halloween - but when we arrived, we headed for Les Abbatoirs - the old ... erm.. abbatoirs of the city which had been loaned to the organizers of the People's Summit and anti-G20 mobilization. There were workshops going on, a row of port-a-potties, organic beer on tap, and lots of leaflets, flyers etc. We got programmes and stowed our bags and settled in. That first afternoon I attended an amazing meeting that was supposed to be a meeting of movements around the Mediterranean but was expanded to include other movements erupting around the world. There were folks from movements in: Portugal, Tunisia, Israel, Greece, Egypt, France, Wall Street, Belgium, Spain, London, Italy, Canada, Venezuela, Amsterdam, Berlin. Amazing to hear what's going on in their different arenas and figure out how to communicate better. Sage words from the Egyptian fellow
who said "we can get rid of what exists, the question is, we have to be ready to replace it with something better."


That night we met up with our hiphop friends from Toronto, Test Their Logic - who performed to a pretty empty hall - we didn't realize people were outside meeting, and then we went to a local gym to sleep. Sidney is really good with all this. He was quite fascinated to sleep in such a big place, and although there were snores, it was pretty quiet. 


The next day we went to Monaco for a protest against tax havens organized by Attac, a large French organization which has been campaigning around these issues, and for the banking tax for years. It was pretty theatrical, with clowns tying up fake bankers, balloons and confetti. Sidney had a great time. However it disappointed some of the young punks, who wanted something that felt a little more 'direct'. Understandable - it was a media spectacle, but one that was relatively well done. 


The next afternoon mac went to a bunch of workshops that he found interesting on climate justice movements etc. But both of us were disappointed that outside of the 99%/Arab 'spring' discussion participants I'd met, most of the people were either pretty staid NGO folks or young drunk punks. 


A couple of points on the culture of the meetings that differed from what we're used to
1. no other little kids. Seriously. none. weird. 
2. serving beer and wine all day in meetings will influence some people more than others. Those people will want attention. 
3. simultaneous translation of everything into french, spanish, english and arabic is amazing. 
4. people still smoke in meetings here. I can just imagine a discussion of 'fragrance free!'
5. the police are really serious here. On the turn of a dime, they whip out giant pepper cannisters, launchers of tear gas, and they pull on masks. They were ready to rumble and its a bit of a miracle that confrontations didn't ensue. 



The final day we went to two small demos - one on Tibet and an ATTAC die-in at a bank. Small, symbolic but spirited is really the best way to describe them.


And off we went in the rain to Marseille, and then back to Perpignan. It was raining cats and dogs throughout the whole week and we spent a good night in a cheap hotel drying out and cleaning up. aahhh. 


 

Halloween pics