Today after a walk on the beach, a good lunch, and some painting, Ella filled a page with lower case gs. Well, she didn’t exactly fill the page. She wrote 36 of them. 2 were upside down. She just couldn’t finish that last line. Repetition isn’t for everyone. Practicing a skill over and over again is not something our household is very good at. We like to take the uncharted path, constantly optimizing, always searching. Part of the challenge of these lessons is to come up with activities that are novel and interesting but still building the skills she needs to move on. Ella likes a healthy mix of the familiar alongside new information and it’s hard to know the recipe that will keep her engaged. Simply doing this practice every day (almost) is an amazing challenge for both of us. We are both hanging in there – some lessons are short but we show up every time.
Though our life in the suburbs of Boston tends to be quite steady and safe, Ella has grown to be very good at managing lots of different kinds of people. She is continuously exposed to the very young and the very old, different languages, different economic and social strata, different levels of hygiene, different political views, etc… For example, last night we had dinner at the olive yard farm house with a representatives from around the world. There was the couple from Germany and their local Italian friends (all met while both working in South Africa tweny years ago). There was my father in law’s longtime Moroccan (and devout Muslim) house-keeper and her cousin’s family visiting from Paris. The three kids didn’t speak a word of English or Italian but Ella played with them all night without a hitch. She was generous, helpful, flexible, and happy. There was also our British/German au pair alongside us – an Italian-American couple from the Boston area. All inside the walls of our Sicilian farmhouse eating arancini, cudduruni, watermelon, and beer.
Sicily has been a cross-roads for many races, cultures, and dominating classes forever, most notably African and Arab countries. In recent years, Arab and African immigrants have been pouring in on rickety wooden boats in the 1000s. It’s a humanitarian disaster as most don’t make the trip and Sicilian fishermen have been pulling up many kilos of human skeletons in their nets.
The mix of cultures is evidenced in the Sicilian dialect, the food, and the religious practice. My husband’s family name, Taibi, means ‘good’ in Arabic. There is cous cous in Trapani. The famous Sicilian cassata dessert is Arabic in origin. The patron Saint of nearby Agrigento, San Calogero, is black. Sicilians have to be tolerant to survive. Diversity is an artform here that is expressed in the food, the fabric of everyday life, and hardship of both citizens and non-citizens alike. There are many that could learn a lot about tolerance and diplomacy by spending a few weeks eating with Ella at our table.
Distractions/Tangents:
· Alex Linder wikipedia biobraphy - the owner and operator of the Vanguard News Network (VNN), an antisemitic, white supremacist website
