Attention, Wal-Mart!

Let me tell you a story, a very familiar story. You are awakened at 3 in the morning by your three-year old, who announces, as best he can, that he has diarrhea. You sigh, get up, go to the bathroom, and yes—there it is. You wash the child, put him to bed, and wait for the inevitable. Sure enough, two days later, again at 3 AM, you’re at your local hospital. You wonder how much, if any, sleep you can get before you drag off to work….

Let me tell you a story, a very familiar story. You are awakened at 3 in the morning by your three-year old, who announces, as best he can, that he has diarrhea. You sigh, get up, go to the bathroom, and yes—there it is. You wash the child, put him to bed, and wait for the inevitable. Sure enough, two days later, again at 3 AM, you’re at your local clinic in a small town in rural Zambia, where there are no medicines. Your gut wrenches: your child may very well die. You trudge home, passing as you go small shops, all of which have Coca-Cola for sale.

There are people who have the word “why” wrapped tightly around every strand of their DNA, and my guess is that Simon and Jane Berry—two retired people who had a little to go off and save humanity—are two such people. And their question, as you can guess, is “why can a town have Coca-Cola but not have medicines? If the Coca-Cola can get there, why can’t a simple, cheap diarrhea kit that could save a kid’s life get there? Why do one in five kids in parts of Africa die of diarrhea before they reach the age of five?”

The nice thing about the why people is that they keep on asking questions, frequently driving everybody else who is just trying through the day, dammit, nuts. So Mr. and Mrs. Berry—they’re British, so no “Simon” or “Jane” here—asked, “why don’t we use the extra space in the crates of Coke to get the diarrhea kits up to the stores that sell the Coca-Cola? 

Presto, mágico! (And I’m sure it wasn’t that easy….)

Tremendous idea, right? The Berrys had designed the kit to fit between the bottles of Coca-Cola. And the kit—which contains basic salts, soap, and a towel—is relatively cheap; as I recall, it costs about a dollar to produce the kit, and it’s a nice little moneymaker for the shopkeeper, with a good margin.

Unbelievably, the Berrys succeeded in getting the attention of Coca-Cola, and they met with them and learned about their distribution chain. That frequently looks like this:

Well, the whole thing seemed like a great idea, when I was pondering the problem of what to write about last July, and also wondering what to do about my brother John and his wife Jeanne, who have:

1.     everything

2.     birthdays in early July

So it seemed like a good idea—why not donate 10 dollars every month? What’s ten bucks to me? So I called John and Jeanne up on vacation and told them about it, and then I forgot that I / they were making the donation. (Just as an aside, isn’t it criminal that we are living in a world where ten dollars is nothing for some, and everything for others?)

Well, among the people for whom the ten dollars is nothing are Bill and Melinda Gates—I’m presuming no introductions needed—who, so says the email the Berrys sent me, agreed to screen a documentary of the project in Seattle last month. Nice!

In fact, I also have a fair amount of “why” bred in the marrow of my bones, and I spent seven years at a company even bigger than Coca-Cola making everybody completely crazy. And when Wal-Mart could bear it no more, they showed me the door; there are, however no hard feelings.

So here are my questions, presented in good business English as a bulleted list:

·     Why doesn’t Wal-Mart partner with ColaLife (the Berrys’ organization)?

·     Why not sell the kit in Wal-Mart (the cost of Pedialyte at Walgreens—sorry, but it’s closer—is six bucks, so what a Volume Producing Item! Wow—better than those Moon Pies!)?

·     Why not donate one dollar for every kit sold to Colalife, thus letting the developed world help the undeveloped world?

There’s something about the Internet that makes people go nuts, and a good example I draw from the comments section of the “About ColaLife” page:

The third world government should tax coca cola and other multi nation corporations at proper rates according to their level of profits. This tax then should be use to supply medicine and infrastructure for the maufacture and distribution of medicines,

These half ass aid program does very little to truly alleviate underdevelopment or promote progress. These programs only continue the dependency and underdevelopment of Africa.

Tax coca cola and other multinational like they do in the west and use the money for medicines and infrastructure.

Ouch—as much for the grammatical errors and typos, as for the content. Fortunately, Mr. Berry is a more temperate soul, and does a neat job of first agreeing with him, and then—gently—demolishing him.

In fact, I think the Berrys’ ideas are a breakthrough on several levels—not the least of which is to combine the private sector with public health.

Now then, Wal-Mart, you guys in?

Naïa Gets an Uncle

Contrary to the calumnies darting from the vicious tongues of asps and vipers, it was never about a slice of pizza.

Naïa, you see, the 12-year-old daughter of Lady and Nico, the owners of the café which I frequent (it’s sort of a stretch to say “where I work”), had offered me a piece of pizza, at the instigation—I later found out—of her mother. “Make sure Marc gets a piece,” said Lady, before tearing off a ten-dollar bill from the wad in her purse. Naïa, fortunately, is still a few steps away from adolescence, so rather than argue, pout, flare, or stalk away, she popped across the gift shop and into the café to offer me the pizza.

“You are now officially my niece,” I told her, on the way to the pizza. She was with Stephen, her tutor, and the two were busy cramming useless information in her head, so that she could take a test before forgetting it all. Remember that?

So I returned to writing what I was writing, and she returned to renting brain space to geography, or whatever The World and Its People is about. Then Lady arrived, and I told her I had adopted Naïa as my niece.

“Wonderful,” said Lady

“Not really,” I said. “I intend to be a completely cranky and querulous uncle. Very exigent. Oh, and she’ll have to take care of me in my declining years….”

So Lady went off to consult with Naïa about all that, and then came back with the news: I had just said what I did because of the offer of pizza.

“That is absolutely untrue,” I erupted. “Dammit, when are people going to stop assuming that random events are causal? I’ve been very seriously pondering adopting Naïa for some time now.”

At this point, Naïa was doing a spelling test—one of the words, by the way, was “serendipity” and that’s a word for a 12-year old?—so I decided to tackle it later, though I did wonder whether putative niecehood (well, computer, what’s YOUR suggestion? It’s bitch, bitch, bitch all day from you!) wasn’t more important than spelling.

I went back to considering the topic of family, since it’s been different, often, for gay people. More than most people, we’ve tended to form our own, informal families, especially in those days when coming out to parents and siblings was impossible, or very difficult.

It was a long time ago, and we’ve all gotten over it, but for some of us it’s happening still, and will never stop. But twenty-five years ago, the phone would ring, there would be silence when I answered, and then a click.

“Your mom called,” I would tell Raf. Eventually, he confronted her: “Mami, Marc knows perfectly well that it’s you…”

There were other things: Raf was barred from seeing his nephew, who was probably four or five at the time. And when we moved to Puerto Rico, I wasn’t welcome in the house.  And so, on one of those early Christmas Eves, I found myself alone in the house: Raf had gone home to his parents, and the other people living in the building were gone as well.

It was a particularly beautiful night, with a gentle fog, and the streets were deserted, hushed. Everybody, it seemed, had gone home to family; in a few hours time, everybody would rush back in to the old city, and the partying would start. But now, it was just me, alone in an empty house.

And then, far away, I heard music approaching, and realized that it was that loveliest of traditions—a group of neighbors gathering with guitars and güiros, walking the streets and singing the old-fashioned Puerto Rican carols, called villancicos or aguinaldos.

Let me explain, this was not the traditional parranda, or maybe, in fact, it was. Because the usual parranda tends to take place a 2 AM, when you are dead asleep, and your friends? Dead drunk!

They then gather outside your house and make enough noise—ostensibly called singing—to rouse you. They then shout “¡ASALTO!”—assault, which is almost literally true. You then have to start making the asopao—a rice and chicken stew, and very tasty—while your “guests” raid your liquor cabinet. The only good thing about it? You can retaliate the next night, when they’ll really be groggy.

But there was none of this about the group singing carols; it was before nine PM, the group was singing almost under their breath, and exchanging greetings with whatever passerby was on the street. Really, the carols seemed part of the fog, and the fog seemed part of a past: a gentle, sweet past that would disappear at any moment. It was spectral.

I stood by the window and listened. And felt, of course, anguishingly alone. I considered going out to join them, but couldn’t—I didn’t speak Spanish.

It feels disloyal even to remember this, much less write about it. Why? Well, I was playing my Bach suites yesterday in the café, next to Naïa; Lady and Craig joined us.

“You know, Naïa, I was utterly serious about being an uncle, which is definitely not good for you, since I’m generally wretched at the business. In fact, we should probably start right now….”

I then put on my crotchety English accent and begin the harangue:

“Naïa, fetch me my shawl. No, not THAT shawl, the other one! How many times do I have to tell you, I never use that shawl at home, only for the opera. And my tea, Naïa, where is my tea? You know that I always have tea with my shawl! Naïa, the tea is too hot. Now it’s too cold!”

Naïa, of course, is completely ignoring me, but that’s fine, because I know what to do about that.

“Naïa, are you ignoring me?”

“I think she is,” I tell her mother. “She completely doesn’t believe I’m serious in my avuncular (you knew that was coming, right?) intentions. Maybe what I should do is write about it, since this blog has an international readership, and people will want to know.”

“That would be good,” said Lady.

“Or we could have a pizza party,” I said.

So I played some Bach, and was just finishing up, when Ilia, Raf’s mother, came strolling in. Well, strolling isn’t quite the term, since both she and Quique, Raf’s father, are now using walkers. So let’s say they came walkering in….

“I can’t stay,” she told me, “because Quique doesn’t want to….”

Quique gives me the half-embrace that guys give each other in Puerto Rico and, surprisingly, sits down. I begin the G major suite and wonder when they will drift off.

They don’t.

So I finish the suite—that’s twenty minutes of Bach—and turn to Ilia.

“Wonderful,” she says, “why don’t you make a recording?”

Then I remember Naïa, still sitting next to me, still absorbed in her iPad.

“Do you know that you have a new granddaughter?” I ask Ilia.

“I had no idea,” she said.

So it was time to get Naïa’s attention, which is done by waving a hand in front of the iPad—the ear buds seem to be an essential part of Naïa’s anatomy.

“You really should meet your new grandparents,” I tell her, and Ilia responds in form.

“Ay, ¡qué linda!”

(For a boy, it’s “¡ay, que guapo!”)

My new niece smiles and waves at her grandmother and returns to the infinitely more interesting world of the iPad.

‘Family,’ I think, ‘gets more important as you get older. When you’re a kid, it’s commonplace and almost annoying. But at Ilia’s age? Wow….”

‘How long will we have them?’ I think. ‘Because it’s precious to have new people come into your life, like Naïa. But it’s ripping everybody apart, knowing that Ilia and Quique… Well, there will be a day…”

‘We’ve all moved on,’ I think. ‘Now I get in trouble if I skip going to family affairs. Can’t win, can you?’

Ah, but I have!

A Walk Through a New Day

Right—time to take a walk through the new day. Or rather, The New Day, since that’s what the premiere and maybe at this point only newspaper on the island is called: El Nuevo Día. So what kind of day are we having?

Rotten, if the Day is to be believed. We start off grimly enough with the news that many of us, living in violence-prone communities, now have Posttraumatic Stress Disorder—the same PTSD that soldiers coming back from Iraq are experiencing. So what percentage of the population suffers from PTSD in these communities? Forty percent.

I know all of this because I saw the headline online—The Day, however, has taken to not publishing its main story online: you have to buy the paper in paper, or buy the paper in eInk (at last! A red squiggle I like—I’m totally with you, computer….) So I went to the drug store, where I bought the paper—approximately the size of the New York City telephone book, or at least the one twenty years ago, before people had smart phones….

“It’s Like Living a Civil War,” says the lead story, which goes on to point out that in the last six years, we’ve had 5,637 murders on the island versus 2,291 deaths of soldiers in Afghanistan. Granted, at its peak the US presence in Afghanistan was only 140,000 soldiers, versus a population of 3.7 million people on the island. But still—what to make of the fact that New York City, with 8 million people or so, has considerably fewer murders than Puerto Rico? 

Particularly worrisome is how are kids are doing: 40,000 have major depression and 53,000 are said to have suicidal ideation. Say what? Almost by definition, wouldn’t you assume that anyone with suicidal ideation suffers from major depression? Seems screwy to me….

We are, in short, all cocked up. So what’s the solution? Well, the Day has the answer (or perhaps The Answer), and that is integration of programs that have proven effective in Puerto Rico. And the Day lists them; curiously, all but one of the nine programs is named in English.

Well, that’s good to know, and very much needed, because on turning the page we get to the story about the school principal who got gunned down on a highly transited road while driving at 7:30 in the evening. Oh, and there are no leads, though lieutenant Elexis Torres, who’s investigating the case, said there has to be someone who saw the car, or the color of the car, or even the license plate of the car. But guess what? No one’s talking….

OK—wrap my head around that, and doesn’t it seem logical that the next page is a long interview with our new chief of police, James Tuller, who was born in New York but lived on the island for much of his childhood and has “close ties” to the island. He has, however, 40 years experience of being a cop, all of it in New York City.

And he was around for the “broken window” program, more formally known as the Bratton Plan. You’ll remember the theory—go after the small stuff and the big stuff will take care of itself. So that meant cracking down on people who were jumping over the turnstiles in the subway, fixing broken windows, fining the guys out washing car windows and shaking down the motorists who hadn’t wanted the service.

Well, Tuller is going to have his hands full. Or rather, there are many opportunities here. We could start with the people who are selling parking on public streets, and promising to offer “protection” for your car. Who knows what might happen? You wouldn’t want to come back and find your windshield broken—would you? Just a few bucks and everything will be all right. Worth it, really, for the peace of mind….

Right, skip gently over the news that DTOP—that’s the Department of Transportation and Public Works—is offering a 35% amnesty on traffic tickets. Oh, and we’re getting a new president of the University of Puerto Rico, which, it turns out, gets a third of its funds from federal money.

Lastly, we come to an opinion piece by Benjamín Torres Gotay, who uses the sorry situation of the putative super port of Ponce as a metaphor for our society.

Ponce, you see, is our second largest city, and is incidentally one of the fifteen most crime-ridden cities from page 4. And twenty years ago, the mayor of Ponce hit on the idea: expand and dredge the harbor, get the big cranes in, and make a super port. Merchandise would come in from Asia or wherever in huge ships, and then get put into smaller ships to be shipped around the Caribbean and the Americas.

Great idea, right? Nor is it just an idea—since in the twenty years since the idea was proposed, some quarter of a billion dollars has been spent. And not without something to show for it.

I’ve seen them—the two cranes—and they are massive. I saw them on a voyage into the absurd that my friend Harry drove me through last year. First we passed a wind farm with some 50 or 60 massive turbines that were supposed to be spinning. They weren’t, so what was the problem? Well, the company that made them had announced that the blade was falling on some identical models somewhere else in the world. But that wasn’t the only problem, because if seemed that the valley had insufficient wind. In fact, there is nowhere on the island where there is enough wind to make this project profitable.

We then got to the Playa de Ponce , a community so poor that a nun—the sister of a former governor—had to start a community center for the people there. And what was there? Two enormous piles of junk metal.

“It’s the only thing we export,” said Harry gloomily. “Oh sure, some specialty coffee, and some specialty fruits—but nothing else. The only thing that the world wants or needs from Puerto Rico? Our trash—that’s all we produce….”

Then we went a bit further, and came to the massive cranes—erected who knows when and never used. What’s happened? Well, they’ve been the focus of political squabbles –the most recent of which is whether the project should be in the hands of the municipality of Ponce or of the central government.

Guys?

Twenty years, and you are arguing this? And Torres Gotay says it best: in the time that we have spent arguing whether the color should be yellow or orange, the Dominican Republic—as corrupt as it is—has managed to build a super port of its own. So guess what? We may as well skip the idea, wait until the salt air takes its toll and the cranes are in imminent danger of collapse.

And then what?

Well, there’s a nice pile of junk metal nearby….  

Right—Got That Taken Care Of....

It’s such a good idea, why didn’t I think about it?

I spent seven years working for Wal-Mart, ostensibly as an English teacher. A good part of that time, in fact, I was busy dreaming up great ideas that absolutely no one liked. The sustainable shopping bag that we were pushing all the customers to use was a great idea, but there’s one little problem: you have to remember to take them with you every time you go shopping. And what if you decide on the spur of the moment to drop into a store? Your bags are at home.

Enter the Newhouse KeyChainShoppingBag!

OK—the problem of keeping meats separate from vegetables and fruits? Easy—redesign the shopping cart!

So I’m totally impressed with two like-minded people, Simon and Jane Berry, who looked around them one day in Northeast Zambia, and realized: Coca-Cola was everywhere.

The Berry’s also put together that fact with another two. First, one in five children in developing countries will die of dehydration before their fifth birthday. Second, though a simple solution of salts and sugar will cure the diarrhea, most public health clinics are too far away, or may not have the formula.

Right—so we can get Coca-Cola to kids, but not life-saving kits?

Then they looked at the Coca-Cola crates and realized—hey, there’s a lot of space wasted there. What if we made a kit of a bar of soap (prevention, as well as cure), the oral salts and sugar formula, zinc pills, and put it all in a container that would wedge in between the necks of the Coca-Cola bottles? So the Berrys created an organization, ColaLife, which produced a product called Kit Yamoyo. Here’s what it looked like:

That way, you could simply piggyback on to Coca-Cola’s distribution system, and not have to invest all that energy on reinventing the wheel.

So Berry went running around—trying to get Coca-Cola’s attention, which proved at first difficult. Finally, he got an interview with the BBC, and the door cracked open. They met to discuss Berry’s great idea.

And like all great ideas, it had to be tweaked. The peak period for diarrhea is in rainy season, which is when Coke sells the least. As well, there may be times when Coca-Cola may prefer not to distribute to a remote location—it simply isn’t worth it. But the kids still need the medicine.

So, in the end, they decided not to distribute through Coca-Cola, but rather to use the company to learn about Coca-Cola’s distribution chain. Consider this photo:

For Coca-Cola to get its products into a small shop in a tiny town in a remote area, they have to work with a lot of people, from the local producer to the regional suppliers to smaller supplier to individuals who have a horse and cart. And many times, the break in the chain was the guy with a horse and cart; therefore, Coca-Cola started their Last Mile program. (Nice name, guys!)

So the Berrys worked with Coca-Cola, often tagging along with them and meeting the people who delivered the Coke. And they soon discovered—it would be better if the shopkeepers simply ordered the Kit Yamoyo as a regular item, like laundry detergent.

The ColaLife began its pilot project in September 2012, and so far, the results are encouraging. Here’s what Berry has to say, as quoted in The New York Times:

Thus far, ColaLife has received mostly positive feedback from customers regarding Kit Yamoyo. “People are convinced it cures diarrhea,” said Simon Berry. “They say it’s much stronger than the medicine you get at the health center. And there’s some evidence that we’re stopping chronic diarrhea.” (While conclusive data has not yet been published, Berry’s assessment is based on more than 20, 000 kits sold and surveys of more than 1000 households.) The team also found that shops that sell Kit Yamoyo are, on average, two-thirds closer than health centers — making it much easier for a mother to obtain O.R.S. (oral rehydrating salts) when a child is sick.

There’s a little problem, for which, of course, I have the answer. And that is, you say?

The kit costs one dollar, unaffordable to many people. Sales have slumped by 60 percent from when the kit was introduced free.

My answer?

I think the genius of the Berrys was to see that the Kit Yamoyo was a product and could be treated like one, not a medicine or a health care issue. So we have a product, a nice product with a terrific potential and an un-mined gold field in public relations. A nice product that Wal-Mart (ASDA in Britain) can sell for $2.49—a steal. Wal-Mart pockets 74 cents, pays ColaLife $1.75. ColaLife, in turn, can use that money to lower their price substantially. They then employ an unemployed blogger in Puerto Rico to write terrific press releases, which I will.

Yes?

Sorry, guys—gotta go. Gonna call some friends at Wal-Mart….

Still a Lot to Do

Somewhere in Puerto Rico, there’s an unhappy and confused twelve-year old girl.

In the grand scheme of affairs, that’s not too bad. Atrocious things are happening all over the world to kids—famine, abuse, displacement. The little girl, whose name no one knows, has two good parents, both professionals, and presumably all the comforts of the upper middle class. In short, she’s well-off, a nice kid living with her two parents who are…

…lesbians.

Ho-hum, you say, and what’s the big deal here?

Well, the mother who is not the biological mother would like to adopt her daughter. In short, she wants to be legally recognized as a mother. And the Puerto Rico Supreme Court has just said, in a 5 / 4 decision, no.

So what, you say. The couple has been together for 25 years, they planned the child together, the I-don’t-want-to-say unnatural mother was the first face the child saw when she was born. No one’s going anywhere….

Yeah? Do we know that? What if the birth mother (don’t know if that’s a term, but it is now) gets hit by a bus tomorrow? Does the Family Department have the right to come in and take the child and assign her to foster care?

There’s also something called divorce, in which case the non-birth mother would be out in the cold. A father could argue for every other weekend and two weeks in the summer, but the non-birth mother? She’d better hope for a good judge.

Predictably, the decision fell on political lines. Our former governor, who was / is a poster boy for the GOP (and implemented the same strategies two years before Scott Walker of Wisconsin) was rumored to be Opus Dei. There were, according to some, prayers—and by no means ecumenical—before meetings. So all of his appointees have dictated the fate of this mothered / motherless child.

The scene is looking potentially better in Washington, where the Supreme Court will begin deliberating on the Proposition 8 decision on March 26. As you remember, the citizens of California—funded liberally by the Mormons—voted against marriage equality in 2008. The decision was challenged, and eventually a federal district court ruled that the citizens didn’t have the right to determine who gets married and who doesn’t. Now, the Supreme Court is going to decide it.

In addition, the Defense of Marriage Act—signed into law by that devoted family man, that upholder of traditional values, that pillar of moral and sexual rectitude Bill Clinton—is up for deliberation by the Supreme Court. Curiously, the court is hearing the DOMA case one day after the Proposition 8 case.

It’s been a long road, this battle for the rights of LGBT folks. So long that it’s a little hard to see how much progress we’ve made in so—relatively—little time. I was born in the worst decade of the twentieth century, perhaps, for gay people—a decade where Joe McCarthy was flaunting a list of “homosexuals” employed by the government, which by executive order made it illegal to be gay and work in the federal government. Gay bashing was not speaking ill of gay people—it was literally assault on men leaving the bars at night. Families routinely invaded houses that two men and women had made homes for years after one partner died—and the legal battles weren’t easy or pretty.

So we’ve done a lot. There’s a reason so many fundamentalists are going crazy: they’re seeing their world vanish.

A lot, yes.

But still so much to do….

Now Then

Well, having dispatched our puppet—La Comay—to wherever it is he went off to, what’s next? We have, as we used to say corporationally (OK, computer, businessly? Companally? Does ANYTHING make you happy?), many opportunities down here. One person in seven is using drugs. Murder rate is over a thousand a year. Forty eight percent of the population is living below poverty level.

‘Well, at least we have absolutely no problems with snow removal,’ I thought on the morning trot, after having glanced at the New Day’s front page. Gobierno irá contra los padres, announced the headline. The Government Is Going After the Parents?

Hunh? Why? What have they done?

It started when our new governor visited a school two days ago, and discovered that very few of the parents had bothered to pick up their children’s report card, much less attend parent / teacher conferences.

How few?

A Department of Education spokesperson says only 30% of parents pick up the grades.

So the government gave the parents un halón de orejas or an ear pulling. It’s a common Puerto Rican chastisement. And now, they’re hitting where it hurts.

It seems that parents get all kinds of benefits from the state—plan 8, that’s the apartment. Tarjeta de salud—free medical care. Departamento de la Familia—money and food. You’ve pretty much got your life taken care of, right there.

But to get all this, the agencies require documents verifying that you do have a kid, and that she or he is in school. So the teachers spend time filling out these documents.

Hunh?

Let me put this car in reverse and tell you that I’m not at my best today. Yes, I did the trot, but it was more instinct / habit than Marc out there. I spent most of yesterday on the only throne I’ll ever own, and when I wasn’t there, I was in bed. I am, to speak frankly, metaphorically and literally flushing out the holidays.

Which may be why this situation, even on an island with a zest for absurdity, seems crazy.

OK—let’s do a list:

1. Teachers teach. They don’t fill out documents, or teach values, or police the school grounds. They just teach, for which they should be paid as much as the governor, easily.
2. Parents parent. Part of which is to say to the kid that the teacher is to be respected, and part of which is to make sure that the teacher is…respectable (OK, but you know what I mean.) Another part of which is to make sure that their kids know—school is work, your education is the most important thing in your life right now, and will be for the rest of your life.
3. Governments govern. Which means that I can drink the water (no), drive the roads without breaking an axle (no), go out on the street at night (what, are you crazy?), or send my kid to a public school (unthinkable).

Right, so now we have all the roles defined. Let’s talk about those public schools.

“Lock your kid in the marquesina!” I was once busily saying—actually repeating—to a student. She had just told me that she had announced to the director of the private school her kids were in, “the only reason I’m paying you ten grand a year is that gate over there!”

(A break for anyone who doesn’t know what a marquesina is. It’s a garage, but much more. It’s also a place where you sit, where you entertain neighbors, where you drink beer and watch fights. Importantly, it’s enclosed and has a gate that can be locked. So it’s safe.)

In the public schools, there are no substitute teachers. So what happens when missis (common nickname for a teacher—a little hangover from the Americans) is missing? The school dumps the kids on the street.

OK—so maybe your child has a cell phone and you’re at home, eating bonbons and reading French novels. You hop in the car and get your kid.

Oh, sorry—forgot. That was the fifties.

If you really would prefer that your child not become a street urchin, then you pay for a private school. The education—with some exceptions, of course—is just as dreadful. But they’ve got a gate and a lock and you know where you kid is gonna be when you drop him or her off at seven in the morning. Now all you gotta do is deal with the boss.

Well, my solution was to lock the kid up in the marquesina every day—with, of course, the 500$ of textbooks you shelled out for him. No, it’s not abuse. You’ll give him food and drink, safety, bathroom, etc. You could, of course, put a closed-circuit monitoring system in the marquesina, and follow him periodically throughout the day. Tremendous idea, if I do say so myself: thinking outside the caja as usual!

Well, I thought it was a good idea.

Predictably, it was shot down.

What I am telling you at obscene length is that the public schools are terrible, for the most part.

It now must be said.

You don’t have a right to have a kid. Not if you’re so damned stupid and lazy and uncaring that you can’t hustle your fat Departamento-de-la-Familia-fed ASS down to the school to pick up a report card. I can’t prevent you from having a kid, but I sure as hell won’t support you, you lazy fat cow who stands in front of me in the supermarket while your kids play tag between my knees, and you’re eating chips and drinking Coca-Cola—too damn busy to fish out your tarjeta de la familia card to pay for all the junk you’re slopping into your kids!

Whew….

Now then, back to bed….