The day starts early when it’s still dark and in the bedroom it’s, at times, below 14 C. Loading up the stove with wood, then feeding the chickens, the rabbit and the cat. The reward is seeing the sky lit up in a pinkish shade of blue with strikes of yellow hovering above the little shadows of barren trees and a distance farmhouse. A quiet coffee and maybe a few morning pages before the kids wake up and breakfast ritual is rolling.
Where have October, November and (already more than half of) December gone?… actually we are already past Christmas and It’s nearly New Year! It seems we had so much happening that we couldn’t even sit back and reflect. It’s time to update a little even though I feel it’s all going to end up in a big plate of scrambled thoughts on toast.
In case the warning about ‘scrambled thoughts’ alarms you or you are just about to be tired of reading anyway here’s the guardian’s summary of our last couple of months at The Old Stable: Looking back, it were two and a half months all around music and education.
Key events:
- We attended a book launching event in Nonantola where Sonja’s (92 year old woman from Israel) childhood diary was translated into Italian. Sonja was one of 72 children hosted in Villa Emma during WWII and was saved from the Nazis by being hidden by families in the area. her diary covered among other adventures, the period in which she stayed in Villa Emma in Nonantola. The way the event was managed, the way the stories were portrayed and the lack of respect (in my opinion) to Sonja left me disappointed and wondering what is our role as parents in keeping the history alive and mainly the important lessons that these stories bring with them.
- I took a mind blowing course arranged by Musicians without Borders in Bologna coming back with a thousand things to think about and do. (some connection to Sonja’s story here)
- We had a drama (with a happy ending) around the children’s music activities where we were fined for ‘begging’ as we played music in the market. It all triggered a cascade of social initiatives, open discussions and new friendships. It was also a big push to do more music!
- We watched two operas in Pavarotti’s Theatre in Modena. Where we also knew the viola players (there is a connection to the Musician without borders course and the drama mentioned in the previous highlight). That is more operas than I saw in my whole lifetime (I saw one before that as a teenager in 1992 with my grandma in Vienna, she loved opera)
- We also held our first weekend beer course and as a result: 80 L of various types of beer are waiting to be drunk soon.
- Finally, a quick visit to Israel to celebrate and reflect on my 40th birthday, also involving music and you got the picture.
Keep on reading if you wish to get that ‘scrambled thoughts on toast’. Unfortunately, this time round I don’t think that pictures can give a visual summary of it all. But I’ll try.
Starting with some reflections on where we are heading with the project. We are entering our second year in The Old Stable and yes, there is still plenty to do when it comes to renovation, building, planting, setting up the language school and learning ‘new’ skills of farming (two weeks ago, for example, I found myself on YouTube learning how to clip chicken’s wings so that they don’t fly over the fence and horribly, then last week, I had to pull a rooster’s neck as he got badly injured during a fight). But what really remained so far behind the scenes is the constant debates and brain storming sessions we have around what we really want to do with our new lifestyle. I think it boils down to redefining what The Old Stable is about. We are still in the phase where we try to articulate what we want to do and why we have made this big change in the first place. In essence, we still ask ourselves on a frequent basis the following question: why did we leave everything and come here in the first place?
Elena would probably emphasize the eagerness to do something connected to the land, to the environment, to live a more sustainable life, to be closer to the family and god forbid, maybe get involved in some activism. I agree with all these reasons, but I’m not sure where it started for me. Basically, I think we left our academic jobs and came here in order to have more time with our children, to really get to follow their growth. It seemed that a change from a hectic job where you leave in the morning and come back in the evening just to be stressed out because you didn’t finish a draft of a paper or an experiment on time was badly needed. We wanted to go back to our inner artists too, to have more time to watch the world around us, be more creative like we used to be when were slightly younger: draw, write, play music. This realization became more vivid when we started our path in ‘homeschooling’. After a year and a half of ‘homeschooling’ in England it just made sense that we all needed to get rid of some rigid social structures and expectations. And that, just like our kids, we just needed more time to do what we like.
Initially, it wasn’t my intention to share much of our personal exploration around education choices as I wanted to keep this blog dedicated mainly to the development of The Old Stable project. In addition, people get on the defense when education topics are discussed, as if we were trying to prove how bad parents they were for doing or not doing something. But, as it is becoming clearer to me that our education choices ARE an important part of The Old Stable project, sharing the developments without disclosing some of our thoughts around education will be missing on a big deal of how we got here.
Elena, on her part, is currently writing a book about ‘unschooling’ in Italian. It’s not her own idea it has been actually requested by an Italian printing house, so lately we had these topics discussed around the table again. In a way, it helps fine tuning our ideas.
I’d like to connect my scrambled thoughts to the events I highlighted earlier and can’t see where to start. There is so much in this ‘non’ schooling world that’s it’s hard to know what’s best to say first. All I wanted to share really is that our basic belief is that a child needs far more time then we can even imagine to: play, figure things out on his own, and be bored without any interference. Not sending the kids to school just allows them more time to do all the things I just mentioned (and I’ll leave the other advantages to a different time). Basically, this means that the parent has to be somehow more at home (whether it is one or both). Once we started freeing our own time to allow this natural growth, we realized how we benefited from it too.
Questions that we never thought of before, started surfacing and a lot of ‘taken for granted’ answers started being questioned, too. I’ll mention one that we get a lot of, regarding socialization (how do you get the kids to socialize?). That particular one made us reflect a lot about what socialization really means and I think it can explain a lot of my scrambled thoughts for this post. As much as school provides some opportunities to socialize with children of the same age, it also minimizes (or even prevents) socialization in other contexts such as: with children at different ages (much bigger or much smaller), old people, the sick, parents at work and so on.
An example of how socializing skills (or the lack of it, in this case to be explained shortly) comes in when I think of the book launching event in Nonantola earlier this October (a link to how the papers presented the event, in Italian is here, this is also where I got the photo of her with the mayor and the director of the Villa Emma foundation). A much more revealing interview with the Villa Emma foundation director is linked here
The event of Sonja Borus’s translated diary launching struck me in a way that I am still trying to get to grips with. I got very angry, but the positive side is that it made me want to socialize much more, especially with the old and to make sure my children do so too. It made me realize that at The Old Stable we should take part in the debate around how immigration is dealt with, in the present, and to provide opportunities for people from different generations to speak to each other. How were these immigration waves been dealt with in the past? and what are the lessons we could learn?
In brief, how I saw the book launching event managed is as follows: An old woman, holocaust survivor came all the way from Israel to see the places and to speak about her experiences to the current citizens of Nonantola. This was supposed to be a truly golden and once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to ask questions and to listen to someone that was a survivor rather than a local. The day started with an ‘informal’ meeting in the old peoples centre where Sonja could have met and spoken to some of the people that knew or actively participated in the events around the saving of the Villa Emma children. It turned out to be a very long speech by the director of the foundation who hardly spoke directly to Sonja, passing on the microphone to a few old people of Nonantola who told their stories (or their parents’) but with very little attention or direction to the star of the event. Sonja doesn’t speak Italian and was accompanied with what seemed to be a pathetic translator. Even when there were some comments or things that may be of interest to Sonja the translator just sat there doing nothing.
It seemed to be an event to praise the people of Nonantola in the past who took on to save the Villa Emma children, to retell an historical event as a myth. What they appeared to be saying is: ‘All the people of Nonantola were taking their moral responsibility to save the children of Villa Emma and that all were part of the resistance, we must keep this heroic episode alive!’. Yeah, sure… but how?… and is this really the way for keeping the stories alive? How is that, now-a-days the anti-immigration stance is alive and kicking also in Nonantola? wasn’t there a way to get the debate a little less superficial? Aside from the shallowness of the debate, the opportunity to listen to the story from the point of view of a survivor was totally lost. In the event, Sonja’s daughters were present and I had to ask them, in private, after the morning session was closed, whether they deliberately asked the organizers not to ask Sonja any questions or let her speak. No, they also found it a bit strange but then they were also grateful for being invited and for being partially funded by the association for the translation work so they couldn’t really complain. I found it shameful that such an opportunity that will most probably never come back has been discarded so easily. I was then optimistic, it could have still been just a bad start of the day, maybe during the official launch of the book, later in the afternoon, Sonja could talk more about what she wrote in person to all the people in Nonantola. However, when we gathered in Salla Verde next to the municipality there was now also the German historian who worked for years on the topic of Villa Emma and a dry teacher-like translator who had lots of comments to say about the translation work. There was so much irrelevant talking and Sonja was left to wait for nearly two hours before she could say anything. The commentators spoke about her ‘non perfect’ German language and her emotional stress that is conveyed in the diary as if she wasn’t there at all. Nothing was ever said in person. At that point, my blood was already boiling and I couldn’t stand it no longer. Elena had to stop me from bursting out from the crowd shouting what a disgrace to ignore such a person and what an opportunity was lost. I’ll never be a good politician, I’d burn all the bridges before I could get anywhere. So that was beginning of October and I’d promised that I’d write an open letter to the director of the Villa Emma foundation on how badly the event was managed. However , by the time I was ready to write and was organizing my thoughts on how to create more opportunities to make a discussion around the Villa Emma story as part of our activities in the Old Stable (brain storming all the Israeli-Italian connections I can create) .. our next adventure came up, somehow it’s all connected in my scrambled thoughts on toast.
Come end of October and as part of our efforts to provide different socialization opportunities for the kids (as I mentioned above and especially after Sonja’s episode). I happened to be left with Emily, our middle daughter one Monday morning and we came up with going to Nonantola’s morning market to play a few tunes we recently learnt on the violin and mandolin.
That time of day the market is full of old people that do their vegetable shopping just in front of the municipality. I thought to myself that that was a wonderful opportunity to meet, make people smile, and to let Emily show her skills without being judged.
It was great, Emily played and the appreciation was immense, smiles, claps and also pocket money. While we were closing our instrument cases and I was having a conversation with a local journalist who shared my thoughts on the previous week’s book launching event, two municipality police approached. I had no clue what was their problem but it was clear that they wanted to fine me for something. It took them a while going through the municipality rule book. I was slightly shocked, a bit embarrassed. Was there a strict rule against playing in the market? something I didn’t really understand? Anyhow, they could warn me and I’d just go away… finally, they handed me a €100 fine which only later I understood to be for begging and disturbing the public… also for taking an advantage over a minor in doing so. Looking back, it’s quite humiliating.
Emily cried, but a overwhelming number of people (mostly old!) ran to comfort us, make sure that Emily wasn’t too traumatized. Nearly everyone, including the mayor but not the policewoman that fined us, were supportive and encouraged us to go and play in the streets again. We even ended up with a new friendship with an old man that was part of the group of teenagers that knew well the children of Villa Emma, back then in 1943. He was present in Sonja’s book launching event the previous week. As soon as the policewoman went away he got Emily some jam he made at home and told her about similar things that happened to him in his childhood. The best part of the story from my point of view, is that we got closer to the teachers in the music school we are attending in Bologna and that we got such a big boost of encouragement that we ended up playing music more than before. A month later our family violin teacher, as well as two other music teachers and three families from the music school came to busk with us in front of the municipality. It was such a meaningful social event, especially for the kids.
You can get more of the ‘fine’ story here (translate to English, if needed). I’d go on about explaining why I think that busking is such an important thing to do, not only for gaining confidence in performing but also for the social aspect of sharing one’s music… but it really is worth a post by itself and I’d rather try to tie all this to our reflections on the development of the Old Stable Project. After the event, it just occurred to me that for some people music is just not appreciated enough and that it is really considered ‘begging’.
So, can we somehow get people through our activities to:
- Socialize more (and bridge the age gap between the old and the young)?
- Create more opportunities for locals to meet immigrants in a friendly atmosphere?
- Get people to appreciate music and share their music?
At that time I was desperately thinking out loud and trying to use the few local contacts I have to gather what we can actively do in these areas. I mentioned in the last post that we started attending some local meetings on the themes of immigration and environment. Elena is a little more active in going to meetings :). I went to one meeting of ‘Anni in Fugga’ which centres its activity around helping immigrants in the area to get through the Italian bureaucracy and to integrate more easily. As well as to listen to what they are up to, I wanted to offer a place to hold some social and musical events and keep brain storming loudly our ideas until we can offer something concrete. I only realized later that the name of the association ‘Anni in fuga’ (which means ‘years on the run’) is the book title of Joseph Indig’s story of the children of Villa Emma and from which the idea for the name of the association was taken. So within my scrambled thoughts… it all connects somehow.
Then our violin teacher suggested that I contact someone from Musicians without Borders to see what they had to say (check out the link, if you are interested to know more about them). I ended up taking a mind blowing course that they were holding just a couple weekends later in Bologna. Their general idea was to get musicians to volunteer in immigration centres in the Bologna area and use music to connect between people. We learned how to run musical activities using vocals, body percussion and more. The organization itself has a wider scope and you can read more about the organization in the link I’ve inserted earlier. For me, it was perfect timing as it was relevant to everything i was thinking about at the time. From teaching to getting involved in work with immigrants to just doing things related to music. This is when my scrambled thoughts went all gushing everywhere.
Initially in the course I felt like an imposer.. I’m still struggling to get rid of the stigma of being an amateur percussionist and being defined as ‘hanging out with musicians’ like many drummers are. The fact that I was training to run musical based workshops along side the first violist of the Emilia Romagna regional orchestra didn’t make any sense to me. However, we shared a lot in common with mainly our eagerness to do something with music for the benefit helping immigrants. I came back with a billion ideas to implement! Who knows, maybe one of these days we could get the workshops and courses running at The Old Stable!
To connect it to our opera experiences… it was there in the Musician without Borders course where I got an invitation to attend an opera in Modena, as the first violist could arrange cheap tickets for us. He was playing in Il Corsaro.
I ended up going with both the daughters and it was a fantastic experience (everyone thought we’d get bored!). They got the chance to see a live orchestra in a proper opera house. Going back to socialization opportunities, the majority of the public were pensioners. They were excited to see such young children attending. A woman even asked the girls to tell her at the end of the show what they thought of it… and they did! She was very happy.
A month later we got to see our actual violin teacher who also plays the viola, playing in a different opera in the same theatre. This time, it was also an opportunity to meet with a friend from the music school!
Finally, a nice conclusion to this music-education mumble has come with us playing with a epic local group for Christmas, passing by the old people’s home and various points in the town.
I think that that was enough scrambled thoughts for now. Congratulations if you made it up until here. Like many of my posts, apart from sharing the developments, the actual writing about it really helps myself refine and vocalize ideas.
Let’s hope that The Old Stable projects develops to something more connected to music.
I am working towards updating more about the first beer course that was held end of November and more about our musical adventures!
Till next time!
Happy New Year
The Old Stable 