Tests & Protests

At 8 o clock on Saturday morning, having bounced out of bed with a "yay, this is the big day!"10 y-o & I set out to complete Stage One of Operation Return Home. Our son has been preparing for some school tests to get him into a school in September, should my husband be able to find a job in the UK, and we return home, and we return to our home town. so a tad tenuous. This seems slightly crazy, like putting the cart before the horse, but if we don't apply for schools now & we do go back to the UK in the summer, it will be too late to apply then. So we are doing things in a rather surreal,back to front way, before we have a job, a location, or anything concrete really.

This being Albania, even this Stage was not entirely normal & straight forward. Firstly we drove up the main boulevard where the protest/riot had happened 12hrs before. Half the boulevard was cordoned off & was still strewn with rocks & lumps of brick which protesters had 'dug out' of the paved road & thrown at police. Then, outside the prime minister's office was a growing memorial of flowers & candles for the 3 men shot dead, one in the head, 2 in the chest at close range. A fourth man lies critical in hopsital. And Albanian hospitals aren't good places to be in a critical condition at the best of times.....

Further on still, were the burnt out carcasses of 5 cars, poised drunkenly on the steps of Hoxha's former mausoleum pyramid. The centre was eerily quiet.

Arriving safely at school, we met the head of lower school & our son's teacher who had very kindly given up their Saturday morning to invigilate him. The school in the UK had, amazingly, suggested our son sit the test here in Albania so he didn't need to go back to the UK.

I had also had to bring my husband's scanner with us as the school had phoned to say that the school scanner wasn't working properly. So, because I am who I am, my husband gave me a crash course in how to use it. I just knew something would go wrong. Sure enough the scanner didn't copy my son's pencil answers, so the deputy head had to use the photocopy, sharpen twice, then darken twice every page of his tests: all 20 pages & then I scanned them for her.This had the added disadvantage of me seeing my son's answers, furiously trying to do mental arithmetic to guage which he had got wrong & reading his compositions, which, compared to practice ones he had written, were dreadful.

All in all not a relaxing morning. I am trying not to think about it anymore. If only I hadn't seen the papers, I would have only had my son's ebullient confidence to go by, which reckoned he had done a "pretty good job!"

Still Stage One complete. Stage two is travelling back to the UK for the open day & interviews & for my husband to have some meetings about his job situation. Of course there are about 47 more stages to go, but it feels good to have begun........