Updates -- On All Fronts

School is really over!  Alex finished his last IGCSE yesterday at noon, and with a flying leap vaulted over the wall, yelling 'I'm free!'  We're looking around for work for him at local garden centres and restaurants, and are arranging his Provisional Driving License and a set of lessons.  He has been promised my car, if his IGCSE average was B.  Results come in at the end of August -- in the meantime we are all trying to forget about it.

Sophia finished Friday, and with a huge sigh said: 'Well that's that!  No more going back there...'  She is taking a week off before diving into her distance learning IGCSE's and hopes that she scored well enough on the exams that she just took to get into the schools for which we have applied in the UK.  The results of those come out July 4, and we will duly send them off as well as making plans for a week's visit to England at the end of September.  She is highly motivated, and I think will do well.

Leo & Theodoros baking carob cookies.

Zenon and Leo finished in the middle of last week and are having a good time.  Both have projects to work on and friends to play with, so most days see them either at friends' houses, or with friends around here.  A mate of Leo's from school was over and they were making carob cookies today -- turned out delicious!  I know that some parents dread the holidays, I thrive on them...




House works...

At long last I have persuaded Best Beloved that SOMETHING Had To Be Done About The Floors Downstairs.  When we were building, I had wanted concrete.  My dad's house in Hawaii had a concrete living room floor.  It was beautiful: a mellow golden colour with weathered brick lines to discourage cracks.  The Turkish-Cypriot house in Agios Ioannis that we rent has a concrete floor, smooth, mottled, and coloured with ochre.  I wanted something similar for here.

Trouble is, no-one knows how to do plain, polished concrete floors... Believe it or not.  And we ended up with an ugly patchwork that BB decided -- against my and a friend's strong counsel -- to paint.  Disaster:  flaking, ugly, difficult to clean.  I have been lobbying with increasing stridency for a change, and he finally caved.

The Corridor Before...

Sophia's Flaking Floor

Leo Helps Tile His Room

The Corridor During.

We chose black granite for the corridor, and grey tiles for the bedrooms.

For the last week the house has been full of misplaced furniture (as each bedroom has been done at a time), dust, and the whine of the angle-grinder.  We are almost on the home stretch.  The five bedrooms have been done -- just in time for my sister's arrival this evening.  The guest bathroom has been done with pebble panels, and now the downstairs corridor is slowly being covered with black.  I got really cold feet over the corridor:  the granite would be too dark ("It will be like descending to the Abyss down there, Manamou!"), it would show every speck of dust, it would look like crap and I would never be able to change it...  But I think it's beginning to look really nice.  The next few days will tell.



The Irish Satellite...

Will Try to Enter for Companionship...

For some reason Leo cannot get his tongue around the name 'Sputnik' and instead insists on calling our latest family member 'Spud Mick'...  But whatever we call him, the Small Golden One has morphed from a Shivering Emaciated Wreck that peed himself if we so much as looked at him into a Happy Little Being who bounces around the garden and verandah, comes (mostly) when he's called, pees and poops (mostly) in his toilet spot near the old goat shed, and stretches out through the heat of the day in a doorway to catch any available breeze.

Training -- Mili came to learn how to cope with Lucky

Training -- Leo is the most dedicated of us all

A dog trainer paid us a visit one afternoon last week and gave us some tips on training him which I implement when I take him for his walks.  Leo is is most loyal supporter -- taking him for 'potty walks' every hour of the day, cutting  up treats, and teaching him to 'sit' on command.  Lucky, of course, is wildly enthusiastic at the presence of another canine about the place, but must be very jealous to see him wandering free.  Sophia takes both dogs for a run every evening, and reports that Lucky's rambunctiousness is as ill-contained as ever, but that Sputnik, although only about one-eighth her size, is learning to hold his own.

The Adventure Continues

There has been a silence from the Little White Donkey for a while. I have been travelling a different path; one that has left me with little spare time over the last week.

Since, aged eleven, I watched Randolph Mantooth and Kevin Tighe racing out of Station 51 in their paramedic vehicle through all the seasons of Emergency! and Emergency One!, I have wanted to be a paramedic. When I took the early steps toward joining the Army in the late ‘80’s, the recruiter looked at my ASVAB results and said: “Ms Asproulla, with your language skills, your test scores, and your college education, we think you’re an ideal candidate for Officer Training School and the Language Program.” I replied: “Sergeant, I want to be a medic in the Airborne Infantry!” and badgered him until he assured me that, should I sign on the dotted line, that’s what I’d be. (Thank goodness I didn’t travel that path, but returned to Egypt instead on the advice of several soldier friends: “Asproulla, you wouldn’t do well in the Army, you argue too much!”)

Now, thirty-five years after I became aware of the job ‘paramedic’, I have just completed a course for Emergency Care Assistants, the first rung on the ladder toward being one.

Paramedics did not officially exist in Cyprus until recently. If you had to call an ambulance, you might or might not get one from the General Hospital. If one came, it would certainly have a driver, but he would probably have little or no first aid training. A nurse might be on board, or another bod to help with lifting, but attendants had little or no medical experience, and at least sixty people died each year because of the lack of trained first responders.

John Thompson and Houston Medical are changing that. For at least five years, John (from here on known as Da Boss) – a former medic with the Royal Army Medical Corps, a paramedic, trainer, and Health and Safety Officer on North Sea oil rigs -- has made the creation of a private ambulance service with trained crews his mission. Alternating working on the rig for two weeks with returning home to Paphos for two weeks, he has managed to build a five-ambulance fleet that serves a small number of – mostly expat – subscribers. Now he is starting to train crews in earnest, and I was in on the first course.

SH, an old friend of Da Boss, came over from the UK where he works as a trainer of paramedics and put Houston’s current employees (J, a twenty-year driver for the Scottish Ambulance Service and a veteran of the Lockerbie bombing; ST, another Scot, a former mechanic and police recovery driver, married to C who worked as a dispatcher for Scottish Ambulance Service – yes, it confuses me when they refer to their time in the SAS; B, twenty-five years in the Royal Engineers who built the beachhead in the Falklands; and R, a Swiss paramedic who has just gone home for an operation) and me (the Cherry) through a forty-hour course that included casualty assessment, diagnoses, advanced first aid, and evacuation techniques as well as discussing mass casualty response and triage.

The week was exhausting and stimulating. Not only were there many hours of lectures, but there were long periods of practical work as well. We – or at least I (it was Old Hat to the others, but they needed their paperwork in order) learned to take blood pressure and blood sugar readings, to insert different types of airways, to suction, to splint, to use an orthopaedic scoop and a spine board; we learned different techniques of helmet removal, and different lifts. On Sunday we provided medical cover to the Paphos Tigers rugby match (some knee injuries, a couple of stubbed toes, and a few gashes requiring Steri-Strips).

When the course finished, SH took me aside saying “Well, you’d better trot down here on Wednesday then, and ask Da Boss about a job. I think you’d be an asset.”

So I did. And for the first time since 1988, I have a job. Part time – event cover for now, until I have more time up on the vehicles and more training -- also until there is more money around in the shape of a full-time contract for medical cover at Pissouri village (several Pissourans have died of heart attacks over the last few years, and the muchtar is keen to have a crew from Houston based there 24/7 – right up my alley since it’s just down the road). I get a nice dark blue uniform and weekly training sessions. In a few months, I hope to be able to get training in advanced driving techniques so that I will be able to drive the ambulances.

All this is not without a degree of angst on my part. Despite all the things I’ve done and all the places I’ve been – many of them hairy – I have never seen as much as a road accident (ok, I was in a bus crash in Egypt, but that was at night, and there were very few injuries, none of them horrific), let alone dealt with heart attacks, broken bones or any of the other conditions that we spent the last week talking about. Except for my parents, who both died at home after illness, I’ve never seen death. I wonder how I’ll cope. “Train hard and fight easy,” was SH’s answer, and Da Boss said: “Don’t worry lass, you’ll no’ panic on us!” (Yes, he’s a Scot, too).

Meanwhile, I’m still working in the field and delivering veg, still ferrying children about, and still trying to find time and head-space for writing. The adventure continues…