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To Megalo Mas Spiti (Our Big Home) Reopens…

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In Greece, like in most countries worldwide we had a wide lockdown because of the pandemic of Covid-19. Schools, nurseries, playgrounds as well as “Our Big Home” had to close down from the beginning of March due to safety measures.

Initially, the team decided to stop ‘welcoming’ our visitors for two weeks, even though there was no clear protocol, until we had some more information about the situation and how it would develop. As in most places, it lasted longer than we expected. However, during this unprecedented threatening period the team was having web meetings every fortnight, sharing concerns and ideas about ways of keeping a part of our project alive, even without our physical presence. How could we be present and available from a distance and how could we be more adaptable and flexible, while preserving our rules and values at the same time, where is the limit between practitioners’ and parents’ responsibility for children’s safety? These were some of the core points that the team was reflecting on.

Our presence on social media (on Facebook and our website: http://www.tomegalomasspiti.gr which can be translated into English by accessing it through Google) was regular either with an article for our project, a comic note about Corona virus addressed to the children, or an audio interview of a paediatrician providing advice on safety measures and discussing opinions. After much thought and a lot of discussion “Our Big Home” team decided that they could be available as Welcomers through a phone line, and willing to listen to parents’ concerns within this period of the pandemic, discussing how they and their children cope or any resulting aspect they wanted to share. There was one phone call during this time. It was a very useful conversation from which emerged the mother’s realisation that she hadn’t talked to her daughter about Corona virus at all during this time.

In our opinion, the fact that during the quarantine we did not have many calls, may be due to the fragility of structures like Our Big Home: the absence of calls shows that parents and children are attached to the specific framework of welcoming, through a lively and real contact with the Welcomers. It seems that there was a difficulty in switching to a distant form of communication. Were they waiting for the place to function again? We assume that this is the case. Moreover, some parents who we bumped into mentioned that they were looking forward to our reopening.

The whole team met again in person mid-June, when we decided that “Our Big Home” will reopen for two weeks beginning 1st of July. The reopening aimed to reposition ourselves in our role as Welcomers, to be in touch with our visitors again, and to have a proper closure before the summer holidays. We also wanted to have a trial of the special conditions of our work that we may most probably have to follow in September. Some new adjustable measures/rules that we had to apply, are as follows: up to 5 children each time inside the Home and only one adult to accompany them, fewer toys and markers available, no rag dolls nor carpets, keeping the windows open, antibacterial wipes available, masks if necessary, disinfection of plastic toys after every shift and regular cleaning.

Still, we are having very few visitors since the reopening, and this could indicate that the safety measures, although they protect public health in Greece, had a negative impact on families feeling secure and trusting public structures of early prevention and socialisation. We formulate the hypothesis that this extraordinary situation of threat upon health and life enhanced the traditional tendency to view family as the only safe framework of development for very young children. We can only hope that this is a temporary incidence of a collective traumatic situation, which is now manifesting its influence on social bonds and desire to meet people outside home.

We expect that this two week experience will give us a good picture of the way that the post-pandemic reopening can be feasible and empower “Our Big Home” again to keep its desire and purpose alive.

On behalf of our team, we are happy to keep sharing this insight and also hear from other ‘Homes’ of the world, regarding common or different pathways we may follow, all based on a very important endeavour inspired from F. Dolto.

Written by the team at To Megalo Mas Spiti

A Post-Pandemic Maison Verte

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The Threat of Proximity

Among many of the questions being raised in this period of deep uncertainty is how we will get out of this? Practically speaking, this question can be addressed to our politicians who are so far setting the guidelines, time frames and social limits on each country as they see fit. But what is slowly dawning on us, at least in the UK, is that most of us will have to come out of isolation and relax social distancing before the threat is really over; it is becoming obvious that there will be no clear-cut ending to this crisis. Most of us will slowly go back to work without a definitive sense that the virus has disappeared. The seemingly finite resolution of a vaccine will not, in the end, be so simple. So how will we emerge out of this, practically and psychologically? How will we go back to feeling safe in the presence of others? Will an unknown, invisible threat be passing between people, unspoken, as we try to repatch the social fabric after this crisis? It is the proximity of real bodies which has endangered us and the new signifier ‘social isolation’ – that which should protect us – ironically touches on what we try to alleviate through our Maison Verte spaces. So what place will the social space of the Maison Verte have now?

Ordinary Isolation

For young children in the early years of life, between 0 and 4 years old, there will undoubtedly be a sense that all is not well. Yet, there will not necessarily be a language to symbolise the dis-ease that is in the air, or these strange circumstances in which we are living. Additionally, these children will be missing out on that vital moment of the first social interactions outside the home – those interactions where the delicate but defining balance between separation and attachment have a chance to be played out.

On top of this strange, unprecedented type of social deprivation, many women have also been forced to give birth alone where hospitals are not allowing visitors or birth partners to attend. This is a potentially traumatic experience for mothers and may be compounded by the fact that many of these mothers and children have not had the chance to meet their extended family. Many mothers will have been separated from vital support networks.

However, in normal times we know that alongside the ordinary joy of birth there also exists an ordinary despair experienced privately, and often, and of which little is spoken of. The quiet emotional, social and psychic isolation of new mothers has been of concern in our contemporary, refracted lives for some time. Will this be amplified by what we now call ‘social isolation’? And what about the parents who’s busy lives left little time for the family? There has also been a ‘forced socialisation’ within the family group itself and, I wonder, how has that been experienced?

What Next?

In the emergency of the pandemic these private experiences will not yet be exposed but I want to think ahead, and to provide what is essentially a place of welcome for these young families and children, and to create a space that functions in between the isolation of home and the first tentative steps back into the social world. This has always been the function of the Maison Verte but this function has become urgent in an interventionist sense, in that we must be there to receive these families when the restrictions are lifted. And we must use the time we have now to think about how we will receive them, slowly, delicately, thoughtfully, and how we will think about this repatching of the social fabric alongside them.

The Maison Verte has two aims: it offers and welcomes speech in the place of experience, and it welcomes the child as a subject alongside their parents. These aims now take on a new value at a decisive moment in time. Our society is questioning the disparate, busy lives that neoliberalism insists upon and now is the time to create local spaces for the community to be together, and where parents can take time to see their children play freely and explore the new experience of the social world at their own pace and in their own way. Just as we will all have to do together.

Written by Catherine from The Green House Playgroup

The Green House Playgroup

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The first instalment of The Green House Playgroup took place in the Tomato Studio – an alternative learning studio in North Finchley – every Sunday morning from 8am to 11am.

Running the playgroup early on a Sunday morning was an interesting time to be open. It was in fact attended by many families and in particular gave us the opportunity to work with a greater number of fathers than we normally see. Many fathers told us that they used the space to give their wives time alone or time with older children while they had some social time with the youngest members of their family. It was also a chance for fathers to meet other fathers. On the whole we worked with a variety of international families many of who worked in the city and who taught us much about parenting in a hypermodern society.

The team was made up of 3 Welcomers: Catherine Alexander, Chris Kyvernites and Francesca Bova who all learnt their trade at the Maison Verte UK in Finsbury Park.

We ran the project for 1 year and plan to reopen again in Bristol. You can contact us at www.thegreenhouseplaygroup.com or thegreenhouseplaygroup@gmail.com

For a review by one of the parents click here

Written by the team at The Green House Playgroup