Kids do give a shit

Olivia will never forget the moment she entered the cowshed. The first thing she saw was Sterna shitting.
Sterna was one of seven cows on a small Carinthian farm, and what she produced deeply impressed and fascinated Olivia. ​

​She was seven years old at the time, and it was the first time she had been outside London. In fact, she had never even been outside Shepherd's Bush and the White City Council Estate. 

Olivia's mum, Shirley, a single mother, had decided to bring up her girl with a wider horizon, so she became partners with another single mum in the Austrian Alps, Johanna.

This was seven years ago. Olivia still has the photographs.
She had spent hours in the cowshed, waiting for the next cow to take a dump, taking lots of pictures.
​No doubt, a truly great start to a wider horizon ;))

A load of cowdung weighs 2 to 2,5 kg

Later this summer, Johanna came to London with Miri and Anna, her daughters.
​Both mums wanted their kids to have what they considered essential in the 21st century:

Early contact with other languages, places and lifestyles.
Something they had, until recently, never thought to be
​within their means for their kids. Well, now it was.
​They knew that Shirley's working class home in the middle of
​a metropolis would be a great contrast to the tiny Rosental village, where Johanna ran her small farm and worked as a waitress in the local pub. 

From now on, their daughters would spend three weeks a year in Austria and another three in the UK. What they hadn't anti-cipated, however, was what the girls would take interest in. 

By the end of their first summer holidays, the two
mums realized that they had never before thought
of questioning what you do when you visit a place.
Doing "touristy things" had always seemed the obvious choice. But it wasn't.

The girls had no interest in the Tower of London,
nor did they want to spend hours queueing up
for Madame Tussaud's.
​Olivia was not keen on sightseeing either. 
But she would sit in Johanna's vegetable garden for​ hours and watch the earth-worms and millepedes,
the honeybees and the dragonflies, the butterflies
​and the tomtits. ​

Olivia soon knew all the German words for everything that lived and grew in the garden. Then she looked up the English words to teach Anna and Miri.

The girls from the farm could not get enough of riding the double-decker buses and the tube, they were fascinated by
​the tremendous diversity of people - folks from all walks of life, from all ethnicities and all social backgrounds. Anna and Miri found them much more amazing than the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace.
And they learned a lot about poverty and homelessness.​

Small farmers in the Alps usually don't have much cash to spare either, but they have a home.
​The people sleeping in corners of railway stations and shop entrances, their faces and their belongings, touched the girls deeply. Today, Anna is fifteen years old and quite certain: She will study public administration and go into politics.
​Miri and Anna speak English fluently, not surprisingly with a London accent. 
Olivia's German is excellent, too. All three have developed a keen interest in science, geography and history. 
Their partnership has made a wealth of experiences available and affordable. And they'll be friends forever.
​
​

Famillage partnerships are much more than a useful combination of holiday child care and language holidays. They let kids discover places and lifestyles, other ways of thinking, working and socialising. Famillages give young people access to other climates and habitats. They are eye-openers.
​
And yes, kids do give a shit. 😁
​

... on to the next story!