Monotonous Meetings

How you goin'? Fine I hope. :)

Today was the day of the big DFC meeting!

Andrea picked me up at about 8:30am and we were off. We outskirted the city and made our way to Marion. Originally Andrea said that I might have to go leave the meeting at some point, so she thought I might want to go shopping at Marion Mall. The mall is HUGE!!! Unfortunately, I didn't have the chance to go because I got to stay the whole meeting. Which was fortunate for me. :) But I will have a chance to visit the mall another time during my stay here.


We arrived at the meeting at 9:30am and we promptly got started after a quick dedication of the Kaurna land and what we were doing on it today. (The Kaurna people are the Aboriginals that originally were living on the South Australia land before the white settlers arrived - sound familiar?) The meeting was held at the Families - SA district office which is at Marion and also has the Housing - SA district office there as well. We went in to the meeting expecting there to be a workshop and then the meeting. Nope. The workshop was cancelled (which we didn't know that) and the meeting was taking place instead. Thank God we started when we did or I might still be there.


The meeting ended a bit before 2pm. And we had one 15 minute break and ate lunch around the table so we could continue our discussion. At this meeting there were other foster care providers and some district people. Some of the other providers were: Anglicare, Uniting Care, Baptist Care, and then a bunch of names that I couldn't either hear or couldn't pronounce. I sat next to Andrea and Gayle - who plays a very important role in Families - SA. And she's quite funny to top it off.

The people from Anglicare were a pain the entire day. They argued every little thing to the ground. And then argued some more. Others could hardly get a word in edgewise. I could tell that the lady from Anglicare does not like LCC. All the organizations had to go around and say what they are doing. When it was Anglicare's turn, this lady was mentioning how they had to learn to work with a "new service provider" that is coming into their region and she just wasn't sure how that was going to work out. (Mind you, she said this in such a snooty way!) The thing is, everyone single person in that room knew she was talking about Andrea, LCC and I. We aren't stupid. And you know the worst (or best - depending on your outlook) part: she used to work here back in the 90s. And what I found humorous about the whole thing is that Anglicare was being called out for not returning wanna-be carers' phone calls or doing follow-ups to see how people were coming along in the carer;s process and assessment. The lady made every single excuse in the book for why they hadn't called back - and one of them was their phones were being funny. I had to stop from laughing at this point because at the Magill office (LCC) we had been having phone issues to the extent where we were changing handphones and having to put one hand on the computer and keep one on the phone to actually hear the other person on the line. There is a history behind LCC and Anglicare - and basically Anglicare stole LCC's foster care program and funding (from the government) back in 1997 in which LCC had to shut down their entire program. Anglicare doesn't like to work LCC at all now - or any other agencies really. Hmmm...

Anyway, the meeting was very interesting because I was able to get an inside look at how the foster care program is run and how non-profit organizations fit into the scheme overall. The different policies and procedures was interesting because they change quite a bit and each organization has to adhere to the new policies. Which means a lot of restructuring or complete demolition of a program. I did have a difficult time at first because there were terms like (DC, SI, JNO, CP) that were being thrown around and I had no idea what they stood for. I do now after Andrea and this lady named Claire explained them to me. I'm really glad I got to go to the meeting because it was a chance to see how all the providers try to work with each other (or don't - Anglicare!) and how that plays out in the bigger picture. Overall, it was a great learning experience and I took a lot of notes. :)

After the meeting Andrea and I took a different route back to Magill and she went off to Sefton to work on the budget. Yuck. I ended up doing some odd things at the office and then it was back to HH.

El and I decided to forego supper at HH (we would've had rice - again) and instead hopped the bus back to the city at 7:50pm to go to Subway near Rundle Mall. I got a pizza sub - I know this isn't experiencing something new, but it's Subway for crying out loud! The sub was toasted instead of microwaved which made it a bit tougher to eat. And poor Ellie got a veggie sub and it wasn't the best - plus it didn't help that we couldn't really hear the girl behind the counter when she was asking for our orders. And they don't have $5 foot-longs, they are $7 foot-longs here.

After eating our supper we journeyed down Rundle Street and just explored the night life. We were going to go to the Universal Wine Bar because my friend Matt was playing there, but it was awkward because we didn't see a band when we arrived. So we just continued on down to the Garden of Unearthly Delights. Which is where "The Fringe" (Adelaide's HUGE art/visual/music festival) is being held at. It wasn't open since opening night is tomorrow night. We did stop at this shop called Cold Rock Ice Cream, and I thought it smelled bad. We didn't get anything. Then we hopped the bus back and I went to bed.

Cheers until my next post!