Monday 28 April 2008

Back to work

I know I shouldn't be tired first thing on a Monday morning - but I am! The weekend was so busy that I feel I need a bit more of a rest!

Yet Saturday morning was great. Up early to grab a hired floor polisher and off to church. 50 of us gathered to spring clean. This hadn't been done for years, and in the meantime we had built an annexe - a church centre - on the side which had just been finished, so there was dust everywhere. The real heroes were the two youngsters who tackled the debris outside, collecting a bucketful of concrete bits before sluicing the cobblestones clean. Without them, the church would have been dirty again within minutes as the dirt was tracked in again.

We had great fun. Chatted to people we hadn't caught up with for ages, moved furniture, found dust in places no one had ever been before... and then afterwards stopped for coffee and cake.

We'd called it a Praise and Power (Cleaning) Party. Some of us gathered together in the quiet of the centre. It is a haven of peace, quiet and full of calm. The perfect place for reflection and prayer.

Thursday 24 April 2008

Friends again!

I can't believe how blessed I am this week. I have just realised that I have met up with friends every single day since last Saturday, in spite of going back to work on Monday. Not just casual friends either, but people who I can be completely real with.

There is nothing, nothing as good as getting your elbows on the table over a meal, and putting the world to rights. Bringing God into our conversation, and our concerns and joys to Him in prayer.

Thank you Renee, Jane, Ian and Sarah!

Tuesday 22 April 2008

Friendship in the rain

What a day yesterday. We were blessed with rain for hours on end. Everytime I went outside, it was pouring skywater. I cycled to school, dried off my clothes, cycled home, dried off my clothes, cycled out to friends for supper, dried off my clothes, cycled home... by that time it had stopped raining.

Inside, though, there was nothing but warmth. My day was spent learning art techniques of block-making and printing, getting wonderfully messy. It is amazing to learn something new, especially for one whose best efforts at drawing result in stick figures. Yet my 'arty' efforts turned out all right: my fingers seemed to know what to do even though my head was clueless, absolutely devoid of imagination.

The evening was full of fun, laughter, restorative chat, ending in prayer. A washing of my soul which had nothing to do with water and everything to do with encouragement and affirmation.

Monday 21 April 2008

New nephew

Here I am with my new nephew Gabriel - aged 4 weeks.

I was amazed to find that he didn't start screaming as soon as I held him.

(He was ALREADY screaming. Not only that, but he actually STOPPED!)

The recipe: a good bit of jiggling and a lot of patting on the bottom seemed to work well. For a while, at least.

I guess I must have done this before.

Saturday 19 April 2008

More than friends: sisters

An add on to my notes about my recent reunion in Ireland last week. Here is a photo of what we look like now. 27 years have been and gone since we originally met.

I have searched and searched for my group photo of how we all looked then: I have it firmly in my mind's eye but cannot physically find it. We spent our days together remembering everyone else in the group, but without the photo I cannot be sure that we have named everyone. I hope we have. Wouldn't it be awful if FOUR people had all completely forgotten a person's existence?

Cath, Ann, Mary and I at the foot of Croagh Patrick - Ireland's holy mountain, on the top of which St Patrick fasted for forty days and nights. Thousands of pilgrims climb it every year in July.

At the foot of Croagh Patrick, overlooking Clew Bay.

Friday 18 April 2008

Small to God

Just like the dog, I'm small to God.

But it's different.

God doesn't treat me as younger than I am. He loves me just as I am, for what I am, right now.
He gives me exactly what I need - if I'm feeling as helpless as a baby or have wisdom beyond my years.
He hugs me whether I feel like it or not, and often I don't notice the hugs. Which is sad - I wish I always did.
I'm still not used to being picked up. My pride protests - it is undignified. Things don't happen the way I think they should. What does that matter when God is taking care of me?
HE doesn't force me into doing anything - I have to make decisions myself, take responsibility for my own behaviour.

And how do I thank Him for all his loving care?
I'm just like my dog Mpira.

I growl and whine prayers of disapproval and complaint.

I wriggle sometimes, trying to get out of something even though I know God wants it for my best.

I snarl angrily.

I have even tried to bite back. Guess who got hurt? That's right - me.

Wish I could learn the lesson in all this.

It's hard to be small

Small means...
You get treated as being younger than you are.
Sometimes, even, like a baby.
You're hugged when you don't feel like it.
You're picked up - it's very undignified.
You're treated as a form of entertainment.
If you don't want to do something you can be forced to do it. (For example, I was made to go outside to play this morning. It was cold and raining. That's not fair.)

You try to make a stand for your independence, but it's difficult.
Most of the time you put up with it.
After all, every relationship has to have a bit of give and take.
Don't sweat the small stuff - put up with it unless you really need to make your feelings known.

Some tips:
A growl of disapproval gives a bit of a hint.
Wriggling helps sometimes.
So, occasionally, does snarling - but that's seen as very bad manners.

The last resort - and, this IS the last resort, only to be used when compromise is impossible.
The fake nip and bite.
Make sure your teeth don't really make contact. Perfect the art of the gentle graze against the skin. Just enough to show that this time, THIS TIME, you are not to be messed with just because you're small and that YOU REALLY MEAN BUSINESS.

Yes, it's hard to be a small dog.

Wednesday 16 April 2008

Spring is sprung

"Spring is sprung
The flowers is riz
I wonder where
The birdies is?
The bird is on the wing?
Why that's absurd -
The wings is on
The little bird."

Said, by my father, with a strong Brooklyn accent. Don't know how to spell birdies with a Brooklyn accent, so I'm not even going to try.

But boy, has spring sprung! Birds going chitter chatter nonstop from early morn to late evening, mallards on the pond with half a dozen chicks, kestrels hovering on the edge of the cliffs waiting to pounce.

Brilliant sunshine, cold winds, trees sprouting leaves and blossom in a helterskelter mishmash. Spring is sprung!

Quiet quiet quiet

J and C - aka the anklebiters - left to go back to uni on Sunday. (By the way, they used to be called anklebiters when they were still at baby crawling stage. I'm not quite sure why I'm referring to them like that again. Hmm, must think about that.)

There are pluses and minuses to their departure:

On the plus side:

1. The house is clean and relatively tidy. At least, it's only untidy with my untidiness, so that doesn't count.
2. The fridge stays well stocked.
3. The kitchen floor no longer suffers a daily sprinkling of crumbs.
4. There is always hot water when I want it.
5. The cupboards remain full of crockery and the dishwasher doesn't have to work twice a day.
6. I have a spare car to use .

On the minus side:

1. There is no loud singing in the shower. (Yes, that is a minus: not only does Jonny have a beautiful singing voice, he sings songs I like.)
2. Their smiling faces are absent from the dinner table.
3. There is no one to share a girly video with or mess around in the garden.
4. The house is too quiet.
5. The dog is somewhat miserable.
6. Our family is only half complete.

Above all, I just miss them. I'm so thankful for them and the opportunities they have, but I still miss them.

Those sisters

I became used to being called 'sister' in Africa, where that's women are: sisters, regardless of blood ties. That experience stretched my thinking way beyond my own tiny family. I gained a new understanding and appreciation of the friendships I had with other women.

The three I spent the weekend with are really special sisters. Some of us come from families where we have several blood sisters and female cousins (and brothers); others, few. We'd shared life together many years ago and know each other as well as - or better than - we do our own families. We don't want to lose that closeness, so we meet up regularly.

It was so relaxing to back in the heart of 'family' that the stress rolled off me. I had been keeping going with a huge exertion of human strength and prayer. My life hasn't been majorly stressy - no life-shattering events - yet the constant niggle of tiny difficulties had been pressing on me for some time. It was such a relief to be so completely away from work and so engulfed by such unconditional love and acceptance that tiredness then hit me, hard. I spent a lot of time quietly yawning and catnapping!

I had caught up by Sunday, though. And in the meantime we had caught up with each others' lives. We'd shared happiness and grief, laughter and tears, hopes and failures. We reminisced endlessly. We were glad to be together again.

Thursday 10 April 2008

Special times

So where am I headed off to?

This weekend has been planned for a few months now. I'm meeting up with three very special women - my sisters in Christ. They are closer to me than sisters. We've known each other for decades, since we first lived together for a few weeks before departing to work in Africa. We have had a rare opportunity to live in close community with each other, sharing every detail of our lives. A closeness developed which has spanned thousands of miles and years of neglect.

We've survived weddings, and a divorce. We've survived not being asked to weddings (there were good reasons for that) and not knowing about the imminent divorce until it was too late. (We would have loved to have helped - but there were good reasons for being kept out of that, as well.) We are so trusting with each other that we live above hurt or injured feelings. We love each other deeply.

We are possibly more brutally honest with each other than with anyone else - even our husbands. We speak the truth immediately, no holds barred, completely secure.

This weekend, I'm taking two flights and travelling hundreds of miles to be with them. I'd go a lot further than that. It will be a very special time. I can't wait.

Leaving - not.

I've spent the last few hours packing. I should have left the island this afternoon, but have put it off until tomorrow morning - I'll leave on the 'red-eye' at 7am. I hope I'm not pushing my luck - I have a connecting flight a mere 4 hours after arrival in Manchester. I think that's enough time to cater for any weather or technical problems. I've only experienced these twice: once, a five hour delay due to fog; another time, an hour's delay because of a minor technical hitch. So I'm hoping all will be well.

I was just putting off my departure - I could have gone this afternoon. But the weather was glorious: cloudless skies, azure blue, millpond still sea; the sun beating down on my face as I sat on the rocks at the beach, while the dog splashed in the sea, convinced summer had arrived.

And Jonny and Cat are still here. They go back to uni at the weekend, while I am away. I just wanted to make the most of every minute with them.

Wednesday 9 April 2008

Deviations and Diversions

When I lived on the UK mainland, I used to say that one of the signs of spring was incipient roadworks. Words - usually in white paint - would appear scrawled on the road, accompanied by circles, arrows, or lines. I had become expert in predicting what these meant: pothole repair, repainting road markings, or even digging trenches along by the kerb and repairing drain covers. Sure enough, a few weeks later 'Men At Work' signs would appear, accompanied by what seemed to be miles of orange cones and barriers. Sometimes traffic lights were required. The roadworks had definitely arrived - and so had summer.

But moving to Guernsey brought me onto a higher level of road disruption. The roads here are so narrow - many of them do not even permit a bicycle to pass a car - that roadworks mean road closures. And road closures mean diversions. Lots of them. Roads in the area suddenly become one way - or one way roads might have to reverse direction, temporarily. Traffic is directed in a circle sometimes a couple of miles long simply because ten yards of road have become unusable. This affects both scheduled and emergency repairs alike.

Nor is the disruption confined to the summer. No, in Guernsey motorists have the privilege of experiencing diversions all year long. The local radio broadcasts hourly updates on road closures and the Guernsey Press -our newspaper - publishes them as well. No one is ever lost for a topic for small talk or dinner party conversation - it's a winner.

Sometimes the diversions can be particularly annoying, when they do not seem to be able to cope with the amount of traffic. (Note: in Guernsey, a traffic jam consists of more than 10 cars in a line waiting. We have too many cars for this small island, but even so do not have the press of traffic on the mainland.)

When I lived in Kenya, diversions were called deviations. Deviations they indeed were - invitations to chaos rather than inconvenience. Deviation from tarmac - usually on dusty tracks which had been made haphazardly along the side of the road being worked on. Or deviation from normal traffic rules: it would not be unusual to find opposing lines of traffic weaving in and across each other, every car searching for the easiest way through, regardless of the side of the road it was supposed to be on.

Diversion and deviation are used interchangeably. Yet our language also uses them differently. A diversion can be a distraction, often good: small children can be managed more easily when their attention is diverted away from their own demands. Yet a deviation has connotations of 'badness' - a deviation from the norm, something different.

Are we less willing to tolerate deviation than diversion?

Words and feelings

I've had so many words in my head the last few days that I haven't been able to blog. It's like an imaginary conversation: I keep starting something, get distracted with something else and start off on that, get diverted again... You get the drift.

I don't like this feeling of being continually sidetracked, unable to focus on one thing at a time. It's confusing. I like to see things as they really are - clearly, even if what I am looking at is ugly. (I always like to know the worst thing that can happen, too. There's a freedom in that, because then other possibilities are endless.) So muddles mix up my emotions as well as my thoughts and eventually panic begins to nibble away at my overheated brain.

But I'm learning to relax about times like this. Sometimes the words just have to do their thing. They swirl around in some huge primordial gloopy soup, shapes of ideas forming and reforming. The thoughts change so fast I can't keep up with them. Sometimes it feels as if I'm in the washing machine on spin cycle.

But then there is the calm after the storm. The rotating slows down and stops. The ideas resolve and settle down with each other. Suddenly I can see the pattern after all. It all starts to make sense.

Saturday 5 April 2008

You can teach an old dog new tricks

Just a footnote to add to Mpira's repertoire of tricks.

He has now learnt how to roll over and wave his paws in the air on the command of 'Bang!'. He just hates doing it.

He looks at me and I can see from the glint in his eye that this trick really is so demeaning and humiliating to do. It requires complete submission. I mean, it's admitting - in public - that he is inferior to us. He believes he isn't: he's just another - equal - member of the family.

It's a hard life being a dog sometimes.

Cross Country

School held its inter-house cross country competition last week. We are a small school (130 boys) and the only school on the island to do this. We all went up to l'Ancresse Common in the north of the island, on the edge of the beach.

The course was short - less than a kilometre - with a gentle upward slope, then a steep downhill and up again before heading for home and hundreds of adoring parents. The excitement was palpable as the boys swarmed over the common like multicoloured rabbits in their red, blue, yellow and green house colours.

I was a marshall at the bottom of the steep hill. This job definitely had a downside: I had no view at all of the sparkling blue sea on the other side of it. My job: to pick up any pieces of small boy which might come a cropper and to encourage them to keep going up the other side - by this stage many had given up running.

Result: one lost shoe on the downward slide; one refusal to run at all - even downhill (the boy kept up the same walking pace all the way round the course); one tumble, quickly up again; and one slightly twisted ankle. The boy who hurt his ankle has the lowest pain threshold I have ever come across, spending more time in the first aid room at school than anyone else, so this was a huge drama. However, by the time he had continued to limp round the course, as to carry on was the shortest way to get back to the start, he was almost completely better.

The best bit of the day: cycling home along the coast path and through the lanes in the brilliant sunshine.

Wednesday 2 April 2008

Teaching

Ten things children don't expect teachers to say:
1. It's okay, you didn't need to do your homework.
2. Here, have this bar of chocolate, I don't need it.
3. Don't fart in class.
4. Please don't throw paper or rubbers while I'm looking: wait until my back is turned.
5. You can go home early today, I'm too tired to teach.
6. Mark your work? Who do you think I am - your teacher?
7. No lessons today -we're just going to play games.
8. I was off school yesterday because I didn't feel like coming in.
9. It's no good, your behaviour has forced me to use the S word: will you please SHUT UP!
10.I love children - on toast, with plenty of tomato ketchup. Mmmm.