Thoughts from a hammock

It is a beautiful highveld afternoon. The sun beats down brightly and warmly, calling for a setting up of the hammock (a gift from Guatemala) under the lone shade of the olive tree in our garden. For awhile I doze off relaxing after a busy week. It feels luxurious to just let go and not feel the need to do anything.

These weeks have been full of annual planning, reporting, and budgeting for the new fiscal year as well as hosting numerous visitors. We are grateful for the opportunity that this place and this work provides. It is a gift to be working alongside so many others who strive for peace, justice and the hope for a better life. Despite the temptation by some to write off a country (or a situation) due to the many difficulties encountered others leap to the challenge and work for transformation. That is so true to the realities of southern Africa. There are a multitude of voices call for accountability, change and effective service delivery. Step by step old patterns and perceptions are changed, each shift calling for creative new ways of thinking and doing.


It is always moving, and challenging, to engage with people working at the grassroots level to create change. In Swaziland we recently met with a retired Matron who had started a clinic, an orphanage and a church – all on her own – to try to address the people’s needs. Swaziland has one of the highest HIV/AIDS infection rates in the world, around 23% of the population. Some communities we were told had no one over 16 living in them. It is hard to imagine such reality. Later on, visiting a project in Durban, we visited a Children’s Creche started by refugee women from the Congo. Beginning as an in-house childcare for a few kids it now has over 80 children who find support, education and hope in a very warm and friendly environment. The crèche is located on the third floor of a very run-down apartment building and the women are looking for other accommodation at the ground level so the kids can go outside and play. Amazing creativity, hope and tenacity have brought them a long way with very limited resources.


But I digress... I was in the hammock relaxing on a warm mid-summer's day (not to be thinking about work).So I dozed off ... as I awoke from my nap my thoughts went to our family scattered over three continents. Job creation, dietetics, international development - consume our various energies. While each of us has our place, our work and our community it is not always easy to be so separated. We cannot just drop in on each other. We 'talk' to each other via skype, telephone, chat or email. Electronic communication systems have certainly transformed the ability to communicate.Even as I lie in the hammock I open my cellphone email browser to see if any of our friends have sent a note - ah yes there is one from some former MCCers coming back for a visit after some 20 years. As a child growing up in the DRC it could take 3-6 months before mail arrived (via ocean liner) - that's how we learned Grandma had died. Now we can hit a button and our images immediately pop up on monitors or TV's and we can see and talk together (even opening gifts together) - yet it is not quite like sharing a cup of tea of coffee face to face. So we lament the distance between us even as we know we have made the choices to live and work in different places.


And yet I cannot but smile when I think of the snowbound -26C it is back home. Actually, where is home? Is it the Canadian prairies, or the Congo (DRC) where I first saw the light of day and had much of my childhood, or now in the 'rainbow nation' of South Africa where I currently live and work? Maybe all those places. In our day and age we are no longer 'restricted' to think of ourselves as from a particular place. Indeed we are all more and more bound together by a common reality - survival on a singular planet. We often, even being unaware, share many cultural practices, eat food from each others part of the world, depend on knowledge, medicine and many other things that come from other places. Home literally is the planet itself. If more of us thought in these terms maybe, just maybe we would be more concerned about not destroying the place we call home...


I just got the call to go and tend the braii (BBQ) as our dinner guests have arrived. So off I go but more another time.  Blessings to each of you this day!