Earthquake

At first I thought it might be another tree, or branches falling.  But it was a strange sound and a strange sinking feeling, sort of a low grumble and a shake.  There was something animal about it.  The noise and sense of movement intensified above me and I imagined animals invading the attic.  This was a big noise, more like a bear than squirrels.  What was in the house with me?   I felt the fear of something unnameable.  And then it moved on, settled down and I could hear the air conditioner and the silence above me.  I looked out of the window.  The trees were standing.  I walked into my reiki room and listened.  No unusual noises up in the attic.

A client was coming for a 2 pm reiki appointment.   She would be here in just a few minutes. I had set up the massage table, arranged the pillows, spritzed a little lemongrass oil.   I didn’t want the peaceful atmosphere disturbed by strange noises in the house.    All was quiet during the reiki session except for the soft music I selected, the drone of the heat pump and a few phone calls I let ring.

After the reiki, my client and I sat on my screen porch with cups of Rooibos tea and discussed the joys and difficulties of being global citizens, of how our connection with many places brings responsibilities as well as expansiveness.  We spoke of serendipity and of the strange threads of connections which weave through our lives.

After she had put on her shoes and left, I went to the answering machine to see who had called.  There were no messages.  Perhaps the caller had sent me an email instead.  I logged on. The only new email was from my daughter in South Africa.  She is living and working in a remote area.  Communications are not easy.  I cannot reach her there by phone.    The subject heading of her email was Earth Moving?  Her message:  Heard there's been some earth shaking over your side of the world. Did you feel it? Hope nothing major and that all is well.

It was only then I realized that what I had experienced had been an earthquake. Julia, in a remote mountainous area, half way round the world knew before me!!  I had experienced earth tremors living in Johannesburg and in Nairobi, but nothing about what I heard or felt yesterday made me think “earthquake”.

 My calendar was open on the desk in front of me.  The only other entry besides the reiki was a note to avoid travel on this day. My sister had alerted me over the phone months ago, saying that some geological disturbance was predicted to occur on 23^rd August.    Something may happen, she warned.  I should be aware.  My sister pays attention to such things and shares them with those she loves.  I read the note I’d made for myself and felt something open up inside me ….  like awe, like fear.

I think of these messages traveling over time and huge distances.   And it feels as though protection and guardianship spread like threads around the Globe and reach out to support and inform.   I am buoyed by a reassurance of the interconnectedness of things, the reassurance of some universal benevolence.   I think of the energy of Reiki --   Re for higher universal knowledge, and Ki (like Chi) for universal life force energy.   

My thoughts leap back over thirty years, to another time that I heard the news first from half way around the world.  It was the evening of 10th November 1979.  I was nine months and eight days pregnant. We were living in a soulless high-rise in Mississauga outside of Toronto, Canada.  We faced out over serious highways lined by newly planted saplings. We had only moved there a few weeks before.  I was tidying the apartment for my mother and sister who were to arrive the following morning.  They were already in the air, flying in from South Africa to help with my first baby, which we had all expected to be born by this date.   

As my husband and I cleaned and organized we heard the wail of sirens, many sirens.  We looked down along the highway spreading below us.  We could see a concentration of flashing lights, red and blue.  A forest of lights. The sirens screeched on and on.  I imagined some horrific traffic accident and deliberately turned my focus back to preparing for our visitors, arching my strained back and rubbing the tiny heels and knees which pressed and kicked from within.

The next morning as I put the kettle on for tea, the phone rings. It is my father calling from Johannesburg.  “Have you been evacuated?”  he asks, worry in his voice.   I look down at my protruding belly.   “No, not yet” I answer laughing, “this baby doesn’t want to come out”.   He explains that he is not asking about the baby, but about the train derailment in Mississauga, the concern of a chlorine gas leak, the huge evacuation which is underway.  I have no idea what he is talking about and reassure him we are fine and that we will be leaving soon for the airport to pick up mum and Deb.   The phone rings again as soon as I replace the receiver.  It is my New Zealand cousin, John, calling from Singapore.  “Are you alright, Bid?  What a terrible thing, this train crash.  How close is it?”  Again I have to profess ignorance.  

The apartment looks clean and tidy.  I have arranged flowers, made the beds, and still need to finish the stuffing for the turkey I plan to cook this afternoon as a special North American treat for the travelers.  Graham leaves the apartment to go and buy a newspaper.  Perhaps that will tell us something about this mysterious train crash.  We know the rail line is not far from our block of apartments.  

He has been gone only about 10 minutes when I hear the loudspeakers from the road.  “Evacuate this building immediately.  Evacuate this building immediately”.   (More than 200,000 people were evacuated in what was then the largest peacetime evacuation in North America until the New Orleans evacuation of 2005.)    I went into labor later that day.

It seems, to me, somehow special that the thoughts and concerns of people from so far away are there to support us.  As though that web of caring, by its global nature, has some extra potency, some special energy.

I was very ill three years ago, totally alone and in intensive care in a rough, sprawling hospital in Queens, New York.  I saw not another white skinned patient in the 5 days I was there.  The medical staff – doctors and nurses - were from all over the world. Ghana, Haiti, Guyana, Mexico, India, Nigeria, Russia.  I received such kindness from so many tired overworked people.  There were holes in the sheets, cockroaches in the bathroom.  But there was something about the international mix of the people caring for me that was particularly moving and seemed particularly healing.  

Again that global web of caring.



Comment:   I found myself making a deep sigh as I read the closing. Only then realizing that I had been holding my breath throughout. You are a magical storyteller...with such wisdom to share! Nancy

Beads

I bought a few strands of nice old beads on my last trip to South Africa. A few years ago it was easy to find these – but no longer.  Several of the bead shops I used to frequent have closed their doors or now only stock new shiny bright beads.  It’s becoming increasingly difficult to find the beads I prefer – beads with a history, with miles under their belts.  Beads which have traveled and been traded, handled and honored.

In a small tourist shop along the waterfront in Knysna I found a few dusty strands in a poorly lit corner.  The beads were still threaded on grass or dirty old string. They had reached the bottom tip of Africa.  I lifted down the single stand of  fine Venetian Feather beads and the green Kankamba beads from Nigeria. How I would love to be able to trace their route, their mode of transport. From Venice, from the Czech Republic. Through Africa. The decades between. 

Graham had brought me a gift of Feather beads years ago when he returned from working in Ghana.  He presented them with a satisfied smile of accomplishment, knowing how delighted I’d be with these  beautiful antique works of art which were made on the island of Murano in Venice especially for trade with West Africa from the early 1800s. Bead making was a highly prized and competitive industry.  So much so that glassmakers on Murano were forbidden, upon penalty of death, to divulge glassmaking secrets.  

Now here was another strand of deep red glass beads with the signature feather design in yellows and white.  These are wound glass beads, individually made – a labor intensive process, centuries old, of winding molten glass around a metallic rod. And then the skill and the practiced hand of adding combed designs in contrasting colors.

 It was the hand-made soaps in the shop window which had caught my eye,  I had not expected to find trade beads secreted in a corner.  Hanging as though in wait for me.

I reached also for the only strand of Nigerian Kankamba beads.  These slim glass heishi are old trade beads which were made in Czechoslovakia for trade in West Africa.  Most of them have a marbled appearance, but this strand  had beads of an almost translucent green, a wonderful green.  I had to have it.

And, I couldn’t help reaching for a couple of small Ethiopian silver crosses.  I had bought many of these in the open air markets in Nairobi  fifteen or more years ago and also in Addis Ababa when I went to Ethiopia to trek in the Simian Highlands with a mule.  But I am almost out of them now, and most of the crosses I’ve seen recently are roughly and recently hewn, lacking the fine grace and delicate appeal of the older crosses.  The crosses in the small shop in Knysna were a mix, I chose the best.

Later in my trip I found fine vintage silver and bronze African bicone beads. I love the way these work as spacers with dramatic beads like amber or bone. And, despite promising myself I would buy no more powdered glass beads from Ghana, I succumbed.  Like a last gasp, just before flying back to America, I bought an overpriced strand of large beads.  The glass is a swirl of clear and browns, like muddy water eddying into a clear stream. They are heavy and rough edged.  Each has been individually cast in a mould of clay.  They started out as bottles.  Possibly beer and coke.   The brown and the clear powered down and then mixed and melted.

It seemed a fitting choice as I left the new South Africa – the rainbow nation.  

  

When I unpack from my Africa trips I spread my purchases out on the dining-room table.  I pass them every time I go to the kitchen.  Between loads of laundry and catching up with emails and stocking the kitchen, I see my new beads and the possibilities grow within me. 

I have combined the feather beads with silver 

and with bronze, chunked with red "Amber" resin beads

I have had fun with the Kankamba green heishi 

  Arranged  them with dramatic "amber" beads from Kenya,

with  volcanic stone and silver

and with powdered glass in ocean and forest hues

I have yet to play with the big tawny glass beads.  But I can sense them calling.

And if any of these necklaces "call" to you,  click here to learn more

Comments: 

I loved this! Gorgeous writing as always.  I can just see the shop.   I have printed out the blog to tuck into my jewelry box, so I won't forget where the beads came from.  I have been wearing your exquisite necklace constantly since I got it, and have gotten all kinds of compliments!  L.

In Print ... Virtually

Traveler, writer, jewelry designer.... 

This is how I've described myself on this blog. 

By some magic way beyond my comprehension, you will be transported instantly 

to something which combines all three ----  my writing, my beading and a time in Africa. 

All you need to do is click

HERE

Ready, set, go!!

Photo by Alex Glenday

 

Comments:

A deeply wonderful story about you and your beads, about healing, and being conscious of what it takes to heal. Thank you so much for sharing.  As more and more opportunities arise in our lives for handling loss and remembering those we have loved, to have a ground like that one, a tactile connection to so many histories of beauty, is so important.   Always, always my favorite prayer has been the Navajo one:  “May you walk in beauty.”  M.B.

Dadaab

As I type this,  famine-ravished Somalis are streaming into Dadaab -- a vast refugee camp in  north-east Kenya.   Mothers clutching dying babies. Match-stick thin children, stomachs swollen with kwashiorkor.  Thousands of starving people walking for days through a parched land.   Many have not made it.  Many more will not. 

The drought is deep and wide in the Horn of Africa.  The UN warns that over 10 million could face starvation.  More than 1,000 refugees arrive every day at Dadaab which was conceived, twenty years ago, as a temporary solution to the civil war in Somalia. It was designed for a maximum of  90,000.  The camp has now  swollen to 400,000,  equal to the population of Cleveland.

I visited Dadaab over fifteen years ago. 

Hearing it mentioned in the news every day this past week has stirred up memories, reminded me of how our perceptions can shift in just  few hours.  I went to Dadaab only for the day, traveling from Nairobi (where I was living at the time) on a UNHCR  (U.N. Refugee Agency) plane.  

I was with a group of about a dozen women.  The others were mainly wives of foreign diplomats.  It was a goodwill mission.   We brought basketballs, pens and other gifts.  We were to meet with a delegation of Somali women refugees.  

I had no idea what to expect.  I don’t think any of us did.

We flew for ages over a seemingly uninhabited and inhospitable landscape and, as we circled to land, we could see that the sprawling camp was ringed by a wide, wide  border of nothingness – land picked bare. 

At the airport we climbed into giant 4x4 vehicles. For our protection, uniformed men were stationed on the vehicles, the barrels of  their long guns extending out of windows. We bounced along a rutted road passing make-shift dwellings, thin plastic shelters, ragged fences made from sticks, chickens, bare-foot children in the dust.

We were escorted into a large room made from corrugated metal and ushered on to a raised platform where chairs had been arrayed in a row. Below us was a packed crowd of Somali refugees, all women. They stood, squatted, or sat on the cement floor, knees drawn up to their chins.  The hall was dimly lit.  I remember no windows.  

But the room vibrated, almost sang with color. Bright patterned fabrics jostled against each other – yellows and purples, greens and reds, indigo and rust – a sea of color wrapped around bodies, draped over heads.  Ebony faces of startling beauty, the brilliant white of teeth.

Speeches were made, our gifts distributed.  Then, from the crowd, woman after woman took their turn to speak to us. Their harsh guttural language was strange to our ears. The staccato force of their unknown words like a slap in our faces.  Each would speak rapidly and at some length and then those of us on the platform would turn anxiously towards the interpreter expecting complaints, anger, reprimands. But instead,  “This woman says thank you for your kind gifts”  Another long diatribe… “This woman says you are welcome in this place.” The sounds and the sentiments seemed totally at odds with each other.

We asked the women about their problems.  Their major concern was rape.  Several women a week were being raped when they went out to gather firewood. The scrubby bush surrounding the camp had been denuded and the women needed to walk further and further to harvest wood.  We suggested that perhaps their menfolk collect the firewood so the women could remain safe.  The women laughed and laughed at our useless suggestion. “ Gathering wood is women’s work”.   Well, perhaps the men could walk with you as protection. They shook their heads.  We clearly didn’t understand.  “Gathering wood is women’s work.”

We asked if there was something we could do for them.  I was expecting to hear requests for medicine or clothing, something basic, tangible. But no, we were asked if we could assist with marketing !!  They told us about the craft groups they had formed and showed us colorful sturdy baskets and delightful hand-carved wooden servers. They had no way to market, no proper outlet for their beautiful, labor-intensive wares.

At the end of our session I heard a Somali woman speaking to an Italian member of our group. I asked how she knew Italian.  She told me that she had done her medical training in Rome. She was a qualified doctor who had lived in Europe. Now she was a refugee.

There was little talk on the flight back.  I think we were all emotionally exhausted and wrapped up in our own musings.  I thought with discomfort about how we had sat, elevated, on a stage and handed out what now seemed such trite gifts. I realized that only a few hours ago I had held a narrow, stereotypical image of “a refugee”.  I felt ashamed and humbled. The women we had met had been so polite, gracious and cheerful  in our presence despite their dire situation. I thought of the doctor and wondered if she too had been crossing that barren expanse of earth in search of firewood. What was her future?  How many others in that camp were accomplished, educated women?  How many could be, given the opportunity?

When I got home I arranged for the baskets and wooden servers to be flown down to Nairobi and sold them in craft shows, placed them in boutiques.  I sent small envelopes of money back with pilots who were flying  food and medicine up to the camp. 

I never got back to Dadaab myself but I brought a basket and some wooden servers with me when I moved to Durham.  

Today I searched my house for them.  I have dusted them off and placed them where I will see them daily. I rub my fingers over the pleasing designs on the servers and wonder if this wood was gathered alongside the firewood.  Did women risk rape to get this wood?  Did the careful making of these items so engross and please the women that they were able for a time to forget where they were? I lift the basket by its bright  handles.  The smell of grass is still trapped in the weave.  A basket of memories. 

Dadaab now houses more than four times the numbers of people it did when I was there. It is the largest refugee camp in the world.  The wide swathe of land around the camp which had been picked clean by women gathering wood must, by now,  be crammed, jam-packed with new refugees fleeing a famine. Thin depleted bodies on the margin of life.  What of their future?


Comments:

Such a lovely piece of writing Bridget and so heartbreaking what they are going through. I know they are being detained and contained in Somalia and it is the" lucky" ones who reach the overcrowded Dadaab.  Jennifer

You touched my heart.  You have a gift with your words. Thank you for sharing...makes us stop in our tracks.  Barbara

Wonderful article, very moving - I shall cherish my basket with greater understanding of its history.  Deb