Shadow, the Sneaky Puff Adder

Shadow is a sneaky puff adder (*) and has caused mayhem in my office today. Each dog has his or her own place and usually peace reigns when we are working. However this morning for reasons best known to Shadow he used his right of elder statesman and took Valentines place under my desk, regardless of the fact that he is too big for the space.

Valentine was totally put out.

I suspect that as a result of the abuse she suffered as a puppy coupled with the fact that she is mostly German Shepard, she is not the most stable of dogs. She has been a thorough going nuisance all morning being utterly unable to settle. She in turn unsettled Apache, the dancing dalmation, who is usually an amiable easy going fellow. Shadow remained oblivious to calls, bones and biscuits temptations and pretended to be far deafer than he actually is. He refused to budge.

He, however, has moved into the sun this afternoon and mercifully peace is restored.

Here are some pictures of the disrupters of the peace......

Shadow the sneaky puff adder

Apache the dancing dalmation and Valentine in a mood

Apache looking handsome and Shadow

(*) I have no idea why we use the expression "sneaky puff adder" as puff adders are not sneaky snakes and mostly will give plenty of noisy warning before striking at some one who ventures to close for their comfort. They are very venomous but really pretty snakes as this picture shows.

Commute times

We had a lot of fun this weekend with various friends, several of whom work in Lusaka Zambia, and now because the airline has gotten absolutely unreliable drive the 1000 odd kilometres to Lusaka on a Monday and home again on a Friday. It takes about the same time as the flight, what with waiting times and airport and flight delays but is considerably harder.

What suddenly bemused me was some gentle teasing of a couple who have moved to the Chisawasha Hills on the outskirts of Harare and some forty five minutes from town. The teasing centred around the distance to travel anywhere..... in fact they described it as living miles from anywhere, in the middle of nowhere. Several people said beautiful place, just that it is so far out! They remarked that living out there you might as well live in Johannesburg, a city notorious for the length of its commutes. My eyebrows raised somewhat, these same people think a 1000 kilometre trip to work is not a long commute?

Epilepsy

Well I've had a couple of exciting weeks but the worst of the not knowing is more or less over. Even with MRI results outstanding (due to an exercise for cutting trees of the line near the Imaging Centre) it appears to the doctors that I have temporal lobe epilepsy.

I am blinking a little, as it was most unexpected and what started as a headache that wouldn't go away has ended somewhere I did not even begin to imagine.

I am told that it is simple to treat.

Seems though that I am in for something of an intensive learning curve in the next couple of months. No driving did make me laugh ..... I haven't driven  for years due to double vision difficulties but no swimming dismays me totally. Perhaps some of these things are negotiable.

Silence is within?

I had to have an MRI last night.

I had been told all sorts of scary stories about how claustrophobic and how noisy the machine is and how hard it is to lie completely still for forty minutes or so. Consequently I was a little anxious.

So it began.

And it was everything I had been told. Small space, loud noise, held still.

Reaching for some way to be that wasn't frightened or panicky I sought comfort in the familiarity of the Rosary. Began the prayers without the beads, using my fingers pressed against the vibrating machine to measure the count. After a while I forgot about the noise and my breathing slowed to an even calm and part of me marvelled that, in the short space of time I have been praying the rosary, it has become so easy to slip into its cadence and rhythm.

So it strikes me what I am sure so many know .... that silence comes from with in and ...... that noise needn't be a disruption of that silence.

Morning meditation

It is very cold here, with ground frost crisping my lawn and those frost tender plants that have survived in my garden, especially so at six thirty this morning as I saw my husband off on his trip to Lusaka. The just risen sun made a warm patch against the bedroom wall and I edged into it, eyes slitted, absorbing the warmth available.

Standing with my eyes closed against the sunrise I listened to the crows to my right and the purple crested louries honking call on my left wondering, no more than idly, how many of each were making such a racket. Not realising that I was listening so intently I began to pick out other bird calls. A chiruping robin, no doubt one of our cats was too close for his comfort, the endless busy chatter of small seed eating finches, the aggressive chirping yellow bellied sunbirds, the piping note of the starlings, the sudden rattling, chattering flurry of a group of babblers, the soft tone of a mourning dove ...... and on and on. Identifying the familiar residents of my garden not as usual by sight but by sound.

All the while enjoying the warming of the sun in a place out of the wind that carried the faintest scent of Antarctica.

As I finally opened my eyes I discovered that I was not alone in sunning myself for not far above my head where a pair of speckled mousebirds and their three offspring clinging below the branch as is their way, tummy's exposed to the morning sun, eyes firmly closed against the glare and further up a whole flock of tiny bronze mannikins were doing the same thing.

I understood why they enjoyed the pleasure of an early morning sunbathe, joined as I was in enjoyment.


And whispering silently beyond our pleasure I could feel the Almighty smiling at our simple happiness.

                                                                     

                                                                          Mousebirds                     

Bronze mannikins

Grandfathers

I know today is Father's Day. A day to celebrate fathers. And that can get mighty tricky for some, for most of us because no one has a perfect father and there are always issues..... some huge, some small.....Today thinking about my dad is too hard. Suddenly I miss him painfully all over again, as if he died only yesterday and not eight months ago. To much to deal with just right now.

Instead I ask my mother about her Dad. He died when I was eleven and I have a child's delighted happy memories of him. Especially of him teasing my mum by pretending not to know where I had got to and actually having me hidden in the knee hole of his desk, or behind his footstool. His celebratory chuckle remains vivid in my memory. He loved books and introduced me to the wonderful world of written words by reading Babar stories to me in his comfortable Scottish burr that didn't fade for all the years he lived in Africa. She tells me he was generous and kindhearted and always played Father Christmas at the local Christmas party. She tells me he was a perfectionist who could be hard to deal with. She tells me, something I didn't know, that like my own Dad he died suddenly and unexpectedly.

I think about having missed out on knowing him, and with gratitude that I knew my other grandfather who died when I was twenty five, and who I lived with at the time of his death. He also was funny, and loved to tease in a kind way. I have learned much about him from going through stuff of my dad's - things I also didn't know. Like how he was retired early by the American Copper Mining company he worked for as he was encouraging the black workforce to form unions. Much frowned upon in the 1940's and early 1950's in colonial Africa.

When I think about  both of them I realise how lucky I am to be here.

Both fought and survived the First World War.

My maternal grandfather ran away to war at age 17 in September 1914, and fought all the way through the war on the Western Front with only minor injuries. It seems remarkable when so many millions died that anyone would live, especially when you consider that he was Mentioned-in-Despatches more than once and won the Military Cross. He wasn't tucked away somewhere safe. He fought with  the Scots Guards in the thick of it.

My paternal grandfather fought in German East Africa. An entirely different kind of war to the trenches in Europe. But brutal none the less. Brutal in an entirely African kind of way. He contracted Blackwater Fever (a deadly form of malaria usually) and dysentery and typhoid. They should have killed him but they didn't. Amazing to think that he lived to be 92 after all that.

Both though, were scarred by the war for both fled into the interior of Africa and never went home to Scotland or the Cape Province of South Africa again. For some years they lived solitary lives farming in remote bush or prospecting. Both then married women much younger than themselves. Both became kind, generous and humorous men in their later lives and seemed somehow to put the awfulness of the war behind them without therapy or dragging after effects.

Neither were well known or famous or celebrities, yet they lived ordinary lives that nonetheless deserve honour and respect and to be remembered with love and fondness.

And without them doing that, well I would not be here to live my own life......... I pray that I will live as well as they did.

Lunar Eclipse

I am not quite together this morning.

I was up way beyond my usual bedtime watching the lunar eclipse.

It was cold out but so worth bundling up, filling a flask with hot coffee, grabbing my binoculars and craning my neck to watch the incredible sight. One of the good things about frequent load shedding is that Harare doesn't have a lot of ambient light, making star and in the case of last night, moon gazing something that can be indulged even in town. Somehow I felt that there should have been a music score to accompany the splendour of the event, music that built to a crescendo as the moon went from bright light to orange to dark and through the other side again.

For me it was not just the eclipse, it was also the changing display of the stars revealed by the changing moonlight, as the moon started to go orange the constellation of Scorpio suddenly stood out with clarity, other lesser stars hidden leaving only Scorpio, proud and easy to identify in the night sky, scattered like bright jewels on black velvet. Yet as the moon darkened other fainter stars were revealed, and so the stars ebbed and waned through the night.

Instead I had the much more entertaining sounds of the neighbourhood children, allowed to stay up late and playing with high excitement under the changing moon.

I was drawn to Psalm 19..

The Heavens declare the Glory of God

The skies proclaim the work of his hands

Day to day pours out speech

and night to night reveals knowledge

There is no speech, nor are there words,

whose voice is not heard.

Patience of Africa

I wondered recently why doctors clients are called patients. I wondered as I waited for an hour for my doctor who was running late as he is given to listening to his patients, if it was because we the patients, need to be patient.But I had a new perspective today.

I had to have an EEG today and there is only one place in Harare (and probably the whole country) where this can be done - the main government hospital, the Pari to locals but really called The Parirenyatwa Hospital. This hospital has suffered terribly from the ravages of super hyper inflation, of mismanagement, of just so much. I was anxious a little about the procedure, and the hospital itself. I arrived on time, found the relevant department, surprised at the helpfulness of the staff I enquired of directions from. Such helpfulness to a white person from a government employee is not the norm. 

When I finally arrived at the correct place I was bemused to see a sign reading EEG, EKG, and DENTAL CLINIC. Interesting combination I thought.

I found the right place and joined a queue of some half dozen people. Thinking to myself that here was  patience in Africa. Queues for services are the same all over the continent. Poor people, for the most part, queue endlessly, not sure that they will get service or even that the service offered is able to be provided. Perhaps the machine will be broken, perhaps the technician is on a go slow, maybe there will be no drugs or no money to treat the illness, maybe there will be no electricity, maybe we will never know why we don't get served. I took my place on the ubiquitous brown benches, so familiar from the continents colonial heritage and dug out my book, for I had come prepared. My bag held book, MP3, water, sweets and biscuits. I know that appointments don't mean a great deal usually. One queues and one takes one's turn

Patience. Acceptance.

Small children ahead of me regarded with wide eyes. So I dug out some sweets. They grinned hugely. 

A young man came out of an office to attend to us. He established that those ahead of me wanted the dentist and not the EEG department. Suddenly, unexpectedly I was the only person in the queue. This same polite young man assisted me in filling out the form, making payment, and in waiting for my turn. The hospital might be tired and worn but it was spotlessly clean and does its best under extreme pressure on its resources. Much like all the people I encountered, polite, helpful, caring.

I wondered again at my expectations of being served, and those of the poor people around me. I wondered at my ingratitude and at their gratitude.

Patience. Acceptance.

Prayer in action. I think I saw it today.

Elephants in water....

These photographs were taken by my friend and assistant Lizane Purse on a recent trip to Kariba, an enormous man made lake on the Zambezi and favourite holiday destination for Zimbabweans.

 A matriarchal group with the Matusadona mountains in the background.

A lone bull with nice ivory.

Elephants in the air

Terri says that she loves the idea of elephants in the air......

I had such a laugh at this .......

If you live in my part of Africa then you will know all sorts of things about elephants. For instance that they can move incredibly quietly through the bush and can appear seemingly out of nowhere a few feet from one. It can be alarming because African elephants are enormous, and they can be a tad unpredictable with fiery tempers and protective instincts and little love or trust for mankind.

You will know that they are both poached to the edge of extinction and over populating their remaining "protected" ( I use the word ironically - poaching is big money and no where is safe) territories. Over population means they are literally eating themselves out of house and home. They are killing themselves. Again anyone who lives in this part of Africa has seen the destruction on the flora that elephants wreak on their stately passage from here to there.

Most of us have watched baby elephants play and teenagers practice charging. We have fitted both our hands into an elephant footprint. We have seen their matriarchal families move in groups through the bush, stomachs rumbling. We have heard their vocalizations, which low range sounds can carry for hundreds of miles ... or so it is thought. If you are really lucky you will have seen them move at night, ivory shining in the moonlight, the impression of grey ghosts belied by the munching and swishing of grasses.

You will know also that sometimes you don't see them at all, for they disappear like grey ghosts in thick scrub and can be completely hidden only a few feet away, but even if you don't see them, chances are you will smell them.

The tang of elephant hanging vividly in the air......

Elephants are awesome (NOT in some teenagery use of that word) they are awe inspiring, terrifying, wonderful, amazing, extra ordinary, beautiful.

But it doesn't often, if ever, occur to me that elephants in the wild are not an experience that people who don't live in Africa share, that in a way I take elephants for granted. After all my husband was held up for an hour on his road trip back from Lusaka yesterday because he had to wait for the elephants on the road to move off.

Frost

We have frost this morning and the wind is very fresh and very cold and out of the south.

When I was a child I loved the smells that the wind carried. I loved the smell of rain and that warm heady mixture of cattle dung and dust that is so Africa before the rains come, and the concretey asphalt smell of a city and waxy smell of acacia  thorn bush in the lowveld and the papery smell of mopane scrub and the vivid tang of elephant or water hanging in the air.

The southerly wind carries for me the ice cold sharpness of the Antarctic snows.

Much as I love still the smells borne on the wild wind, the smell of the Antarctic is one that usually only makes me hunker down and grit my teeth and hold on to the hope of summer heat. This morning as the wind has finally swung around to the South, bearing winter with it I consider opening myself to a different perspective. I can't quite bring myself to enjoy winter but I consider what joy I may find. Warm fires, snuggly warm bed clothes, hot porridge, hot chocolate drinks, three cat bodies cuddled in close. And other than the theme of being warm I see that winter in Zimbabwe is about being close, cuddling and snuggling.

And I think, maybe winter isn't all bad.

Rain in winter

Now I am not a Global Warming kind of pessimist but I do know that weather patterns are changing.

We've just had half an inch of rain.

Not so surprising, I guess, except that winters here are dry and cold, not wet and cold. I woke this morning to thick overcast and thundering rain. Being cold is bad enough, but wet and cold does not please me. More than that the changing weather is killing people .... not just in Africa either

So please remember to switch off lights and walk not drive when you can and to recycle and and and. ..... every small thing that you do adds up to saving lives. For me the line is a pretty direct one.

I met an angel today......

Today I met a woman who had been terribly burned. The burns are long healed but they had reshaped her face and ear and arm and hand (and I should imagine much more hidden by her blouse). I grinned at her because despite only having stumps for fingers and thumb she continued to use her left hand, not withstanding the damage to it, when it might have been easier to learn to use her undamaged right hand. I commented, as I often do, that all the best people are left handed and she laughed outright – relief, I realised in that instant. She said, holding up her damaged hand, that God and Fire had shaped her this way, different from most but she was still as she had been made. Left handed. We talked, two strangers, about intimate damage and maiming. Mine not so visible but present none the less and obvious, seemingly, to her. She said it was not the surgery's, not the pain, not the rebuilding and reshaping of her face and body that had been truly hard but the daily living with the changes unwillingly wrought upon her.

She said her scarred skin would need extra care for the rest of her life, that she would always need to stretch what remained of her maimed muscle or it would seize completely, that she would always be vulnerable to certain "looks" (pity, disgust, horror and others) from strangers, and even friends, that she still fell prey sometimes to despair and depression. Mostly, she said, knew now how to deal with these two, but she didn't tell me how.

In a flash this angel woman revealed to me what I have seen so hazily at best and mostly not at all. This is what healing is. This is what health is. Maimed she might be, for the rest of her life, her soul and mind and spirit and body reshaped by the fire. But it is being able to live with the maiming, being able to live with the consequences of this crippling, productively, constructively, in peace, and contentment. In happiness even.

She did not tell me what I most desperately want to know - the how you live with maiming and the demons of depression that lurk on the fringes of ones mind but she did show my what the direction was.....

Driving with Small

Small came home this evening and said he needed to buy some sports energy drinks as he has a long day refereeng rugby matches tomorrow. I duly handed over the cash and he was half out the door before turning around and saying did I want to come for a ride?

On impulse I said, sure why not?

I didn't think that we would need to visit three shops before we found the brand he likes best.

On the way around several neighbourhoods we stopped for coffee in one place and ice cream in another. We talked and laughed and generally had a good time and it took us an hour and half to shop for four bottles of energy drink, some chewing gum and a chocolate. Not my style at all .... these days I am all about efficiency and getting food in to feed voracious teenage boys. Still it was fun to be reminded of one of the good parts of being a teenager when the idea was simply to hang, seeing and being seen and without a dozen things that need to be done.

He has gone out now to Youth Group but we did have fun and I think suddenly how much I like this boy - sometimes that liking just gets lost in busyness but this evening it was very good to savour it.

Evening

Its no secret that I am a morning kind of person and that by evening time am not at my best. I usually just want to get done what needs to be done and go to bed.

So usually I don't "see" the evening.

Today I took the Dancing Dalmation and "Old Man" retriever for a walk. Valentine is still supposed to be quiet. I say walk but really it was a stroll, threading my rosary through my fingers. Being a convert to Catholicism there are all sorts of traditions of which I am ignorant and this Easter Season I set out to pray the rosary with the help of Mitch Findlay's excellent book. When I began it was awkward and took all my concentration to repeat the prayers. Yet in a surprisingly short time it has become comfortable, easy, soothing and oddly challenging prayer.

This evening I strolled, murmuring my prayers, and found myself aware of the evening.

Aware of the pearl coloured sky, still and peaceful. A few clouds glowing briefly pink and salmon and finally cerise before fading into the coming night. Aware of the last birdsong. Aware of the cooling air, and the tang of water hanging in the faded heat of the afternoon.

A rare occasion when I was present to the evening.

And it was beautiful.

Wonderful, as if the Evening itself took up my own poor prayer.