Amazon forest under threat - please help

The Amazon is spoken of as being the lungs of the earth - twenty percent of our oxygen comes from this forest. Lumiere Charity received an email from Luis and the Avaaz team asking us to support the safety of this vital forest. They highlight a situation which is close to the Charity's heart - that of conservation of the beauties of the earth God created for us to exercise stewardship over. 


Luis and the Avaaz team apprise a forestry bill has been passed that gives free rein to loggers and farmers to cut down huge swathes of the Amazon.  Avaaz has an urgent petition to stop the chainsaws. 
The petition will be presented by Avaaz shortly.  Please sign the urgent petition and send this to everyone you know. Please send the information on to your family,  friends and colleagues, and post the link on to your Facebook and share it on Twitter. 
Let us hold hands together in our global village and save the wonderful world our God has made. 


Here is the petition;  http://www.avaaz.org/en/veto_dilma_global/?vl

The Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming apprises that the Amazon rainforest is a critical influence on the South American climate and one of the world's most important carbon banks. It is home to twenty percent of the world's animal and plant species, and plays a crucial part in the precipitation cycle of South America, pumping oxygen into the atmosphere. *



Avaaz; http://mainstreetags.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/avaaz-org-stop-the-amazon-chainsaw-massacre%E2%80%8F-petition/

*  http://globalwarming.house.gov/impactzones/amazon

The wondrous plant life of the Amazon, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igkjcuw_n_U

Ants create a lifeboat in the Amazon, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A042J0IDQK4&feature=relmfu

*Photograph taken by Catherine Nicolette - please feel free to use copyright free for any worthy purpose

My Granddad was fiery to the end

Luky;
As I recall him, my father's father was a flamboyant character. Of irascible temperament, he was the opposite of his sweet, placid wife. I remember her each time I see my youngest daughter, who inherited her beautiful creamy face. 


My grandfather was an achiever, a go-getter. My dad, however, took after his mother, and by my grandfather's standards was a non-achiever. After an afternoon spent in my grandfather's house, I was always grateful to give it a miss until the next birthday. I was terribly glad my father had not inherited his dad's temperament, though sorry he lacked his financial acumen.


Sharp tongue
My father would always watch his tongue, especially in the presence of children. His dad, in order to stress a point, could use an expression so blistering as to extinguish the candles on a Christmas tree. My father was scared stiff of God. His dad, on the other hand, had a certain admiration for his Creator, which he showed by financing his second-youngest son's entire priestly education, but he certainly wasn't scared of God.
"When you live in fear, you die in fear", he'd snort, and my mother, who seemed to be much fonder of him than my dad was, blossomed every time she recalled her visit to him as he lay on his death bed.


Last rebuke
"See that nitwit", he spluttered, pointing at my spinster aunt who was weeping bitterly: 
"She just dropped the bedpan. If only she'd wipe those tears and pull herself together!"
He died that same evening, no doubt approaching the Judgement Seat with a calm confidence born from his belief in noblesse oblige.
He believed that if you did your duty by your wife, by your children, by your workers, the Church and the poor, God could do no less than admit you into heaven.


Ceremonial
The way he did his stint for the poor was another story my parents would tell amid chuckles. Every Friday morning, he would take all the vouchers from the St Vincent de Paul Society that he had exchanged for bread and throw them into the flames of his bakery oven. Just as lunch was served on the stroke of one in his house and supper at six exactly, so he had an exact time set for the weekly burning of the SVP vouchers.


These were the depression years, and many poor people were on the dole and helped by the Society. They would be sent with vouchers for bread to my grandfather, who was later supposed to return them to the Society for payment, which he never did. When my parents told me that story, it confirmed the irritation I often feel when remembering my grandfather. Why did people have to go through the humiliation of bringing in the vouchers, I wondered. Could they not just have come to him quietly, and could he not tactfully have given them a loaf for free? That is what I thought I would have done in his place.


However, looking back over many years, I am reluctantly forced to admit that my grandfather may have had a point. In the first place, he did not work in the shop, but in the bakery, so he had no access to poor people. In the second place, you will never become financially sound enough to be able to support the poor if you go about charity in a haphazard way. I tried, and believe me, it does not work.


By insisting on the SVP voucher, my grandfather made sure that the people he helped were truly in need, and he was giving them a measure of dignity too, because they thought their bread would be paid for by the St Vincent de Paul Society. Later, perhaps, when their luck turned, they in turn would contribute to the SVP.


That my grandfather chose to feed their vouchers to the flames in a characteristically flamboyant gesture was his affair. He supported the poor without going broke himself.


*Photograph taken by Catherine Nicolette. Please feel free to use copyright free for any worthy purpose

Do I believe in ghosts? Well, now . . .

LUKY: 
DO YOU believe in ghosts? I never used to, since my Dutch father - that laconic exploder of myths - always told me they don't exist. However, since I married an Irishman, I changed my mind somewhat. To the memory of my father I'll concede that I've never actually seen a ghost, but my Irish husband claimed that he saw more than one, and since he usually told the truth I was inclined to believe him.


Irish ghosts and Dutch ones
Moreover, I could believe in an Irish ghost before a Dutch one. You see, the Dutch are great tidyers. They love a mess because this gives them something to clean up. Your old ruin, your deserted cottage - such buildings have little future in Holland. Before you can say Jack Robinson, the roadrollers arrive and the entire edifice is razed. What they can't knock down, they restore, and that's almost as bad, because it is the air of neglect that give historical monuments their impact.


Air of antiquity
Let's now cross the Irish Sea. What do we find? Ancient abbeys, mossgrown cottages and rickety signposts abound,none of which would stand a chance of survival in Holland. The Irish have a great sense of history, in addition to which they believe in letting sleeping dogs lie. In the city of Waterford from where the beautiful Waterford crystal comes, there stands a tower which looks made up entirely of boulders. "Why don't they demolish that?" I asked my husband. He was horrified, and looked furtively behind him before whispering confidentially that this tower had stood in this place since the year one thousand. "That's no excuse", I said unimpressed. But if I know the Irish, that tower will be there another thousand years.


Now if I were a ghost, I'd prefer to settle in Waterford rather than in one of those towers in Amsterdam, where a carillon peals out on the hour and scaffolding is regularly erected to give the place a facelift and the tourists a thrill.


A handsome stranger
I was talking to an Irish friend along these lines and mentioned another old Waterford building my husband had pointed out to me. He had told me that it was once visited by a handsome stranger who was invited by his hosts to play cards. Someone dropped a card on the floor. Bending down to pick it up, he spotted the feet of the guest. From under that rich cloak and satin trousers there peeped out two cloven hooves. "That's the Irish", my friend said, "I was raised on stories of handsome strangers with cloven hooves. You'd find them particularly on the dance floor, we were told. For years after, when a man asked me to dance I'd look at his feet before accepting."


Bancroft Copper Mine
Never mind the cloven hoofed; you meet nice ghosts as well, and not only in Ireland. My husband swears by all he holds dear that he saw one underground in Bancroft copper mine. The man wore no helmet, a flagrant breach of the most elementary safety rule. "I got up to stop him", my husband says, "when he turned the most beautiful smile on me. 'Good evening, Bwana', he said, and walked on.
"I had greeted him back before remembering that his helmet was missing, so I rushed after him to remind him of regulations, but he had passed beyond a doorway. When I opened it I could see no one."


Lo Long One
"I went into the working place and asked the other men if they had seen a tall miner minus hat. Pandemonium followed! Tools were dropped and impediments brushed aside as they raced towards the cage in a body."
To the uninitiated, a cage is what they call the underground lift. "Lo Long One", someone gasped.
"When they had calmed down," my husband continued, "I discovered that the Long One was a ghost who frequently haunted that particular section, and everyone was afraid of meeting him."


A gentle person
Do I believe this story? All I can tell you is that for weeks after the incident my husband took his rosary underground with him when he went on duty, and all the holy medals he could lay his hands on. I worried about the Long One with the beautiful smile. Why I wondered, is he wandering around underground? A gentle person like that ought to be at rest. So I had a Mass said for the Long One and felt better about him afterwards.


Before we jeer at another ghost story, we ought to reflect: perhaps the reason we've never met a ghost is because we don't have the sensitivity needed, rather than being too sensible as I had always believed.


Speaking for myself, however, I feel that's just as well.


*Photograph taken by Catherine Nicolette. Please feel free to use copyright free for any worthy purpose.

Frying pans of locusts

Catherine Nicolette;
Many years ago we had a plague of locusts in Welkom, and everywhere we went as children there were the whirring of wings. As we drove by the local fields, young hoppers were everywhere moving steadily on, leaving behind them absolute devastation. We weren't best pleased when the plague moved up to our home, and we spent time running around our garden and our beloved mimosa tree, flapping our blankets and blowing smoke at the locusts to try to get them to stay away from the tree, the fruit trees and the grapevines in our garden. We managed to save our garden somewhat from the scavenging horde, but many's the tear I shed when I picked up the hoppers to put them out of the garden and they lashed out with their hind legs. Locusts are anything but defenceless - there is a surprising kick with their back legs, and on occasion their leg spines left behind small bleeding punctures on my hands.


It was a miserable time. Locusts are great within reason. But this was like the great plague of Egypt.  I would trudge gloomily back and forth to school, avoiding the moving carpet of locusts and hoppers with my feet. However, I started to notice dark rings of burnt out fire patches at the roadside which puzzled me. One day, the enigma became clear. As I walked down the road from school on my way back home I saw one of the labourers from Lesotho sitting at the roadside. He had set up a ring of stones, set a small fire, and was thoughtfully frying a pan of locusts in oil. The sounds of the sputtering oil filled the air. I greeted the man courteously, Dumela Ntate. He gravely returned my greeting, Dumela kleinmies. I asked if I could watch, and he invited me to sit on one of the stones on the opposite side. I duly put down my school satchel, perched on the large grey stone which had obviously been borrowed from the kerb of our Afrikaans neighbours' house garden, and settled to watch. The gentleman fried the locusts, stirring them briskly around in the battered black frying pan, and it was a soothing picture and sound; the labourer, with his carved noble features serenely sitting in the late afternoon glow of the African sunlight, with smoke drifting above our heads into the canopy of the trees whose foliage had been stripped by the ravening hordes of locusts. The sputtering of the oil and the scrape of his cooking implement were loud in the serenity of the quiet afternoon. The strange thing was, the whirring of the locusts in the vicinity had stopped, and there were no locusts nearby. Some sense of insect preservation had warned them to clear the area.
 
Once the gentleman had finished frying the locusts to his satisfaction, he tested them for crunchiness by breaking off a leg. He then settled down to eat his impromptu afternoon meal. He invited me to join his meal, but I declined. I watched him eat the locusts, amazed at this choice of a meal so different to what we ate at home. Young as I was, I realised then at that moment that what we had seen as a plague, he had seen as an opportunity. Thereafter I went on my way. As I looked back, the gentleman from Lesotho was still sitting there, finishing his meal.


I never saw him again. Yet, every time I walked past that tree from home to school, and school to home, the black fire marks on the designer stones of the family home which had carefully been put back into place reminded me of the infinite courtesy of the gentleman from Lesotho sitting staring into the fire and holding the pan of locusts, probably dreaming of home.


*Photograph taken by Catherine Nicolette

Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder

Luky;
Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. To a child, the wrinkled face of a kind servant can seem radiantly beautiful and to a lover the plain features and mousey hair of the beloved may take on a glow of their own. 


When we were teenagers, my sisters and I would bemoan our appearances. My mother would tell us that were being very ungrateful to God, who gave us our health and our strength. "Who wants health and strength?" we'd ask each other when she'd be out of the way. "We want to look like the Gabor sisters."


There wasn't much likelihood of that with a father who'd send you to the bathroom to wash your face each time you applied a little blusher or eyeliner. In later years, I would take my children to school and enviously eye the beautiful faces and figures of the mothers of some of their fellow-pupils. "Wouldn't you be proud if I looked like Mrs. Jones?" I'd ask and, though my children would loyally try to reasure me that this wasn't the case, they never convinced me.


Then one day my eldest son came to the rescue. "Do you think Mrs. Jones is pretty? I don't. She looks like plastic." And when I took another look at the lady we were discussing, I could see what he meant.


When my mother was dying, she got a phobia about wearing her false teeth, so the nurses looking after her stopped putting them in. This horrified some visitors, but to me she still looked nice. Her eyes and her skin were so good and in her features you could still see the traces of her former beauty. After she died, my mentally disabled son once mentioned this to me. He said: "When Oma died and went to Jesus, did He give her all her teeth back?" "I'm sure He did," I said. 
He was quiet for a while, then he replied: "I'm so glad He did. 
Happy woman, your mother!"


*Names have been changed

Eyes tell a tale of their own

Luky;
"Eyes," our history teacher at school would sternly say "are the mirror of the soul". 
"Rubbish," I'd think privately, but just for safety's sake, I'd fix mine about a fraction of an inch above her eyebrows. As the years go by all these old expressions come back to me, and I've begun to experience their underlying truth.
"A stitch in time saves nine", I sigh dismally as I view the pile of buttonless, hemless garments that have a way of collecting in my cupboards. "Health and happiness, two things you cannot buy", I advise myself as I gaze longingly at the new season's fashions in the store windows. "Out of sight, out of mind", I mutter spitefully, when having ascertained, upon checking my post box, that my ex-neighbour still hasn't replied to my six page letter of two months ago. And by now there is no doubt in my mind that eyes are the mirror of the soul.


Everybody subconsciously notices certain things about his fellow men and women. Some look for bearing, others listen for pronunciation, yet others watch hands. I notice eyes, not as much for their colour or beauty as for their expression. There is so much one can learn about people from their eyes.


Eyes tell a tale of their own
A great number are able to control their facial expressions to the extent of looking pokerfaced, there are those enviable ones who can tell a joke without collapsing with laughter at its humour themselves and there are some who maintain a controlled expression in the face of deep sorrow and pain. Often their eyes, however, tell a tale of their own.


There is that steely flash of anger that can come to the eyes of the most easygoing person when one tries him a little too far. Almost immediately it may fade and the expressions become more kindly, yet somehow you find yourself treading a little more carefully afterwards. There is the wandering non-focusing glance of the person who doesn't like you and is not quite sure whether the friends in whom he confided about this matter have already told you. There are the cold eyes accompanying an otherwise sweet smile.


Look of love and pride
Then there are the understanding eyes of the person in whom you find yourself confiding about your problems and of whom it never occurs to you that he might have some of his own, the eyes of a mother talking to her baby, those of a father greeted enthusiastically by his offspring upon arrival from work, and the grandmother's look of love, pride and fulfilment as she holds her first grandchild. There is the look of mistrust in a salesman's eyes as he watches you saying goodbye when you have forgotten to pay for the item you purchased. "Don't bother to apologise", one said to me on one occasion, "it happens every day".
I still get warm with embarrassment when I think of those words and the look accompanying them.


The eyes of young lovers
As for the eyes of young lovers, one look at them can cheer even the most bitter person. That young girl's fleeting glance at her boyfriend, which already moving away is suddenly captured in the glance of the beloved one's and seemingly unable to tear itself away, drowns in a tide of love. Even those cynical people who declare that love between man and woman is an illusion and that marriage is a prison, cannot refrain from smiling when watching the eyes of a couple in love.


Once I went and asked a new neighbour for permission to use her telephone. When I had made my call and we were talking I noticed that her eyes kept travelling to the door. I was on the point of leaving when an attractive teenage girl swept in, dressed beautifully in a ball frock. 
The pride and love in her mother's eyes were reflected in her hushed voice as she said, in the tone of one presenting a debutante at Buckingham Palace:
"Mrs. Whittle, may I introduce to you . . . my daughter Mary!"
It may sound funny but when Mary paid me a short neighbourly call afterwards, I felt deeply honoured.


The eyes of an immigrant
The same expression I saw in the eyes of an immigrant next to whom I stood at a glance when his daughter was chosen as beauty queen. The voice broke like that of a young boy as he said to his wife: "Isn't that really great news?" and when the queen turned and waved to them excitedly he beamed and waved back, looking left and right to make sure everyone saw it was his daughter.


I really ought to get some sunglasses.


*The photograph reminds me of a Japanese print. Taken in the gloaming of beautiful Ireland. Please feel free to use copyright free for any worthy purpose - Catherine Nicolette

Turning every penny around for Education

Luky;
I consider attitude to be the most important step on the road to success. The Oxford dictionary defines success as "favourable outcome, accomplishment of what was aimed at, attainment of wealth or fame or position..."
To me, success does not mean attainment of wealth or fame or position. Some of the unhappiest, most insecure people I knew possessed wealth, fame and position. But it does mean favourable outcome, accomplishment of what was aimed at, but within the limits imposed by the circumstances.

To achieve success in life
To achieve success in life, one has to school one's attitude. One should decide on priorities, and then go for them like a greyhound. I knew a woman, mother of a large family, whose eldest son had gone to university.
For years she had quietly prepared for the event. Neither her husband or herself earned large wages, but nothing was stopping her eldest child's achievement.

She bought nothing for herself, turned every penny several times before spending it, and then one January he actually went to university. Once he was put on the road, he managed to get jobs to help him pay for his books, and no doubt he had a loan. One day, seeing her looking so bravely shabby, I couldn't help saying:
"It must be hard on you financially sending your child to varsity."
She smiled, a very joyful smile.
"Oh, I wouldn't say that", she replied casually. "In life I have found when you really want to do something and you go all out for it, you'll attain it in the end."

It's that attitude of hers which will in the end lift her son from his poor environment and achieve an easier, more comfortable way of life than his parents ever knew. As for his mother, once she has him safely launched, she will, I'm sure, start saving and sacrificing so that her other children can follow suit. She had her priorities sorted out, and went after success like a greyhound, never mind what it may have cost her.

The educational needs of my children
Like my friend, I too made the educational needs of my children my priority. I got up, even on holidays, at the crack of dawn to take my eldest child to her hospital where she eventually wrote her finals one March.
My eldest son now holds a Master's Degree, and he did it all on his own.
Another of my sons sustained brain injury with resultant damage at birth. There was a child psychologist who was forever telling me to put him into a home, so that his brothers and sisters wouldn't be embarassed about him in front of their friends.
"If his brothers and sisters are embarrassed, they can go", we decided.
 "It's his home, too."
Our attitudes sustained us through the difficulties in raising a child with the challenge of brain injury. He went to the Sisters in Umzumbe for two years and they prepared him beautifully for his first confession and holy Communion. Eventually he came home to us.

And if his brothers and sisters were embarrassed about him, they have always had the dignity to hide it from their parents. Rather than humiliate them, the fact of their having a mentally challenged brother has increased their respect for all God's creatures in their hearts.

We are the captains of our own ships
It is our attitude to life which is infinitely more important than the things that happen to us. We are the captains of our own ships.
We should never whine: "I can't stand any more of this."
We can stand it all right, if only we make up our minds to stand it.

Jesus of Nazareth and Mary of Nazareth have many graces available, which they're ever ready to shower upon us. All we have to do is to ask them for these graces and they will be poured upon us in abundance.

Catherine Nicolette;
My beloved brother with the brain injury completed his studies at a special medium school.
I am immensely proud of his abilities and talents; we are truly the best of friends.
My brother is exceptionally gifted in peacemaking between people at outs with each other.
He has intuitive counselling skills, and a peaceful and loving spirit that has healed many rifts and broken hearts. He also has wonderful ability with friendship.

It is he who advised me to start photography, as I would discover I had a gift for it.
Upon his advice I started taking photographs, and to my amazement found I absolutely loved it.
My brother has great ability in making wonderful works of art with his hands, spending hours of patient labour over tapestries and linen for sale. He will not be rushed; money is not the object. He only wants enough for his needs. What he does want is that any item he makes is made with love, is of the best quality and will last for years, useful and beautiful in other people's houses.
I believe that as injury at birth damaged some of my brother's inherent intellectual power, God gave him powerful spiritual gifts that have sustained all of us at some time or another.

I well remember Dad and Mom calling us together when the psychologist was advising my brother be put into a home.
I remember well being appalled at the very thought that we could ever be embarrassed by our beloved brother.
Who could ever be embarrassed by being related to a King among men?



*Photograph taken by Catherine Nicolette in springtime Ireland. Please feel free to use photograph copyright free for any worthy purpose

Magnum PI and the Guinea Pigs

Luky;
Reading about the silkworms that did the rounds between the three houses made a lot of things clear to me. It also reminded me about the time when my eldest had already left home. There were pets everywhere, we had seventeen at one stage. One evening when we had all begun watching Magnum PI, I left the children watching the programme and went into the kitchen. As I was working there, some of the children came in to talk to me, which was unusual during the programme. They were speaking in gentle voices, and saying complimentary things to me. When I wanted to leave the kitchen, the children seemed to be gently in the way each time, still speaking quietly and lovingly. Back in the lounge the other children were with the guinea pigs. When we first got the two guinea pigs, I had been told they were two brothers. It turned out they were a boy and a girl, and the little mother was busy giving birth to her babies in the lounge while I was in the kitchen. There were nine pets when Magnum started, and nineteen when it ended. You have no idea what I went through to find good homes for them all when they were older...

Catherine Nicolette;
Knowing my siblings as I do, the minute I heard about the gentle voices and the compliments, my elder sister radar went on full alert. Something had been going on... and indeed it had.

*Photograph of a beloved family pet in South Africa

The King from Lesotho

Catherine Nicolette;
Dad was cheerful and his eyes were twinkling. He was thrilled with life, as he had engaged a new gentleman to work part time in the garden. Dad had heard how wonderful he was in the garden and at planting roses and beautiful grass. Soon after Mtawa began working his magic in the garden, the glorious mimosa tree glowed and shrubs towered above my small head along the fences. Fig trees, peach trees (which bore only green peaches), pomegranates, and grapevines in the front and back proudly presented fruit annually to the happy Whittle children and the neighbourhood friends. Pumpkin flowers and pumpkins thrived in the back yard. The mulberry tree in the back of the yard housed our homemade tree house (out of which we fell more often than not) and its massive leaves fed generations of silkworms we children bred annually and hid in shoe boxes in the cupboards from Mom.

Every now and then we would know if Mom had one of her Dutch spring cleaning inspirations, as we would hear a muffled shriek from the direction of our cupboards where she would have opened the boxes to clean the shoes and found Harold, Matsimela, Grace and Djamila happily munching the mulberry leaves and peering up at her with their little beady silkworm eyes. Oh, how I loved our silkworms. Whenever this happened, Mom would banish the worms from the house. We would trundle the boxes to the back fence, and give them in rotation turns to the other two groups of kid who lived behind us. They would babysit our worms until their moms found them, and then banish them back to us. So for a number of years, we contentedly rotated the Pieterses, Therons and Whittles' silkworms en masse between the three households, as the moms of the three families thought the worm problem had been solved. Anyhow; I digress.

So. Dad had a new gentleman in the garden, and treated him with great courtesy and respect. Dad had worked as a gardener in Britain for a while, Oxford I think he said. He knew what backbreaking work it can be, and he always ensured that Mtawa had daily cooked meals, and plenty of water, tea and juice to drink. We children were firmly cautioned to have the utmost respect for Mtawa at all times. That was no problem for me; I hero worshipped Mtawa, who was a wonderful person and an amazing gardener. We had the largest blooms on the rose bushes, and the grapes grew to a huge size. They were sweet, and we all ate grapes and the produce of the trees.

Mtawa would allow me to uncoil the long garden hose for him when he prepared to water the garden. He showed endless patience with me, as I used to trail around following him with my little dog Tubby, chattering to him about all that was happening, the girls at school and the news there, and all the news of the neighbourhood. I used to ask him about himself, and he had very little to say, except to tell me kindly that he was from Lesotho and that he had family there. Lesotho, I decided, must be a Very Great Place.

Every day that Mtawa was working, I would finish my homework then escape outside and follow him around for a while, helping him (though I rather think now that I was getting in the way). Then I would be off next door to visit Safia. One day after years of Mtawa devotedly working in the garden, I arrived home; no Mtawa. I asked Dad where he was. Dad told me that Mtawa would no longer be working in the garden; he had resigned, and was returning to his home in Lesotho. But surely Mtawa would come to say goodbye, I asked. Dad looked at me with his kind eyes. I don't remember what he said, but I told him I would watch out for Mtawa, which I did.

Over the next few days, whenever a mine worker passed our gates I would run to the gate to see if it was Mtawa. When I realised that he would not be coming back to say goodbye, I was inconsolable. I kept on going out into the lane, asking the mine workers,
'Have you seen Mtawa? Do you know him?" The tears were running down my face and those of the children with me, as I explained,
 "He is our gardener. And we love him. We must see him to say good bye to him. Do you know him at all?"
The workers, many of them touched by our tears, simply murmured,
"No kleinmies. We do not know him. But he must be a very good man, for you to have so many tears for him."
And one young man said to me,
 "Kleinmies, if we see someone with the name of Mtawa, we will tell him your message. But we cannot promise that we will see him. To be honest, I must tell the kleinmies the truth. But we will try."

Every day for months afterwards, I would run out to the gate, and hang around, looking up and down the street. But Mtawa never arrived. After a while I would heave a great sigh, and go back indoors. It is not easy being a child.

Nearly a year later I was walking down the road back from school when I saw a forgotten lone copper bracelet winking in the sunlight, somewhat dulled by the year's weeds and dust that had drifted up around it. For some reason, I was convinced that it might have belonged to Mtawa. I carefully took it up, carried it home, and cleaned it up. I put it safely in the shoe box I kept in my cupboard to give back to him if he came to greet us.

 I am not sure what happened to the copper bracelet, but have a vague recollection that we children ceremoniously returned it to the resting place under the hedge when we moved to a new house.
I never saw or heard of Mtawa again. I have long since forgotten his surname.
However, I have never forgotten his gentle face, his courteous manners or wonderful kindness to children who had hero-worship for his horticultural gifts. Whenever I think of royalty, I know I met a king among men; Mtawa, to my childhood eyes, was a King from Lesotho.

Luky;
Mtawa was indeed a king among men, with gentleness and beauty. He was actually from Malawi, and worked on the mines during the day and worked part-time in the evening in the garden to supplement his wages to help his family in Malawi. To our sorrow he was repatriated unexpectedly to Malawi.

Catherine Nicolette;
As a child I thought Mtawa came from Lesotho. So both Lesotho and Malawi were Very Great Places to me...

*Names have been changed
*Photograph taken by Catherine Nicolette in sunny South Africa. Please feel free to use copyright free for any worthy purpose

This is my Lovely Day

Luky;
To a twelve-year-old girl unable to understand English, my first school term at Greenhill was a jumble of impressions. How well I understood the confusion at the Tower of Babel.
"Silence", Sister called at my first boarding school supper. "There is much too much talking."
"Much too much, ah! Veel te veel", I said to myself.
It's amazing how quickly you pick up a language when nobody speaks your own. What was surprising to me was that I understood the big words more readily than the simple ones.
"Loyalty, girls, loyalty", Mother said, regarding us majestically through her goldrimmed glasses. "Semper fidelis is our school's motto."
"Loyalty, loyaliteit, trouw!" I recognised instantly, "semper fidelis, always faithful, altijd trouw. So that's what it means. But why make such a song and dance about being faithful?"
For then as now, loyalty was not a virtue I found difficult to adhere to. Then as now I knew that if I could only attain to the virtue of charity, everything else would be puddy-sticks, as the children say.

Scared
And yet I realise now how important the virtue of loyalty is, and how rarely it is found. I recall the young man who was in love but wouldn't get married, saying he was scared stiff of commitment in case the marriage failed.

Creak or two
Despite having been married for so many years, I'd still never dare to set myself up as a marriage counsellor. My own marriage underwent shaky patches when my husband and I were at loggerheads or took offence at a random remark. Joseph was our peacemaker.
"Dad, do you love mother?" he would ask very sternly.
My husband would regard me with a jaundiced eye, dying to say: "No, I can't stand her", but when he looked at his little mentally challenged angel with the flaming sword, he could only say: "Yes, of course I love her."
"Then you must speak nicely to her", Joseph would say.

"Forgive him"
I didn't get off lightly either:
"Tell him you forgive him. He says he loves you."
To Joseph love is far more simple than it was to us because he is not caught up in the intricate web of pride, nor does he bear malice.
I was in town once, shopping with a friend, when we bumped into her husband who was taking another woman out to lunch. He felt an ass and so did the woman. Although she was most attractive, she seemed to crumple at the sight of my friend.

Sudden Beauty
My friend was an exuberant down-to-earth sort of woman, but she seemed to grow in stature and become extraordinarily dignified and beautiful all at once.
She smiled politely at the woman and waited for her husband to finish his jumbled explanation. Then she nodded at them and said: "Bon appetit to you both."
As she and I walked off she started chatting about everything except husbands. But for her white lips, I might have thought the encounter hadn't affected her.

Womanly heart
This friend of mine was a very modern woman. And yet when she met her husband taking out another woman to lunch, she reacted no differently from the way the most old-fashioned of women would have done. Underneath her glamorous exterior quivered a heart as vulnerable as that of any woman since Eve.

Like an anchor
I think the wedding vows are such a steadying promise. Religion in her ageless wisdom knows what the young bride does not, that her marriage to that extremely handsome and eligible man will also contain thorns.
But because most marriages bring forth children and all marriages are contracted between people who feel at least temporarily drawn to one another, loyalty must prevail.

I always knew that if I had  walked out on my husband I'd never again have put on the wireless - it would only have taken a recording of "This is my lovely day", to recall a sundrenched day in Johannesburg all those years ago and have had me returning straight back to him.

Where my husband was concerned, I was no different from the next woman.

*Youtube 'This is my lovely day '. Click into the link to hear Lizabeth Webb sing
 'This is my Lovely Day'


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58e1rxKAUzI

The Teddybear and the Paper Hat

Luky;
Can you believe how the days fly by each year, until you wake up and find it's only eighteen more shopping days till Christmas?

I don't doubt that we'll have the annual Mrs. Grundies about the commercialisation around the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ. I don't belong to their number. To me Christmas cards are the height of artistic perfection. No matter how highly coloured the picture of the sledge in the snow and the crimson robin on the green branch may be, I need to resort to the hankie I brought to wipe the sweat of Welkom's heat from my brow to wipe away a tear whenever my first Christmas card arrives.

At home we used to get lots of Christmas cards. How I resented the paltry little stock I received the first year I was married. It was bad enough living in a house without furniture but an empty mantelpiece on Christmas day was poverty indeed. I saved my three or four cards for a year and in the following year I produced them again. Added to the five or six we got then they made a goodly little show on my mantelpiece, even though they were mostly from the same people.

However, by that second Christmas we had a little baby who spent her days collapsing with laughter at the antics of her father. She got a teddybear in the mine Christmas tree. It had a tag on it, saying: 'My name is Sandy'. She pronounced it Sheshie with a Zulu intonation learned from the lady who cared for her when I was out at work in the day. So she, her daddy, the teddybear and I had our Christmas dinner together, she in her high chair, screaming with laughter at the sight of her father wearing a paper hat.

As time went by she got five brothers and sisters and hordes of pets and we were eventually so busy feeding them that we didn't even get much chance to check the postbox during the Christmas season. Yet I still get a lump in my throat each year when the first Christmas cards arrive and when I hear the first carol on the radio. And I drink a toast to the gifted artists who produce them year after year. Long may they continue to do so.

*Photograph taken by Catherine Nicolette. Please feel free to use copyright free for any worthy purpose
*Hear the wonderful Mormon Tabernacle Choir sing 'Silent Night' - click into the following link
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2CHfZ9NP8k&feature=results_main&playnext=1&list=PL6E478F2D88D89498

Our oceans are endangered - please sign petition

 

Lumiere Charity received an email from Stephanie and the Avaaz team asking us to support a rescue package for the world's oceans. They highlight a situation which is close to the Charity's heart - that of conservation of the wonderful earth God created for us to enjoy and to use its resources responsibly. It is a fact that species are either extinct or threatened with extinction. Now the Avaaz team tell us that the oceans are dying, beset by pollution and demolition fishing.

In the next 72 hours, governments are considering a new rescue plan - and we can help to push it through. The plan is to craft a new treaty to protect the high seas, and establish critical marine protection reserves. The vision of Avaaz is to champion the idea. This crucial meeting is being held at the UN. Avaaz wishes to deliver global support to Europe to save our oceans. Please sign the urgent petition and send this to everyone - once Avaaz hits 500,000 signatures, they will deliver the petition straight into the meeting. Here is the link to the petition;

http://www.avaaz.org/en/72_hours_to_save_our_oceans/?tta

There are just three days left - please send the information to friends and family, and post this link on your Facebook wall and share it on Twitter. According to Avaaz, our marine ecosystems are under threat, and 85% of fish stocks are depleted. They go on to tell that scientists say that what we need right now is a plan that sets aside 20% of our blue planet as conservation areas by 2020, allowing the seas to replenish themselves for generations to come, and create a new protection agreement for the oceans outside of national boundaries.

In the beginning God created the earth and all in it; let us not be able to write that in 2012 humanity by not protecting its resources helped to destroy some of it.

Thank you for taking action to support a rescue package for the world's oceans.

Please place the link on your Facebook wall or link it to Twitter;

http://www.avaaz.org/en/72_hours_to_save_our_oceans/?tta


SOURCES made available by Avaaz

International Policy: United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Pew Environment Group)
http://www.pewenvironment.org/news-room/compilations/international-policy-united-nations-conference-on-sustainable-development-328397

Six steps for successful oceans negotiations (Greenpeace)
http://www.scribd.com/doc/89557361/Six-Steps-Rio-Oceans-Rescue-Plan-Greenpeace

Our Endangered Oceans (Ecoworld)
http://www.ecoworld.com/animals/our-endangered-oceans.html

Threats to Oceans and Coasts (WWF)
http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/blue_planet/problems/

*Photograph courtesy of Avaaz petition