Chiffon cake for birthdays

Somewhere along the track in our family, we changed from the fun novelty cake for our birthdays to a chocolate chip chiffon cake, which is sort of like a huge sponge cake only better.  Mum would make some sort of boiled frosting for the cake (and now my sister does).  It is delicious, especially with icecream and /or cream.  I am on a diet at present, but will have a treat when my birthday comes along in September.

Church

When we went to church as small children.  The services would go on for a very long time.  I usually had to sit in church for the music and testimonies and so on.  Then we could go and sit in the car and play with our match box cars, or something.

We would lock the doors and the African kids would come and press their noses up against the window of the car to watch us.  I found it threatening.  They would call our mzungu, mzungu - meaning white person.  We wanted to call back to them black person, black person, and to stare them down, but it never seemed to make any difference.  When I was in Madagascar, people, especially children and young men, would call out after us, Vazaha, vazaha, which means white person in Malagasy.  If we were walking down the narrow alley ways to church.  I didn't like that much, either.

Church is difficult just now and has been for a long time.  All I want is a community of people who will love and accept me, and whom I can share life with - and who know how horrible it can be for a single person to go home for Sunday lunch on their own. 

Safari time

Going for a drive in Kenya was always a bit of an adventure.  Especially when I got my new glasses so I could actually see the animals that were being pointed out to me.  We often saw monkeys, zebra, giraffe, and antelope. 

That is one thing my father instilled in me.  A love of the outdoors.  I don't like long drives on freeways any more - Madagascar cured me of that, (and my illness).  But I love the memory of the family drives we went on during school holidays.

Chameleons

We used to find chameleons regularly.  They must be a different variety to those in Madagascar, which were quite vicious.  The Kenyan ones, if they weren't too big, would walk on you.  It was fun.

There was a rumour that you should never put a chameleon onto red as trying to turn red would make it burst.  This was never proven.  We used to put the up on the curtain rods of our house sometimes to eat the flies that came in.

 This is a good memory.

Nobody listened

I remember when I was in year 12 at boarding school.
I was distressed, scared, grieving already for the prospect of leaving Kenya and all I knew.
I was angry one night, when a friend, I wanted so much to care for me, didn't come and find me to ask me to walk to the movie with her.
I rubbed my knuckle against the concrete plastered wall next to my bed until it bled.

That was the start of the cutting - a blunt swiss army knife, my tool... so I never did too much damage.
A couple of my friends knew - and one went with me to a teacher to tell him I was feeling suicidal and cutting.
He gave me a form to fill out.....
I gave it back, filled out...
It was in the last week of term and we left with our families for holidays.

I was petrified my parents would find out how distressed I was.
I wrote a story about my pain.
There was something cathartic about that.
I've never shown it to anyone.

When I went back to school, I met that teacher walking around the school grounds.
I said, "I'm okay now".
He never followed anything through.
My isolation was increased even more.

I was a model student.
High grades
Active in sports
Quiet and well behaved
No one listened.

I wonder what difference it would have made to my life if there had been some intervention then???
I still cut sometimes.

Joy playing inigo montoya

I remember the night before leaving Madagascar in 2002.  I was exhausted from illness and also all the work of getting sorted and packed and organised and my colleague moved to another house.  Our dear Malagasy friends came to visit and little Joy, who is a boy, was three then.  He had a stick and was playing on the stairs outside, the role of inigo montoya from The Princess Bride... one of his favourite movies.  It was great to watch him.  This isn't him, but it reminds me of him.

That night his father, a very dear friend, asked me the question... "Is it harder to be the one who leaves, or the one who is left?"  They knew I wasn't coming back there to work.  I think I answered that it can be harder to be the one who is left, knowing that I was going on to something new.... hopefully a journey to better health, and they were going to miss me deeply.  10 years later, we still keep in touch, but mostly through my colleague who is still working there.

"My name is inigo montoya, prepare to die"  Go joy... you are 13 now and I still see you in every 3 year old boy I meet!

The ant lions

It was 10th grade biology, I'm sure... our teacher was a bit radical for a fundamental evangelical missionary kids school... and sent us out into the bush to find a place within ear shot, but where we couldn't see anyone else in the group.  He asked us to spend the next 15 to 20 minutes in quiet observation of the things we could see within a metre of the space we were sitting.

I remember that close to my foot, was an ant lion trap.  An ant lion is a small bug (pictured below), which digs a cone shaped hole with soft sandy soil loosely building up the edges.  An ant crawls on the cone and slips down the soft sand and behold, the ant lion has lunch.

I watched this ant lion trap intently for most of the 15 or so minutes we were given.  I don't remember any ants falling in... but it is something I remember... as my first experience of meditation - in retrospect... what a brilliant teacher....  He gave me an opportunity to look at a metre of my world and just breathe and see what there was to see - and in the process to come into myself and capture an image that remains with me until today. 35 years later...  Thank you biology teacher... and I don't even remember your name.