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Monthly Archives: April 2010

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Chocolate taste

For the fainthearted . . .

Friday, 30th April

Muhanga

A gin and tonic would be nice: Bombay Sapphire and Schweppes tonic water. Lemon and ice would be dispensable and, in the absence of a crystal tumbler, a china mug would suffice. In the absence of gin, the tonic water would do. Isn’t the quinine supposed to be good at warding off malaria, or something like that?

The mention of chocolate brings thoughts of bars of Cadbury’s, lines and lines of bars along a shop counter. I haven’t bought a bar of chocolate for months and …

Arriving

For the fainthearted . . .

Thursday,29th April

KIgali

There are four immigration desks when one would have sufficed.  How many passengers came from the plane before it continued its onward journey to Bujumbura – three, perhaps four, dozen?  The arrival card is completed and there is no queue at the desk by the time all the details have been filled in. The official looks at the passport, looks up, and then stamps a page, very neatly, in one corner, countersigning it with a Biro squiggle.  A Burundian friend laughed when he first saw an EU …

People make a difference

For the fainthearted . . .

Sitting at Heathrow Airport, eating bangers and mash and watching the world go by, there is a feeling of being very small and insignificant; what is there that one ordinary person can do to change the world?

The Biblical response to the demands of justice in our world has an inescapably individual dimension. The evangelical writer Ronald Sider’s ‘Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger’ published in the 1970s, stressed the role of individual choice and lifestyle in allowing a generous response to the needs of the poor. Sider’s perspective …

Revisiting

For the fainthearted . . .

The bag is packed; the documents checked, and the flight is not until tomorrow afternoon.  On Thursday morning, we land in Nairobi, having flown overnight from Heathrow.  Then we fly on to Kigali, and I’ll again set foot on Rwandan soil.

I have become old and hard; I can stare straight ahead in the knowledge that I cannot change the world alone.  When I return to Ireland, I will be able to cope with the things I have seen, well, most of them.  The stories of the 1994 genocide will …

The Annual Appeal is now closed!

For the fainthearted . . .

26th April is Ian Graham’s birthday – he is 49 today, some six months younger than me.

Trawling the internet for him over the past few years has borne little fruit; even posting an appeal on his birthday brought no success.  This was what appeared on 26th April last year:

Ian Graham is 48 today.  It would be good to wish him ‘Happy Birthday’, except that he seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth.

Ian’s father was a priest in the Church of England and lived at

…

Reciting the padre’s lines

For the fainthearted . . .

A lovely girl led our party on the tour through the memorial park; “a fine lass” observed one companion, and him a generation older than me.

At the end of her talk there was a pause: what did one say in response to a tale of appalling tragedy?  as the group slowly dispersed, feeling the need to be jolly, I asked the girl about her work back in Canada during the summer and how it was working for her employer. We laughed and smiled and I wandered down the path.…

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