bing bang the fridge is here

if you ask it it will come. and there it is…i asked for a fridge and a fridge arrived this afternoon. a simple request -hopeful and earnest – at the rotary club meeting and a kind soul came through.

no more excues…i have to cook now…

This is the city of sails. Walk to the water…and in a city surrounded by water it isn’t difficult…and boats line the shores, float on the waves and speckle the horizon. It is an amazing concept to me. I went from knowing not a single person who owned a boat to being attached to a club where the better portion of its members own boats.

This week I got a glimpse of that up close and personal. The pakuranga rotary club hosted its annual fishing fundraiser. The club members sell packages where teams compete in a fishing contest and the club supplies the organising of the whole thing, food, and booze accordingly. There were about 400 people on various sized yachts, as they are called. And there I was…on a ferry with inner wheel (wives of rotary) taking in the view chatting with the fishermen, and dishing out food.

Rewind two days and I was in more rural zed with the drury rotary club. They were hosting a fundraiser of their own. The sausage sizzle…a zed classic. So we belted out prices and the jolly doc (my host) chatted to folks as they passed the booth. The beauty of a small town shone through because he knew so many people and so many people knew him.

I learned about the concept of a lifestyle block – or hobby farms – kind of mini-farms for people to work at and enjoy without the commitment of a large farm. All in all, a completely different concept than the city. Here were people who plant orchids in their glass houses (read greenhouse) and collect water from their roofs (not piped in from the municipalities). A mere 30 km away and a whole different world began to unfold. It makes me wonder what else is out there.

Not to be redundant, as my sister just touched on this, but technology is amazing. It is able to bend the confines of time and space and render them almost obsolete. Surfing into what is in reality – nothing – but has become – virtual – all of a sudden where I am sitting and what I am doing right this instance is made somehow larger. I am somehow more available.

Friends send me invites to all sorts of sites. I rarely keep up except when I’m sent a message that lets me know that someone somewhere said something on one of those spaces. And until just the other day those someones were all people that I could reach out and touch in some other way. If I didn’t post today’s mood or my favourite cartoon…it wouldn’t be anything at all except random space I didn’t fill.

But earlier this week I got a an invitation from my past. A person who I haven’t spoken to in 8 years. Almost a quarter of my life. And all of a sudden there he is. Filling in spaces of questions and experiences. Reminding me of who I was so long ago in what feels like another life. And at the same time there he was in this life – still a smiling face I remember – still a bender of words, able to fit them into the space you can manage at the time.

And as dots do tend to connect, or rather we tend to connect them, I also caught up with another friend 6 years in my past. Tracing our lives journeys into some understanding of our presents.

And so I am amazed…thrilled…intrigued…delighted that virtual has filtered into my actual. I guess that is what they mean by virtual reality.

it dawned on me tonight, that no matter my experiences in life and travel…no matter my knowldege of current affairs or politics…what i know and what i understand are different things.

i was talking to a friend of mine tonight…halfway joking but mostly serious about him running for office at some point in the future. he’s from nigeria. an amazingly thoughtful – both in the full of thoughts and the kindness ways – man. i have grand visions of him being the kind of leader that most countries need.

i joked with him about how great it would be for me to know the president of nigeria. he joked with me about him getting shot in the process.

and all of a sudden it wasn’t funny to me anymore. the reality of violence in politics, one of the few horrible things america has not invited into the political arena, was something i knew but did not relate to. and it made me so sad…so sad to think of my beautiful, articulate, creative friend who has so much to offer the world and who has to consider in real terms what offering that up to his country might mean…not simply an invsion of privacy, not only attacks on his character…but the possiblity of attacks on him…in more than words.

Today is one of those days I love…random in a way that I just couldn’t have imagined when I got up in the morning. I mean, picture me sitting around this morning eating organic oatmeal and pondering why my computer has decided to forsake me…and then rushing to my 10am meeting unsure if where I think it is it actually is (it is).

Three hours later I’m filled with all sorts of information about zed’s health system – its strengths and weaknesses, how pacific islanders work in that system, how public health can have a synergistic relationship with other governing bodies and affect real change…it was amazing.

So arms filled with stuff to read and mind spinning on stuff to do I decide to mosey down queen street in search of shoes. Here is where my day gets interesting. While trying on a shoe an older gentleman says, “nice shoes”. And that begins a mini conversation. He’s from Ecuador so I say, “buenos dias” and away we go.

We spent the day speaking in Spanish and talking about our worlds…his 53 years globe trekking, importing, exporting, and leather making. We wandered through a market, to coffeehouses, met a mutual friend from Burundi, compared experiences, ate food, bought stuff. I really don’t know where the 5 hours went.

I leave for Wellington in 8 hours and he leaves for Tasmania, Ecuador and the us in a day. But he returns in may and we have plans to hang out again. This time I’ll get to see some of his work and practice some more Spanish…or French…or Portuguese…he speaks them all so I have an abundance of languages to pick from…being that my Spanish isn’t that great I think I’ll stick with it and see what I can learn.

last night i watched the movie “frailty”t. it  is making me seriously rethink my very texan view on the death penalty. tree hugger that people see me to be, i’ve found it hard to get all worked up over the death penalty in recent years.  while it is not soemthing i herald as great i’m not so disgusted by it that i hang my head in shame. i mean, come on, i live in texas.

i have a friend who was all worked up over tookie williams in california. he wanted me to get worked up about it too. and all i could think to say was that it would take something more than tookie to get me hollering.

i may have found it. for anyone who says hollywood is useless please know that hollywood has me thinking in a way the news hasn’t been able to on this issue.

the concept of the movie is slow in unfolding. it takes you down a path that you are clear you understand. your typical psychological thriller. or so i thought.

the gist of the movie is that this kid’s dad wakes him and his brother up in the middle of the night and  tells them that God has come to him and that they must kill demons. he starts bringing people to the house, laying hands on them so that he can “see” that they are demons and then killing them. the oldest kid is upset by this and tries to stop him. but the little brother says he sees the demons as well.

God tells the father to kill his son becuase he is a demon but he doesn’t, instead he puts him in the cellar so that he can “see” God too. weeks later he sees and is let out. the next person his dad brings home he saves by killing his dad.

bear with me a moment longer.

so this story is being told by an adult that was one of the children – you think it is the oldest son but turns out to be the youngest one who then kills the person who he is telling the story to. the twist is that those people he kills and that his father killed are really “evil”, in that they’ve done horrible things.

so the turn at the end is that he is doing God’s work and that is why he is never caught.

it disturbed me on different levels. firstly just that it was spooky. the way it was told, the way it unfolded, the voices, the way it was shot. add to that the idea of thinking that you know what happened and then it turns out that you don’t.  on top of that the almost smug ending that it is indeed God’s work to kill those who do bad things.

i’ve done bad things.

i’m assuming whoever is reading this has done bad things. and while i could argue severity – so could anybody. there is always someone who has done something worse than you. so where do we draw the line?

and while  i am not a religious person i am a spiritual person…and this depiction of a God that sends out “demon killers” to do his bidding in the middle of the night…that is such a small manifestation of God in my world. my God doesn’t seek vengance through people. if there is vengance to be done i believe she’ll unleash it herself, but mostly i know a God capable of grace.

i’m babbling…overwhelmingly this movie has me thinking about what it means to take the life of a person for killing someone..taking a life in a somewhat arbitrary way given that some people do the same acts and get different punishments.

i haven’t jumped to the other side of the fence yet…but i’m looking at the pastures on the other side and wondering if i would be better suited there. of course then i’d be like so many people that i chide for straddling…one foot on one side for abortion and another foot someplace else for the death penalty.

it is easy to shake my head and say it doesn’t matter to me because i don’t have to decide. but by not making a decision i make a decision – it just ins’t a very well informed one.

We bonded over “sweet as”, a common zed phrase that sounds a little lewd in an American context (say it out loud and you’ll get my drift) but we’ve moved beyond that into the general things that friends talk about. School…boys…travel…and our favourite…FOOD. We, are myself and my friend lana. She is a trip and  yesterday I hung out with her and her friends at a bbq she threw for a friend.

while plowing me with zed wine, lamb, and prawns we all hung out and got to know each other better…poking fun and teaching me about the subtleties of zed.

For instance, the cute boy in one of my classes might have possibly been “chatting me up” when he asked me if I knew where the busses are. I took this for kiwi kindness but apparently I need to hyper tune my detection of the male green light here.

After managing the bus I flopped into bed around midnight. Don’t judge me as too old given that I had an 8-hour class that morning and followed it up with some fun-filled partying afterward.

And I know all the working stiffs are smirking that 8-hours should be difficult when they do it every day…but I’ve done that kind of work too and let me just say that trying to absorb material for that long is different than work. And if you question that…think back to the last time you had an all day training session…it is no small feat!

Anyway, today was the pasifika festival. Auckland is considered the largest pacific island city in the world because so many folks converge here from islands I’ve never heard of, let alone seen on a map. The thing was enormous. Last year they estimated 200,000 people. And when you consider that the country has a population of a mere 4.2 million…that is no small gathering.

There was food to be had, live music, people calling me Fijian, crafts…did I mention people asking me if I’m from fiji?

At any rate, me and my friend hung out…talked about life, compared the pacific plight in zed to the black plight in America and the plight in general in Nigeria. Basically we had an amazing time.

We had an abundance of food and I apparently had an abundance of sun given that my face is a little red this evening.