Local scenes and global perspectives 2

I must say I was having something of an argy-bargy with God over the weekend. It doesn't happen often, but last week's events got under my skin. That documentary about Kibera in Kenya, as you'll have gathered, moved me a lot. A million people crammed into one and a half square miles of mud huts with corrugated tin roofs, with communal toilets (up to 1000 sharing) with open sewers running down the centre of the alleys, awful child mortality. As Angela Rippon commented, "Here 'hand-to-mouth' literally means hand to mouth." Lennie Henry was lodged with five orphans, living in squalor, and couldn't take it. He was so upset that he broke the 'rules' of the film and asked to buy them a house with his credit card. It was an expensive house (£800) for Kibera, but hardly a palace. Samantha Womack was put with a young mum who worked as a prostitute to support her children and extended family up-country. Contrary to my expectations I understood why she did so, and how Jesus loved and forgave 'sinners'.

"Why, God, don't you get out your celestial credit card and rehouse the whole lot of them?" Actually, I know there is something much larger, more systemic, than bad housing conditions behind places like Kibera. My friend, Katie, recently wrote from holiday in Cape Town, that she "has been blown away by the poverty in the local township here... 40.000+ people crowded into a small space....." And, of course,  I know that God doesn't use American Express and doesn't bale out every result of human or satanic folly. That's something to do with free will, isn't it? I guess one of his questions is "Why don't you feed, or house, this multitude?"

Tsunami debris (Photo: Reuters/Kyodo)

And then came the earthquake happened off northern Japan, and its devastating consequences started to dawn us like the tsunami it caused, so that now Japan holds its breath lest a plutonium reactor melts down and explodes. Already the radiation levels have increased 100 miles away. Tens of thousands of people are dead or missing as the tsunami swept all in its irresistible path. And, what's more, the Tokyo stock market has plunged. I've heard it all described as "an act of God", an instance of the awesome power of nature, an example of the limits of the most sophisticated human technology, and the result of Adam and Eve's fall from innocence.... I find it very hard to understand as either the first or the last of those. I don't think we can thank God for the good things about it, such as the tsunami not causing damage in other Pacific Rim countries, if we rule him out of the bad parts. And while I'm happy to believe that "the whole creation has been groaning with the pains of childbirth until now", as Paul of Tarsus put it, it feels too simplistic a correlation to make to primal sin.

Rescue in Japan with body-bags (Photo ABC Australia)

I guess it's just part of inhabiting a planet formed as ours was. And a consequence of rising populations and increasing urbanisation, so that although the incidence of earthquakes hasn't noticeably increased, their human effects have become more catastrophic. We have an odd instinct to blame when disasters occur, blame someone or something for things going wrong. Blame whoever built nuclear power station on seismic fault lines, blame whoever built cities on them (though I gather that humans have chosen to live in such places from the beginning), blame authorities who allowed it all, and in due course blame someone for failures in rescue operations and in the reconstruction effort.

Photo © Ian Salisbury

And then today I've heard that another of my lovely young friends has cancer. Give us a break. Maybe it's copping out, but I'm cornered into concluding, as I was about my illness, that God is love (for which I have good evidence), but that love is far more incomprehensible than I'd imagined - so that somehow personal and international catastrophes both fall within that love, as does rescue from them. So I move backwards from Psalm 135.6, "Whatever the Lord pleases, he does in heaven and on earth, in the seas and all deeps", to Psalm 131.1, "O Lord, my heart is not lifted up... I do not occupy myself with things too great and marvellous for me."

We certainly live in a mysterious and beautiful universe. This is a picture I was sent last week of the moon over the North Pole, with the sun just above the horizon. I understand the moon has recently been nearer than usual.

(Unknown source)

Local scenes and global perspectives 1

On Thursday evening, I watched the second part of Comic Relief: Famous, rich and in the slums. Again it was touching and moving. Again it moved me to tears - and hopefully to action. It certainly moved me to reflection. More of that anon.

Not mine! From Wikipedia

Meanwhile it's been quite a week. It was framed by visits from two friends who have had cancer and amazingly better, one who's had brilliant chemo and the other who's not had treatment. Those were two good news stories. Another small one was when my physio, Lesley, visited on Monday and checked me over, and gave me the thumbs-up. She reckoned I was no worse than four months ago - just need to keep an eye on my posture. Good news. On Tuesday it was back to the dentist to decide what to do about the troublesome molar (or perhaps premolar). Whatever treatment (extraction or root filling) would require visits to Oxford, as the little local clinic doesn't have sufficient back-up if complications arise - which is likely since it's been pushed sideways. So I've opted to have it out and be done with it. We now await the summons from the hospital, hopefully before too long as the antibiotics which have held the infection at bay ran out at the weekend.

On Wednesday we had our joint Oxfordshire/South Bucks MNDA meeting in Thame about benefits, like DLA, Carers' and Attendance Allowance. A really good service provided by the Department of Work & Pensions, this, their outreach: we certainly learned things we didn't know before, which were pleasant surprises. I asked the chap about the future of the benefits. The answer was, if I got it right, that from 2013 all the disability allowances will stop being self-assessed and will be assessed by doctors employed by the DWP. The idea must be drastically to cut the number of disabled claimants in order to justify the expense of employing all those medics, I reckon. They want to catch the abusers of the system, such as the woman who claimed and then played golf... apparently. I doubt whether there are that many of them, but I may be wrong.

My genuinely disabled artist friend, Katherine Araniello, pointed out an article by Lucy Mangan in the Weekend Guardian, We're in a right state, in which she reflects on the experience of being temporarily mildly disabled. She describes vividly what it's like (similar, I thought, to early MND) and the unexpected acts of kindness she keeps experiencing from individuals. "It makes me wonder, though: what happens to all this kindness and compassion when we move beyond the individual level? It clearly dissipates at some point. I'm fascinated, truly, by the fact that a government is elected by people and made up of people, yet so lacks the empathy or sympathy of the average person that it can blithely cut the benefits that mitigate the sociocultural disadvantages of disability – the enforced isolation, the extra expense (of minicabs, of having to go to the most accessible rather than the cheapest shops) – and reformulate the rules of qualifying so that it seems every applicant is assumed to be a fraud until proven otherwise."  


I hadn't read that by Thursday when I went to the Churchill Hospital to talk to trainee clergy about my experience on both sides of degenerative illness and disability, or I might have quoted it to them. As I might have foreseen, I broke down talking about the church family and especially my own family's unconditional love, but I hope, nonetheless, that it gave them some insight to what it's like. Of course they asked some tricky questions, like what's the most helpful approach to people like me - to which the answer is to notice us as people, not to come up with the 'right words'. Rachel Marsden, the MND Centre archangel, also spoke and mentioned some of the things not to say, such as "I know how you feel" (No, you don't) and "Something good will come out of this" (It may not, and anyway my problem is now). Sadly, not many of them bought my books! Recession-hit ordinands? After us there was a panel of hospital chaplains, who I felt were less than clear about euthanasia, with one exception - though admittedly they were speaking pastorally rather than ethically. Perhaps they should watch Katharine Araniello's films and listen to her experience. Her latest one is sardonically funny and yet deeply serious: "'Follow Me on My Journey To Die' follows Gem, a flamboyant artist whose plan to commit suicide captures the attention of the masses. Not only does she have Turner Prize committee in her sway but also the London fashion scene which has been hit with a euthanasia craze."Katherine Araniello's website

Katherine Araniello performing

And so with visitors on Friday and breaking news from Japan, I sank exhausted to watch an afternoon of rugby, which certainly woke me up. In fact it was an extraordinary weekend of internationals: Italy beating France by a single point in Rome, Wales beating Ireland with a try which contravened Rule 19.2 after a quick line-out with a new ball (!), England beating Scotland after a dubious sin-binning, a fox on the pitch and the referee injured with a torn calf muscle! It looks as though England are on course for the Grand Slam (beating all the other teams in the 6 Nations) unless Ireland pull off a miracle in Dublin on Saturday, two days after St Patrick's Day.

Converted

I've been converted! I know you'll rejoice with me. Yesterday I watched all the way through Comic Relief 2011: Famous, Rich and in the Slums - Part 1 on iPlayer. I wanted to watch because it looked as though it would remind me of the time I spent in 1967 in Pumwami, which was then the slum area of Nairobi. (I have to say I remember it as being nothing as bad as Kibera today.) Fortunately I watched it while Jane was out, because it had me moved to tears, and I still feel embarrassed when I blub.

Now I've always been a bit sceptical about Comic Relief and very sceptical about "reality" TV shows. And here, basically, were four broadcasting celebrities being stranded for a week (with cameramen of course) in Kibera, the biggest slum in Africa, on the edge of Nairobi, capital of Kenya, "for Comic Relief". The celebs were Angela Rippon, Lennie Henry, Samantha Womack and Reggie Yates. But despite the publicity photo it wasn't either jokey or mawkish or sensational. Each of them had their own clothes and possessions removed and were supplied with second-hand Kibera clothing. They were given the equivalent of £1.50 each and an 8-foot square corrugated shack each and left to cope, like the Kiberans have to. It's a programme you need to watch because there's no way in which I can do justice to it, the open sewers running down the alleys, the latrines shared shared by up to 1000 each, the matter of factness of death (one in five children don't reach the age of five), the commitment of the parents, often on their own. The four celebs were torn between reporting and identifying with their neighbours, and the end the 3rd-generation Kiberan who'd arranged their contacts himself was overwhelmed by the emotion which he and other slum-dwellers habitually suppress in order to survive.

It was a remarkable programme. And I could understand why someone this morning said her immediate reaction was to make a donation. I shall have to watch Part 2, of course, although part of me would rather not. But these are our neighbours.

So I may still not go for the razzmatazz of 18th March evening TV, and I'll still find Ant and Dec's antics in the jungle absurd, however this was real reality TV and that's not absurd. And I will no longer look down my nose at Comic Relief. I'm converted. Famous, Rich and in the Slums