Other People

As I write I am sitting on a concrete road sign, waiting for a minibus to emerge from the heat haze on the horizon. And I have realised that all my blogs so far have been largely about myself, which I suppose is understandable, but regardless I’d like to rectify that.

I’ve just been staying with my New Zealander friend Nadine for a few days. She is a glorious human being. She is kind in the most profound sense of the word, she is clever, self-forgetful, funny. She has the sort of deep courage and love that are only forged in the furnace of pain. She gives awesome hugs, and cooks great corn fritters. She currently has her hair braided in a funky, African kind of way – she doesn’t like it but whenever a bit comes out the kids at her school helpfully re-plait it for her! She’s teaching at a deaf school and you can see instantly how much she actually loves her kids. She wants to work overseas for the Red Cross – and she’d be awesome at it.

I’ve been living for 6 months now with another New Zealander, Michael Wilkie. He is one of the funniest people I have ever met. He is incredibly irritating about 80% of the time, but you find yourself a day later telling people about how he annoyed you as an anecdote, and it’s really really funny. He loves sport way too much, and celebrates goals in football matches with 4 year olds as if he’s just won the World Cup. While drunk. He knows the words to an insane amount of hip hop, and unexpectedly, country music. He sings these songs in his bed every morning and then in spells throughout the day. He loves teaching the kids. He works hard. He embraces problems with a spectacularly carefree attitude, that can only be described as ‘swagger’. He has broken a bucket, a door handle, and his bed while we’ve been here. He has climbed a 1000 meter mountain, with no path, wearing trainers with holes in and no grip on the bottom. He loves, really loves, to snuggle.

Rachael Leeson is currently in France, no doubt speaking impressively good French, having just finished a week of acting for a pro Christian theatre company at Spring Harvest France – a bit Christian holiday festival. She wrote some really beautiful stuff for it. She has an incredible face, which is genuinely fun to watch whether she’s performing or not. She is faithful and funny and talented and brave. Her boyfriend has been away for six months and they’re still together. She is wise, and she listens. She listens to people, and she listens to God. She is selfless and joyful. She makes people happy.

My Dad got ordained on Sunday. He is a legend. Wise like an owl, gentle, loving. He’s genuinely brilliant with kids, including myself. He invents games that we mock but secretly love. He talks about Jesus with passion and integrity and insight. He gets excited about the bits of the bible he’s studying at college and explains them to me, just like he used to explain how gears worked, or surface tension. He loves Athletic Bilbao a lot. He loves Pringles because they are neat. He is my Dad and I am proud of him.



And these people, and many, many others, are the reason I will be sad to leave in a month’s time, and the reason I will be glad to be home.