Christa's Baptism

What was meant to be a dunk in the pool and then a garden party, was moved indoors because of the weather. Nonetheless, it was a very special day not only for Christa, but also for our whole family. Thanks to everyone who came and helped to make it so special; to Alan for leading us through the ceremony, to the "Burgertreff Hochzoll" for letting us use their beautiful and practical accommodations at the last minute and for a big discount, and a huge thanks to Katherine for cooking those delicious Nigerian dishes!!! And of course thank you to everyone for all the yummy salads and cakes that were brought! It was certainly a day that Christa will cherish, and that is what we wanted. Maybe at some point, I will get around to translating the mini-sermon Jan and I gave in tandem and will post it on the blog as well, but for now, here are some pictures of the day.

Mama Bear!!! Grrrrrr!!

Ok, so this is a longer story….

Since shortly before this past christmas break, Charis (12) fell in outs with the “click” in her class. One of the girls, who she had been friends with (had even spent the night here), stopped being her friend from one day to the next, because of a new girl who purposefully wedged Charis out of this group. Then they proceeded to make her miserable every day, writing notes, whispering about her, glaring, trying to get others in the class against her. With every girl Charis tried to hang out with in the break, they would start to be sugar sweet to her and monopolize her. It took weeeeeeeeks before I could get the school to do anything. Finally there was one talk with all the girls and Charis, and the worst of it stopped. Still, this group of girls dominates the class and is totally prissy about every little thing. Charis is not your wall-flower-I’ll-do-whatever-you-say-just-so-I-can-be-near-you kind of girl, so she keeps getting in the line of fire.

She has been asking for a long while now if she can switch to Jonathan’s school, but I haven’t really entertained the idea, until I spoke with a mother recently, who did switch her daughter, and was glad she did. So, I called the Principal to see if he could give me some kind of reason to keep her at the school… some assurance that they would finally take the problem seriously… ha! “Problem? What problem? That is just Charis’ side of the story… no one else in the class seems to have a problem. It’s a normal class and none of the teachers has mentioned that there are any problems. It depends on how you define “fighting”…. bla bla bla!” Basically, he wanted me to know that it was my problem and not his.

Anyway, that very day Charis comes home in tears…. this little prissy brat (sorry, but I’ve still got my fangs and claws out!) was screaming at her in sport class, because Charis fouled her, then threw the ball at her as hard as she could. Later, when Charis went to change, her new shoes had been stolen.

So, today, I went into the class (luckily at the same time the sport teacher went in to bring up the issue, and she let me in, and let me rant!!), and I told that class exactly what I thought of them. Especially this particular brat and the two girls who had been guests in our home, and now don’t give Charis the time of day. I also scolded the entire class for letting this little mouse of a girl intimidate them all… “just because she has a big mouth, you think she’s a lion, but she is just a little mouse! You should all be ashamed of yourselves that you let some of these girls boss others, and scream at Charis, and NOBODY does anything against it… but then talk about her (the brat and the click) behind their backs… how lame is that and cowardly?” By the time I was done, a couple of girls who I had targeted were in tears.

While I was waiting for the sport teacher and the girls were switching classes, and Charis came down surrounded by girls from her class, I asked her if she found it terribly embarrising, and all the girls started in “no way, that was great! finally someone speaks up and finally DOES something!” When Charis got home, she told me that a few girls came to her and apologized for stuff that had happened back at the beginning of 5th! grade, or finally told her why they stopped being friendly with her (one was hurt, because Charis hadn’t shown up to her birthday party (our bad). Some came up to her and asked if I was mad at them, because I was looking at them so intensly (I basically stared that entire class down to the size of pin head). and tonight Charis got a message on her school network from the girl who had screamed at her… half apology, half trying to get me not to call her parents. Her turkish friend in the class, said it was too bad she could never get her mom to do something like that, because she can hardly speak german!

Moral of the story: parents should be way more involved in what goes on in school!

But, the way it looks, we got the one and only spot that opened up for a seventh grade girl at jonathan’s school, and Charis still wants to switch, so I will make the call tomorrow to confirm it.

It's Just Not Right!!

Anyone who knows me even a little bit, knows that I am no great Phileos Animalis. In our family, I am the one immovable barrier to my children’s desperate pleas for a domestic canine experience (thank God that Christa is allergic to cats, so we at least don’t have to have that battle). The only compromise I was willing to make was to let them get turtles, who sleep a good 6 months of the year in someone else’s garage. Talk about low maintenance! The only pet I had as a child was the adorable little kitten we got as kids one Christmas and creatively named… Christmas, and who just disappeared one day even before it stopped being a cute little kitten. Then there was the tank of amazing tropical fish my parents were “fish-sitting,” while the real owners were traveling for a few months. Every last fish was dead within the first few weeks. The small white budgerigar I was given when I was 18, whom I named Coca (yes, after that stuff!), survived my care, against all odds, for about three years, but not the care of his “bird sitters,” when I was away in Europe for a year.

The only pets I’ve had since then were the ones we had in PNG. Our dog, Hadley, who died an agonizing death after eating pesticides while we were away in Germany for a couple of months, and our ants, cockroaches and mice, who survived despite our decisive efforts to exterminate them. In fact, the real reason I don’t mind staying in Germany, is because there are no cockroaches here. A couple of days ago, my neighbor friend Louisa invited me in to see her three new kittens. The whole time I was petting them and saying how cute they were, I was thinking, “What kind of crazy people have a house full of cats?” And every morning when another neighbor’s cat wants to be let in for breakfast between 5 and 7 am, yowling like a squeaky violin, I am sure that if I still had a bb-gun from my wild and crazy teen years, I would have long put an end to its miserable little existence (I’m obviously also not a morning person).

So I feel almost hypocritical when I start to listen to my own heart’s response to the oil gushing out into the Gulf of Mexico, and I find there much more compassion and heartbreak than I would have expected. In fact, I started sobbing convulsively on my way to Ikea the other day, as I imagined the violence being inflicted upon this living, pulsating and diverse ecosystem, and wrote this poem when I got back home. Every new article about the failed attempts to cap the leak, every aerial video of the sprawling black pest, and every picture of the birds and sea life who are suffocating and smothered in the fuming, sludgy crude, wrenches from my heart new waves of horror and sorrow, of feeling angry and helpless and… responsible. It’s just not right! It’s just not right!

In stretches such as I’ve had the last few weeks, when melancholy has settled in like a long bout of bad weather, this tragedy seems to have given me that last right hook emotionally and landed me on the mat for the final count of ten. The actual physical crises of the unrelenting oil still intruding into the aqua blue Gulf is daunting enough, but the network of corporate and political corruption, the world wide scale of unsustainable consumption, and my own addictive behavior, which keeps the whole system well lubricated and in ceaseless operation, appear to me to be an unstoppable herd of buffalo stampeding us all off a cliff. Will it ever change? Will I ever change? How do you stop a stampeding herd of anything?

Any ideas?