Light and shadows – travel

I had been officially asked to travel! After the covid chaos of the last couple of years, I jumped at the opportunity. Albania would be my destination, and I was to participate in a week of meetings. However, given that I was going all the way from Australia to Europe, I added on three weeks of vacation leave, one before the meetings and two afterwards. I would visit England, the land of my heritage. For months I dreamt, planned, talked about it to anyone who showed an ounce of interest, and saw God’s goodness through serendipitous coincidences and the generosity of his people.

Now I’m back and kind people are asking, “How was the trip?” Usually I just say, “Good, thanks” or occasionally add a note of frustration about getting covid halfway through. This blog post will provide a bit more of an answer for those who are interested.

I am also pondering the fact that rarely is life all good or all bad. To classify a whole month of travel as one or the other is unrealistic. But some people – okay, actually I’m talking about me – seem to expect everything to be all good all the time. Strange.

In fact, one theme of the trip could be this: light and shadows. In the physical world around us, we see both light and shadows. One without the other would be flat or dark. That’s true of my trip too – it was full of light and shadows.

(By the way, I’ll avoid naming or showing photos of people in this blog post. That’s out of consideration for their privacy. Despite not mentioning them, however, please note that I appreciate family and friends in the UK very much indeed – without them, the holiday part of trip would not have been possible.)

Pre-conference – Oxford

The long weekend I spent with friends in Oxford was fabulous. I thought that staying with them would give me a chance to overcome jet-lag before the Visio Divina retreat that started three days after I landed in the UK. And it did. But it became a highlight in its own right.

Yet a hint of the first shadow of the trip began before I even left Australia. I tried to activate ‘global roaming’ with my phone carrier, but kept getting the response, “Technical difficulties – please try again later.” I hadn’t wanted to activate it early because of the $5 a day fee. I left on 22 September 2022 – the day that Optus (my telephone server) was hacked. Within half a day of arriving in England, I was notified that I had already run up over AU$50 in data usage. Mega oops. Why didn’t I switch off my mobile data?!

In the end, it worked out okay. I couldn’t get onto Optus and so bought a local SIM card. I lodged a complaint with Optus but, despite multiple messages, they didn’t seem to understand that I couldn’t be contacted on my Australian phone number. Twice, they sent me emails explaining that they had tried to call me five or six times but that I was not answering their calls and so they closed the case. Nevertheless, even with the cost of the British SIM and paying the extra data-use fee, I still ended up financially better off than I would have been had I used global roaming. Lesson learned.

Apart from that, my time in and around Oxford was BRILLIANT. I’m so grateful to my kind hosts who showed me the sights and looked after me beautifully.

A retreat

I had been talking about this ‘Visio Divina’ retreat for months. I love photography and Christian meditation, and this retreat promised to bring these together. It did not disappoint.

I heard about the Penhurst Retreat Centre through friends in missions circles because they have a strong history of supporting cross-cultural mission workers. The venue had been the grand old home of the Broomhall family for many years – a family with strong connections with my sending agency in particular. I was happily surprised to find myself allocated to the ‘Sundar Singh’ room – a room decorated with an Indian theme. Sadhu Sundar Singh just happens to be one of my ‘heroes of the faith’ – an Indian man who took contextualisation to an extreme and, despite a privileged upbringing, wandered about as a penniless religious man (a sadhu) in Tibet a century ago. What’s more, I was surprised to realise that Paul Broomhall had been born in a part of Asia very dear to me – the city of Taiyuan. And now here I was, in the Sundar Singh room in his family home. It was quite special.

I could write a lot more about the themes of the Visio Divina retreat, but will save that for a set of blog posts with more photographs sometime soon. For now, suffice to say that the retreat was restorative and restful, just as I had hoped it would be. But it was not without shadows.

Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) is something I don’t write about much but it drives me absolutely mad sometimes. I’ve recently been working with a dietician on identifying triggers, which has been helpful. I’ve also got some new medication – Fodzyme, an enzyme powder, which can be sprinkled on food. It works really well for things like onion and garlic. It does not work at all for cauliflower, which contains mannitol – something that adversely affects me but which the enzyme powder doesn’t break down. Yes, you know where this is going, don’t you.

The kitchen staff prepared incredible gluten free meals for me. They really went out of their way, and I appreciated it a lot. One particularly tasty Cornish pastie – yes, a real (GF) Cornish pastie! – was served with a huge pile of cauliflower. Why, oh why, didn’t I leave the cauliflower?

I missed an evening session and a night of sleep because of that mistake. I’ll spare you the details, but even after the silly body had settled down, I remained ‘delicate’ for a couple more days. That happened on the day that our theme was ‘light and shadows’. Yes, but I don’t like shadows……..

It was still a wonderful retreat week, by the way.

Conference

To be honest, I was not excited about going to the conference. I was willing to go, of course, but felt quite out of my depth amongst our most senior leaders. I had only been asked to go because my team leader had been unable to attend. Nevertheless, it turned out to be a really good week. It was a privilege to contribute to discussions that will shape the direction of our organisation over the coming few years.

Each day was full, with meetings scheduled from 8.30am to 6.15pm and sometimes in the evenings too. The conference venue was right by the Adriatic Sea, facing west, and the sunsets were incredible. A group of us would race down to the water just as soon as we finished each day and stand there in wonder. The sunset was different every single day – the colours and the cloud formations varied a lot.

The shadow side of the week’s conference, however, was a blow that I’m still processing – a healthy blow, but a blow nonetheless. Early in the week, we had a session called ‘Re-imagining our heritage’. It was led by two sisters in Christ of Indian heritage. We had been asked to pre-read an excerpt from a missionary biography of an English lady in India in the 1850s. The heroine of the story “… quickly slipped into the routine of Anglo-Indian missionary life in the mid-nineteenth century…. She was a Miss Sahib through and through, as were they all, members of the dominant race….” And so the chapter continued. (I can provide the reference if you ask me, but hate to publicly criticise the book here.) I grew up on missionary biographies like this, and it is no exaggeration to say that I chose my own life direction in part because of a desire to have an impact in the world, just like those ‘heroes of history’ had done.

Of course, we know that biographies only tell one side of the story, and, these days, most of us would agree that there were aspects of colonial rule that were simply just not right. However, it was shocking to hear these dear colleagues at conference powerfully and dramatically present a session considering the same events that the chapter described, but from the perspective of their ancestors – women just like them. ‘Invisible’, ‘unseen’, ‘belittled’ and ‘torn from family’ were some of the words and phrases used to describe the local Indian women who were barely mentioned in the story.

Our international director, himself an Indian man, later added that history is just that – history – and we are not responsible for what happened back then, be it good or bad. Furthermore, in God’s sovereignty, empires rise and fall, and have done for millennia. We are, however, responsible to learn from history and not repeat the mistakes of those in whose footsteps we follow.

Nevertheless, I admit that this reinterpretation of history rocked my little world…..

The other downside to conference was that covid circulated amongst us. One by one or two by two, conference delegates would disappear, only joining the meetings by zoom from their hotel rooms. We would take turns at delivering meals to their doors. Thankfully, I remained healthy throughout the week.

British family holiday

I had been SO looking forward to spending time with British relatives and to glimpsing their lives. However, I unwittingly brought a souvenir back from conference……

After purchasing a ticket for my luggage (which I’d apparently neglected to do earlier) then a l-o-n-g trip by plane, train, underground and another train, it was lovely to be reunited with my father’s cousin and his wife, The following morning, however, I woke up with a bit of a sniffle.

Before poking my snuffly nose beyond the bedroom door, I did a covid test. As I watched the second line develop, my heart both plummeted and pounded. I masked, sanitised, investigated local accommodation options and broke the bad news to my relatives.

I had been so very very careful, masking for everything except for meals and when outdoors, spraying ‘First Defence’ up my nostrils after any potential exposure (which had included every day of the week of conference) and going through bottles of sanitiser. And now, of all times, I come down with covid on day ONE of this family visit?!

My cousins suggested that I should stay with them despite the covid, but I was adamant that I would not pose any more of a risk to them than I had already done. Furthermore, I insisted on walking to the hotel. A planned family gathering with cousins in the south of the country was postponed.

Just the same, despite coming down with mild covid symptoms, I actually enjoyed a lovely week, outdoors, masked, but still seeing plenty of my relatives. The culture around covid is far more relaxed in the UK than it was at the time in Australia.

I stayed a little longer than originally planned up in the north of the country because British covid guidelines suggested that one should keep one’s distance from others for five days. After that, the NHS guidelines suggested, one could mingle again, but should mask for a further five days if one couldn’t socially distance.

After five days, I double masked and travelled to a caravan park in the south of the country, near the town where my father grew up and where cousins still live. It was lovely to have my own space and kitchen facilities, but I felt bad that cousins would drive half an hour or so each way each day to show me round. And I’m very very grateful. Again, we limited most activities to those which could be enjoyed in the fresh open air.

Time and space don’t permit me to write up all we did each day, but, in short, it was an excellent visit. In the company of various cousins, cousins’ adult children and grandchildren, I enjoyed beaches of stones and beaches of sand, cliff tops, forests of trees tall and short, castles, villages, gardens and even fossils (at the Jurassic Coast). My goal of photographing a red squirrel (as opposed to the more common grey squirrels, which I had photographed earlier in the trip) had been a bit of a running joke, but to my delight, we did it!

The end

It felt ‘safe’ to mingle unmasked and to stay with a couple more cousins for the last few days of my trip. The rescheduled family gathering was delightful. And before I knew it, I found myself on a l-o-n-g journey back to the other side of the world, to a place I call ‘home’.

So how was the trip? Well, overall good, But not perfect.

Does that matter? That’s life, right? Life is full of light and shadows.

I’m still disappointed that covid (and cauliflower) mucked up my expectations for the trip, but ever so grateful that none of my kind relatives caught covid from me. And I must admit that it was actually rather nice to have my own space and manage my own diet.

Despite the trip not being perfect, I still had a good time. I came back to Australia wiser, though a tad disillusioned about those heroes from history who turn out to be just as flawed and ‘products of their time’ as we are today.

That’s the longer answer to the question, “How was your trip?” Light and shadows … just like life.

Thanks for asking.