DAY 3 WEDNESDAY

(MORE) COMMUNITY and the KINDNESS of STRANGERS


COMMUNITY in MICROCOSM

I lived with four other people on Mabel One, the ground floor of one of the residences our group was assigned at the University of Cantebury. This training was the most international I have attended and my floormates – an American living in Australia, one Brit, a woman from Spain and another from Australia, as well as me, a Canadian living in West Africa – were typical of the group’s diversity.

My floormate Annie is lovely in all possible senses. I like it when she talks about her life because I get a sense of someone who has worked out for herself what it means to live with integrity. Annie plays Hare Krishna chants loud in her room and misses her kids a ton. So does Alicia at the other end of the hall. Miss her kids, I mean. Alicia plays bands like Maroon 5 under headphones while reading the training manual. We talk a lot about the similarities between our families and lives in Alicia’s native Louisiana and Nova Scotia, my ground zero. Both turn out to be the kind of brilliant people you can borrow cash from and talk with about what constitutes a good moisturizer while loading washing machines.

I think Tony is a kind of bodyworker wizard who can synthesize complex ideas across modalities and make it look easy. And he’s fun, too, in that zany bodyworker kind of way: one night he stuck his hand under my hip bone and pressed something that caused my whole left leg to feel as if it were being played like a fiddle. By the end of the training I was kind of addicted to the sound of Tony's laugh.

Gloria is tiny and quiet until she laughs, at which point she seems large because she laughs with her whole body, as if mirth were a static charge. I see this same charge when she dances. I admire her for several reasons, not least because English is not her first language and, demanding as the training is, I can’t imagine having to deal with the mental fatigue that comes with trying to operate in a second language.

Tony

Gloria & Annie

Alicia

I’m posting this with a shout out to my floor-mates — gold stars, you beautiful people, for being the reason our residence changed from mere accommodation to a temporary home.

The KINDNESS of STRANGERS 2

I took the bus into Christchurch today to see a show at the Museum, then walked through the botanic gardens and along Riccarton Road to the shopping mall. My camera battery died and I needed to find a place that sells Canon cameras to ask if they can charge it. At one store, I meet a guy named Adam who tells me to go to another store to ask his friend Lance to charge the battery. Lance isn’t there, but John is, and since John recommended Lance for his job, and since Lance says Adam is a great guy, and since I am friend of Adam’s, no problem. (Well, okey dokey to all that.) John mined the packaging of a new Canon for its charger and I left the battery for the night. 

When I returned the next day, I handed John a ten-dollar bill and suggested that using it to buy a beer after work might be a good idea. Based on the amount of times he said, “Really?,” I get the idea John is chuffed, just over-the-top happy about this, and I get a glimpse of what someone looks like when their instinct is to do a nice thing is completely unmotivated by potential reward, and a reward arrives anyway. 

John decides between lager and ale.