There was a briefing yesterday at OCHA concerning the continuing eruption of Nyamulagira. Two vulcanologists were present to give their (sometimes contradicting) opinions.
I was not actually able to attend the meeting (the joys of reformatting budgets got in the way!) but colleagues attended, and here is what they reported back (translated from the French, with some of my own comments added in):
For the last two days (now, presumably, three days; the meeting was yesterday) the speed of the lava flow has slowed considerably. When it first erupted, the lava moved at speeds reaching 2 km per day; now, it is only moving at 200-300 meters per day. Partially, this can be explained because the flow has reached a much flatter surface. It is no longer coursing downhill. Moreover, rather than being only 15 meters wide, as it was in the first few days, it is now nearly 200 meters wide. This news is greeted with much relief. While people’s homes were never in danger, a large, important road (along the Gummed/Sake ax) is in the path of the lava. Now it appears that the lava will not be able to reach the road for another 2 to 4 weeks.
This all said, the activity level of the volcano does remain intense. Fountains of lava spewing forth from Nyamulagira have reached heights of more than 50 meters in the last several days. The vulcanologists posited that this high level of activity will continue for several more weeks or months.
One thing that both scientists agreed on (luckily, as it is probably the thing that most terrifies those of us with active imaginations): The “degasification” of Lake Kivu remains very unlikely. To “rock” the gas saturation point, which lies in the depths of the deep, deep lake, a very violent phenomenon would need to occur. Even in the 2002 eruption of Nyragongo, marked by an earthquake of magnitude six and lava that flowed into the lake for several days, the gases did not bubble up to suffocate the population. (Yay!)
The effects of this eruption on the population of Goma and its surrounding areas remain limited. Dominant winds are blowing westward, and people who live in Sake, who are drinking contaminated rainwater, are becoming ill. Spring waters (underground waters) are so far untouched. Surface waters are only slightly contaminated. (Eventually, surface waters may be more contaminated.)
Ashes are not toxic; fruits and vegetables touched by ashes need only be thoroughly washed. However, the presence of ash in pastures is harmful to cattle because of a phenomenon called “Pelé's Hair” where the ashes crystallize on leaves and can affect the digestive system of animals if eaten.
Conclusion: The situation is not currently alarming. However, it is a volcano. Things can change, and quickly, and with little warning. Measuring instruments only caught wind of troubles within the ground 8 hours before the beginning of this eruption. Happily, researchers, general scientists, and vulcanologists are currently pouring into town, conducting in-depth studies and monitoring the situation.
*
(Oh yeah and PS there is now a spot for comments on this blog, if you so desire.)
Friday, January 8, 2010
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Seriously?! Seriously. SERIOUSLY?!?!
After the distressing end of the disastrous Kimia II, FARDC is beginning a new UN-sponsered offense against the FDLR rebels. Guess what it is called? No, go on, guess. You'll never get it! Okay! Had enough? I'll tell you.
It is called "Amani Leo". Don't know Swahili? Let me translate that for you. It means "Peace Today".
Can I retype that?
The new military offensive, replacing Kimia II, is named "Peace Today."
Who says the military doesn't have a sense of humor? Or maybe I'm being too harsh... if the leaders of the FARDC caught Obama's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, they may be justifiably confused...
It is called "Amani Leo". Don't know Swahili? Let me translate that for you. It means "Peace Today".
Can I retype that?
The new military offensive, replacing Kimia II, is named "Peace Today."
Who says the military doesn't have a sense of humor? Or maybe I'm being too harsh... if the leaders of the FARDC caught Obama's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, they may be justifiably confused...
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Nyamulagira
The lava from Nyamulagira is still flowing so we ate lunch inside today to avoid the ash. But I haven't seen any ash. So I'm not sure if that was a true necessity or simply our chef's superstition.
The lava is now just 4.5 km from the main road between Goma and Sake. Luckily it is still not near any person's home, but we don't want it to damage the road, either.
The lava is now just 4.5 km from the main road between Goma and Sake. Luckily it is still not near any person's home, but we don't want it to damage the road, either.
Beggars and Choosers
I’m jetlagged. It’s 2:46 am and there is thunder out across the lake. 2:46 am is only 7:46 pm in my Christmas time zone. 7:47 pm now. But I have work in 5 hours and 13 minutes. Sleep is a necessity. Argh.
Maybe philosophizing about a moral quandary will help quiet my mind. Specifically: when (if) to give to beggars. I have been revisiting my previous conclusions about this subject recently and have been meaning to sit down and truly think it out, but I haven’t had time. I guess 2:53 am is as good a time as any.
(What insane luxury to be lying in a warm bed with a roof over my head and a computer on my lap, debating this – to be on the “giving” side of the beggar divide and not the “asking”.)
When I was a child, a woman beggar sat many days on the street two blocks away from mine, holding out a cup in her hands. Sometimes at night when I walked to the ice cream shop with my parents, my dad would give me a quarter to give to her, and I understood from him that it was important to share with people, even strangers. But I am 28 years old now and this woman is still there, on the same street. I suppose that she is happy enough with her life, as she doesn’t seem to have attempted to change her status quo in the last quarter century. But there is more to life than finding your own happiness; there is a responsibility to support the vulnerable in your society. This responsibility should fall on her shoulders, too. I have trouble respecting this woman. The way she asks for money in a high whine; the way her skin is bloated; the way her face changes when she sees someone approaching whom she thinks will give money – like she pulls on a mask of self-pity and need. I have watched her for over two decades. I have never had a long conversation with her, but she has watched me grow up and I have watched her grow prematurely old. If she is truly unable to care for herself, then I would rather give money to an organization that can help her than directly to her. But if she just doesn’t care enough about her society to try to pull her life together, then I would also rather give money to an organization.
When I first moved to this huge and diverse continent, I lived in Senegal for two months (early 2007). Senegal has talibé. Talibé are students. They are young boys who are sent to live with marabouts to learn math, writing, Islam, humility, and how to be strong men when they grow up. Unfortunately, (as I was told the history, and as I remember it three years later) since the big drought in the 1970s resulted in widespread hunger and poverty, the young boys were sent out to beg more and more and kept in class less and less. Since the drought, the culture of excessive begging has remained. This is obviously not true for all daara and many marabout are caring teachers who do not beat their children for not bringing home enough coins in the evening. However, when you walk at night in Senegal you will come across plenty of kids still out, caring around their red tomato paste cans (for some reason, this is the signature begging cup for talibé), scared to go back to their schools to sleep. In Dakar, I knew an ex-pat girl who was a Ba’hai. On the day to break her fast, she and I celebrated by buying sweet muffins and walking through our neighborhood, distributing them to talibé. I remember one little boy, sitting in the sand against a crumble wall with his head in the crook of his elbow. I shook his arm to hand him a muffin. He looked at me, took it, stuffed it up the sleeve of his shirt and put his head back down. He didn’t even smile and his eyes looked so old. I remember another kid, no older than three, snotty-faced, who stumbled up to me on Gorée Island, holding up a tomato paste can. Imagine the sting of pebbles launched from slingshots at your back and legs by tired, angry nine year olds, out alone at night. It really hurts. So – giving a coin to one of these little boys at night might allow him to go home to sleep without being beaten – but what about the next night? This wasn’t a system that I felt I could support. Instead, shouldn’t one give money and time to a local organization that could work to provide a sustainable solution for these boys?
(Side note: At the NGO I interned at, I had colleagues who were once talibé – but in good daara with responsible caretakers. And these colleagues would sometimes give coins to the beggar boys, in accordance with the pillar of Islam that dictates alms be given. But first, before giving coins, my colleagues would quiz the boys in Arabic on Quran verses or in French on school work. When they got satisfactory answers, they were assured that the boys were attending a strong, valid daara and would give the boys coins to reward their humility and hard work.)
In The Gambia, I lived back and forth between the far east of the country, Basse Santu Su, a vibrant market town right on the river which I loved, and a resort town in the west, Kololi, right outside the capital and on the Atlantic Ocean. Kololi has a serious problem with tourism. Prostitution is rampant (most visible are the men, called bumsters, who pick up or are picked up by European females for a week of fun, sex and drugs). And then there are the plentiful tourists who come down with bags of clothes and toys and hand them out to children on the beach. They lie on their towels at their resorts beneath their umbrellas in their knock-off D&G sunglasses and brag about their good deeds, envisioning themselves Santa Claus or a philanthropist, Carnegie maybe, or maybe an old explorer/colonialist, from those romantic times, offering tokens of civilization to the helpless African children. (I would spend hours searching for sand dollars on the beach and I heard so many of these stories). The situation is so bad and ridiculous that children actually skip school to go hang out at the beach and get candies, barrettes, and tee-shirts from the tourists. Besides missing out on education, the poorest of these children then take the candies they are given and sell them to shopkeepers for the coins, so they can offer them up to their caretakers and not be beaten. It’s a terrible system that the tourists partially create and fully exacerbate. It makes you never want to give out money and instead support an organization that will work to change the status quo.
When the children in The Gambia and later in Uganda chased me to ask me for gifts I would make a point of stopping, shaking their hands, looking them in the eye, letting them practice their English, and leaving them with just that – the attention of an adult and the smile of a woman – and no coins or foods or material goods.
In northern Uganda, one of my first times in the IDP camps, my four Ugandan colleagues, one Mauritanian colleague and I were wrapping up a focus group session. We thanked people for their time and participation by giving them soaps. Because I didn’t speak Acholi (and because my Mauritanian colleague, who also didn’t speak Acholi, was awful), I found myself being the sole distributor of soaps while my Ugandan colleagues asked wrap-up questions of the contributors. I freaked out. Here I was, the one white person around, and I was the one passing out items. I told my colleagues in our little rented car on the way back to Kitgum town that I absolutely never wanted that to happen again. I don’t think any of them understood why I was upset. They agreed easily, because they liked me, but with confused looks on their faces – I think they thought I wasn’t making sense, or maybe that I was indulging my “white guilt” and thus would be lengthening our future stays in the camps by not helping with the little task. I don’t know. I just pictured those tourists and their bags of handouts and couldn’t do it. Not that I had any issues with the soap distribution itself – I just didn’t feel comfortable being the face of the handouts.
So – all of these stories combine and melt into the back story of my life, and bring us to here: Goma, Eastern Congo. Here, where I have two ex-pat colleagues, both of whom I like and respect, who have bought soccer balls for the neighborhood youths; who hand out bread to the beggars in front of the Western grocery store. I just can’t grasp this entirely, but it has made me think a lot about the issue.
And this is what I wonder – despite all the stories and their conclusions which I have written above, I wonder if still the main reason I refuse to hand out coins or bread or soaps isn’t because my morals don’t allow me too – but because I feel so uncomfortable with my place as one of the “Haves” in the world. Maybe I have made good points above. But maybe, partially, I just want to ignore the divisions that are there, when I am face-to-face with them without the buffer of an NGO. I want to shake hands, make friends, sweep the divisions under the rug, hide them behind a curtain, pretend. I have never gone hungry for lack of access to food, and I have never been forced to sleep without a roof over my head. Those facts do separate me from something like 80% of the other humans on this earth.
I’m a firm believer that serious sustainable changes need to be made to the way we have organized our societies. But does it really do harm to give a soccer ball to kids who are kicking around bound up rags? Does it teach them to beg or does it help them learn generosity and sportsmanship? I’m just not sure. (Why am I the one in the position to make these decisions?) If you can give coins to stop one boy from being hit and kicked by his caretaker for one night, even if it doesn’t fix the system, even if it strengthens the system, one child has not gotten beat up one night. What is that worth? How can you measure the worth of that?
It’s 4:27 am. I need to be asleep.
Maybe philosophizing about a moral quandary will help quiet my mind. Specifically: when (if) to give to beggars. I have been revisiting my previous conclusions about this subject recently and have been meaning to sit down and truly think it out, but I haven’t had time. I guess 2:53 am is as good a time as any.
(What insane luxury to be lying in a warm bed with a roof over my head and a computer on my lap, debating this – to be on the “giving” side of the beggar divide and not the “asking”.)
When I was a child, a woman beggar sat many days on the street two blocks away from mine, holding out a cup in her hands. Sometimes at night when I walked to the ice cream shop with my parents, my dad would give me a quarter to give to her, and I understood from him that it was important to share with people, even strangers. But I am 28 years old now and this woman is still there, on the same street. I suppose that she is happy enough with her life, as she doesn’t seem to have attempted to change her status quo in the last quarter century. But there is more to life than finding your own happiness; there is a responsibility to support the vulnerable in your society. This responsibility should fall on her shoulders, too. I have trouble respecting this woman. The way she asks for money in a high whine; the way her skin is bloated; the way her face changes when she sees someone approaching whom she thinks will give money – like she pulls on a mask of self-pity and need. I have watched her for over two decades. I have never had a long conversation with her, but she has watched me grow up and I have watched her grow prematurely old. If she is truly unable to care for herself, then I would rather give money to an organization that can help her than directly to her. But if she just doesn’t care enough about her society to try to pull her life together, then I would also rather give money to an organization.
When I first moved to this huge and diverse continent, I lived in Senegal for two months (early 2007). Senegal has talibé. Talibé are students. They are young boys who are sent to live with marabouts to learn math, writing, Islam, humility, and how to be strong men when they grow up. Unfortunately, (as I was told the history, and as I remember it three years later) since the big drought in the 1970s resulted in widespread hunger and poverty, the young boys were sent out to beg more and more and kept in class less and less. Since the drought, the culture of excessive begging has remained. This is obviously not true for all daara and many marabout are caring teachers who do not beat their children for not bringing home enough coins in the evening. However, when you walk at night in Senegal you will come across plenty of kids still out, caring around their red tomato paste cans (for some reason, this is the signature begging cup for talibé), scared to go back to their schools to sleep. In Dakar, I knew an ex-pat girl who was a Ba’hai. On the day to break her fast, she and I celebrated by buying sweet muffins and walking through our neighborhood, distributing them to talibé. I remember one little boy, sitting in the sand against a crumble wall with his head in the crook of his elbow. I shook his arm to hand him a muffin. He looked at me, took it, stuffed it up the sleeve of his shirt and put his head back down. He didn’t even smile and his eyes looked so old. I remember another kid, no older than three, snotty-faced, who stumbled up to me on Gorée Island, holding up a tomato paste can. Imagine the sting of pebbles launched from slingshots at your back and legs by tired, angry nine year olds, out alone at night. It really hurts. So – giving a coin to one of these little boys at night might allow him to go home to sleep without being beaten – but what about the next night? This wasn’t a system that I felt I could support. Instead, shouldn’t one give money and time to a local organization that could work to provide a sustainable solution for these boys?
(Side note: At the NGO I interned at, I had colleagues who were once talibé – but in good daara with responsible caretakers. And these colleagues would sometimes give coins to the beggar boys, in accordance with the pillar of Islam that dictates alms be given. But first, before giving coins, my colleagues would quiz the boys in Arabic on Quran verses or in French on school work. When they got satisfactory answers, they were assured that the boys were attending a strong, valid daara and would give the boys coins to reward their humility and hard work.)
In The Gambia, I lived back and forth between the far east of the country, Basse Santu Su, a vibrant market town right on the river which I loved, and a resort town in the west, Kololi, right outside the capital and on the Atlantic Ocean. Kololi has a serious problem with tourism. Prostitution is rampant (most visible are the men, called bumsters, who pick up or are picked up by European females for a week of fun, sex and drugs). And then there are the plentiful tourists who come down with bags of clothes and toys and hand them out to children on the beach. They lie on their towels at their resorts beneath their umbrellas in their knock-off D&G sunglasses and brag about their good deeds, envisioning themselves Santa Claus or a philanthropist, Carnegie maybe, or maybe an old explorer/colonialist, from those romantic times, offering tokens of civilization to the helpless African children. (I would spend hours searching for sand dollars on the beach and I heard so many of these stories). The situation is so bad and ridiculous that children actually skip school to go hang out at the beach and get candies, barrettes, and tee-shirts from the tourists. Besides missing out on education, the poorest of these children then take the candies they are given and sell them to shopkeepers for the coins, so they can offer them up to their caretakers and not be beaten. It’s a terrible system that the tourists partially create and fully exacerbate. It makes you never want to give out money and instead support an organization that will work to change the status quo.
When the children in The Gambia and later in Uganda chased me to ask me for gifts I would make a point of stopping, shaking their hands, looking them in the eye, letting them practice their English, and leaving them with just that – the attention of an adult and the smile of a woman – and no coins or foods or material goods.
In northern Uganda, one of my first times in the IDP camps, my four Ugandan colleagues, one Mauritanian colleague and I were wrapping up a focus group session. We thanked people for their time and participation by giving them soaps. Because I didn’t speak Acholi (and because my Mauritanian colleague, who also didn’t speak Acholi, was awful), I found myself being the sole distributor of soaps while my Ugandan colleagues asked wrap-up questions of the contributors. I freaked out. Here I was, the one white person around, and I was the one passing out items. I told my colleagues in our little rented car on the way back to Kitgum town that I absolutely never wanted that to happen again. I don’t think any of them understood why I was upset. They agreed easily, because they liked me, but with confused looks on their faces – I think they thought I wasn’t making sense, or maybe that I was indulging my “white guilt” and thus would be lengthening our future stays in the camps by not helping with the little task. I don’t know. I just pictured those tourists and their bags of handouts and couldn’t do it. Not that I had any issues with the soap distribution itself – I just didn’t feel comfortable being the face of the handouts.
So – all of these stories combine and melt into the back story of my life, and bring us to here: Goma, Eastern Congo. Here, where I have two ex-pat colleagues, both of whom I like and respect, who have bought soccer balls for the neighborhood youths; who hand out bread to the beggars in front of the Western grocery store. I just can’t grasp this entirely, but it has made me think a lot about the issue.
And this is what I wonder – despite all the stories and their conclusions which I have written above, I wonder if still the main reason I refuse to hand out coins or bread or soaps isn’t because my morals don’t allow me too – but because I feel so uncomfortable with my place as one of the “Haves” in the world. Maybe I have made good points above. But maybe, partially, I just want to ignore the divisions that are there, when I am face-to-face with them without the buffer of an NGO. I want to shake hands, make friends, sweep the divisions under the rug, hide them behind a curtain, pretend. I have never gone hungry for lack of access to food, and I have never been forced to sleep without a roof over my head. Those facts do separate me from something like 80% of the other humans on this earth.
I’m a firm believer that serious sustainable changes need to be made to the way we have organized our societies. But does it really do harm to give a soccer ball to kids who are kicking around bound up rags? Does it teach them to beg or does it help them learn generosity and sportsmanship? I’m just not sure. (Why am I the one in the position to make these decisions?) If you can give coins to stop one boy from being hit and kicked by his caretaker for one night, even if it doesn’t fix the system, even if it strengthens the system, one child has not gotten beat up one night. What is that worth? How can you measure the worth of that?
It’s 4:27 am. I need to be asleep.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Being Understood
Two weeks ago, I was attacked.
By this:
Okay, it didn't actually get the chance to attack me, but it was planning to, I know it. This being, this result of the unholy union between a cockroach and a scorpion, was sitting on the stairs outside of my room and it was facing towards my room.
Even in my panic, I kept a clear head. I did the only sensible thing. I ran to the watch tower and yelled for our guards. "J'ai un tres grand problème et j'ai besoin d'aide!"
The younger guard, who I hadn't seen before, actually began reaching for his emergency radio. Luckily, our older guard, who is always there, stopped him with a look and a shake of his head. "C'est Rachel," he said, introducing me. He then he calmly followed me to find and destroy the monster.
Even though our older guard does not speak perfect French (and for sure, neither do I), I liked it, the fact that he understood me, my intentions, when I spoke. I felt known.
And that is why traveling back to Goma is very different than traveling to Goma for the first time. This time, I have friends.
*
Looking at the picture of the bug, from the safe distance of an ocean and two weeks, I feel a bit badly that I was the cause of its demise. Poor sad buggy. I am sorry. But at the time, it seemed huge and it was nighttime and the bug was just glowing, its pinchers casting scary shadows beneath the security lamp.
By this:
Okay, it didn't actually get the chance to attack me, but it was planning to, I know it. This being, this result of the unholy union between a cockroach and a scorpion, was sitting on the stairs outside of my room and it was facing towards my room.
Even in my panic, I kept a clear head. I did the only sensible thing. I ran to the watch tower and yelled for our guards. "J'ai un tres grand problème et j'ai besoin d'aide!"
The younger guard, who I hadn't seen before, actually began reaching for his emergency radio. Luckily, our older guard, who is always there, stopped him with a look and a shake of his head. "C'est Rachel," he said, introducing me. He then he calmly followed me to find and destroy the monster.
Even though our older guard does not speak perfect French (and for sure, neither do I), I liked it, the fact that he understood me, my intentions, when I spoke. I felt known.
And that is why traveling back to Goma is very different than traveling to Goma for the first time. This time, I have friends.
*
Looking at the picture of the bug, from the safe distance of an ocean and two weeks, I feel a bit badly that I was the cause of its demise. Poor sad buggy. I am sorry. But at the time, it seemed huge and it was nighttime and the bug was just glowing, its pinchers casting scary shadows beneath the security lamp.
Jetlag & Culture Shock
Last night Nyamulagira erupted. No villages are near it but endangered chimps may be injured in the lava flow. I wonder how red the sky glowed. I wonder if the sky looked like sunrise at 3:45 am. I've been in Pittsburgh* so I didn't see it.
Tomorrow morning I leave Pittsburgh & begin the 40 hour trek back to Goma. This has been a veryveryvery fast holiday break and for most of it I have been jetlagged. I fell asleep on my neighbors' couch during Christmas dinner.
My flight isn't until 6:15 am but my father is driving me to the airport. Father believes in getting to the airport at least 16 hours ahead of the time your flight will be boarding. Right now it is 4:30 pm, and, to be honest, I'm a bit surprised we haven't already left. Haha. Anyway, we will probably leave at about 2 am. I want Dad to drive me the long way around, via the top of Mount Washington, so I can stand in the sky and look down over my dark city before I fly away: The pinprick lights of the stars above me; the pinprick lights of the skyscrapers below.
But because we drove to the top of Mount Washington just today, and because it will be the middle of the night and we will be stressed and tired, I think this is a want that I will not receive.
My close friend J has been visiting this vacation. She is from a mid-sized village in the North of Uganda. The culture of my family at Christmas involves dressing in short black dresses and ascot suits, drinking a lot of champagne, and eating finger foods, fancy cheeses, and caviar. That is not the whole story: there are also bowls of chips and football talk. But the country club with its crystal chandeliers and black high heels is a part of it. J was sometimes overwhelmed by this, um, very understandably. And what did she think it all? I don't know, I have no clue. My friends and family, wallowing blindly in our merry excess, truly did like her a lot. Nobody said anything too embarrassing (only one person referred to Africa as a country, in my hearing).
Because I spend my life stumbling from cultural gaffe to language-barrier confusion to overwhelming travel shock, and because J was so patient with me in Uganda, I was thrilled for the chance to try to reciprocate her hospitality. I, in my holiday-exhaustion, was not always the outgoing hostess I should have been. But it was great fun for me to have her visiting.
*Best city in the world, for those of you (sadly) unacquainted with it.
Tomorrow morning I leave Pittsburgh & begin the 40 hour trek back to Goma. This has been a veryveryvery fast holiday break and for most of it I have been jetlagged. I fell asleep on my neighbors' couch during Christmas dinner.
My flight isn't until 6:15 am but my father is driving me to the airport. Father believes in getting to the airport at least 16 hours ahead of the time your flight will be boarding. Right now it is 4:30 pm, and, to be honest, I'm a bit surprised we haven't already left. Haha. Anyway, we will probably leave at about 2 am. I want Dad to drive me the long way around, via the top of Mount Washington, so I can stand in the sky and look down over my dark city before I fly away: The pinprick lights of the stars above me; the pinprick lights of the skyscrapers below.
But because we drove to the top of Mount Washington just today, and because it will be the middle of the night and we will be stressed and tired, I think this is a want that I will not receive.
My close friend J has been visiting this vacation. She is from a mid-sized village in the North of Uganda. The culture of my family at Christmas involves dressing in short black dresses and ascot suits, drinking a lot of champagne, and eating finger foods, fancy cheeses, and caviar. That is not the whole story: there are also bowls of chips and football talk. But the country club with its crystal chandeliers and black high heels is a part of it. J was sometimes overwhelmed by this, um, very understandably. And what did she think it all? I don't know, I have no clue. My friends and family, wallowing blindly in our merry excess, truly did like her a lot. Nobody said anything too embarrassing (only one person referred to Africa as a country, in my hearing).
Because I spend my life stumbling from cultural gaffe to language-barrier confusion to overwhelming travel shock, and because J was so patient with me in Uganda, I was thrilled for the chance to try to reciprocate her hospitality. I, in my holiday-exhaustion, was not always the outgoing hostess I should have been. But it was great fun for me to have her visiting.
*Best city in the world, for those of you (sadly) unacquainted with it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
