This past week has been exhausting, mostly because we’ve had so many evening meetings. We’ve travelled to different buildings to teach and it has resulted in a lot of late nights! As always though, we have met some interesting people. We have a new man who is starting one of our classes. He is originally from Sudan and was a teacher there. In the 1965 war he had to leave Sudan and cross into Uganda. He lived there and taught school in the refugee camps until 1970. From 1970 to 1974 he taught school in Ethiopia. Then, because of war, he moved to Kenya to teach and then went back to Sudan after it calmed down. He taught for there for 7 years. From 1990-95 he went back to Kenya and worked as a head teacher at a high school. All his moving around from country to country during these years was always related to the various wars in those countries. In 1998 he came to Australia as a refugee. He lived here for several years and got more education and then returned to South Sudan from 2006 to 2008 working for Unicef. Since his return to Australia in 2008 he has not been able to get another full-time teaching job, only substitute jobs. He feels like his inability to get a job is related to prejudice because he is black. I think that it's more related to his age, he's almost 60 now and I think he'd have a hard time finding a teaching job anywhere. He definitely needed lots of work on his resume and our interview skills classes will help him as well. Discouragement makes people insecure which in turn makes them not as impressive as they could be when they interview. This man is a great individual with a long story common to many people from war-torn countries. It's hard to imagine living in a country where you are not safe and not protected from violence. Children especially are victims. This man's life story should be written up and published. Maybe writing his story is his answer to employment...
An event that touched my heart this week concerns a man we met when we first got to Australia. He is part of a group of senior missionaries we spend a lot of time with. However, he is not a missionary, he is a BYU engineering professor (I try not to give the names of the people I write about for privacy protection, a habit left over from my teaching days) over here on sabbatical doing research with an Australian engineering company. He and his wife have been here for a year and will go home next weekend. However, he will go home next weekend minus one of his body parts… he had surgery yesterday and donated one of his kidneys to a young missionary from Tonga who went into kidney failure almost two years ago, soon after he arrived here on his mission. This young man had been healthy and then suddenly his kidneys just stopped working correctly. Luckily, he was in Australia, not in Tonga when this all happened, or he would have died. Medical care in Tonga is very basic, no services for things like dialysis. He’s been on dialysis for two years, and has been on a waiting list for a kidney donation for most of that time. Somehow, (I’m not sure of the order of events, we weren’t in Australia yet when most of this happened) the professor found out about his plight and offered to be tested to see if he was a match. It turned out that he was a perfect match! Yesterday, both the professor and the missionary went into surgery and all went according to schedule. Both men are doing well. I marvel at the selfless giving of this engineering professor who, in his late 50s, was willing to give someone the gift of a healthy kidney. His sacrifice will allow this young 21 year old missionary the chance at a long and healthy life. He will not be able to return to Tonga though, there is no medical support there. He has begun the process to get citizenship in Australia. Luckily, there is a pretty big Tongan population in Sydney, so he should be able to enjoy the friendship and support of people with a common culture to his. The Tongans as a people are very loving and giving. His life has certainly changed from where he was two years ago.
I thought I’d send a picture illustrating just one of many the differences between Australian grocery stores and US stores. In the US, eggs are always sold in the refrigerated section. Not so here, or in New Zealand, eggs are just stacked on the shelves with everything else. Also, it’s impossible to buy cheap eggs. All eggs here are free-range (nice for the chickens) and vary in price from $3.79 up to $7.00 a dozen.
I went to buy a cake mix this week, just the cheap boxed version you can buy at Walmart for around a dollar. After checking three different grocery stores, the cheapest cake mix I found was $5.25 a box! By the time you factor in the oil and eggs you have to add to the mix, it’s pretty expensive to make a birthday cake! Especially once you add on the cost of the overpriced powdered sugar for the frosting. I’ve commented several times on how expensive everything is over here, especially food, but it still always amazes me every time I go shopping.
Speaking of food, I’ve been searching since we got here for a place to buy steel cut oats. In the US you can buy them in grocery stores by the oatmeal and in bulk quite cheaply in health food stores and in WinCo in the bulk items. I haven’t been able to find any stores that carry it over here, so I finally Googled it and found only one health food store in all of Sydney that carries steel cut oats. The smallest size they sell is a 5 kilo bag (11 pounds), more than I want, but you take what you can get! The store is located quite a ways away from where we live and is located in an older section of the city. It took us over an hour to drive there. On the way, we drove through some pretty interesting suburbs. Like all large cities, the suburbs close to the heart of the city are highly ethnic in makeup. Some are kind of scary and others look like they’d be fun to wander the streets in. I couldn’t resist taking a picture out of the car window when we stopped at a stoplight in a town called Ashfield. This picture is of a beauty salon with this sign on the side:
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| It's hard to read from this angle, but it says 'International Eyebrow Shaping Champion" |
I can’t help wondering how one becomes an International eyebrow shaping champion… where is this contest held? How many countries participate? What are the criteria for eyebrow shaping contests? How many contests must one participate in to reach the ‘international’ level? I kind of wish I lived closer so I could have my eyebrows shaped and find out the answers to my questions!
Grandkids
I have another language question for you. I took a picture of a big sign outside of the mall where the Kmart store is. What do you think ‘peckish’ means? It’s a very common term over here. |
| Here's a hint… Nando's is a restaurant |
If you guessed peckish means a little bit hungry, you are right! What a funny word, I wonder who made it up? It’s a very British term, so the Aussies must have kept it from the early British days. Since the US was under British control for so long, I wonder why peckish isn’t an English word we use?
Grandpa and I went to the outdoor market with some friends on Saturday. Because it rains so much over here, the market is held indoors not outdoors though. There are great big fruit and vegetable sections in these markets so we got our fruits and vegetables for the week. I took a couple of pictures for you that I thought were interesting. Take a look at this picture and see if you can guess what ‘fairy floss’ is…
Grandpa and I went to the outdoor market with some friends on Saturday. Because it rains so much over here, the market is held indoors not outdoors though. There are great big fruit and vegetable sections in these markets so we got our fruits and vegetables for the week. I took a couple of pictures for you that I thought were interesting. Take a look at this picture and see if you can guess what ‘fairy floss’ is…
Fairy floss is what we call cotton candy! I think the name fairy floss is a better name than cotton candy, don’t you?
This market sold pets as well as food and all kinds of other ‘junk’. I took a picture of these two kittens that were for sale. Do you think your mom and dad would buy you a kitten for $195? In Fruitland you can get a kitten like these ones for free! If you look at the cage behind the kittens you can see that they have mini lop-eared bunnies for sale for $29.95. These were the ‘closeout sale’ bunnies; all the other bunnies were $59.95. Bunnies and kittens in the US are much cheaper than they are in Australia!
Did you listen to Conference this weekend? We didn't because Australia is one day ahead of the US, so Saturday's Conference sessions start at 3 in the morning Sunday morning. Since most sessions of Conference happen in the middle of the night for us, this Sunday is a regular church day for us over here, but the Conference sessions are recorded and then next Sunday they show the Conference broadcast during church. I’m not sure how that works because there are several two-hour sessions of Conference and church would last way too long if they even showed two sessions, so I’m guessing they only show one session during church. I will find out next week and let you know.
I have a job for each of you to do this week. I'd like you to think about and choose someone you could be kind to this week. Maybe you know someone at school or pre-school who needs a friend or just needs someone to be nice to them. Maybe you could choose a brother or sister of yours to be kind to. Here is a link to a video (you may need to watch it on your computer, not the iPad, I haven't had much luck with videos working on the iPad). It's a video about two young boys who lived a long time ago, and the kindness they showed to someone in need:
I love you and miss you all! I hope you have a happy week.
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