“home” for now
Back from England, so happy to be ‘home’ and looking forward so much to really being home in a few weeks. I have, of course, new photos! Also visit my facebook account for more…
http://www.picturetrail.com/sfx/album/view/20487983
A day in the life of Amanda McMillan
8:30am: up, delighted to find a rainy day. Good day to do work.
9:00am: Sarah comes up the stairs. I meet her in the hallway, because my room is a mess, and I heard her coming from the first step she took. The stairs holler and creak and whine like an old, weathered ship. Sarah relays the message that Jean-Pierre is ready for Auto-Ecole…am I?
9:30am: Auto-Ecole. Jean-Pierre took Chantel out first, and I am self-satisfied to note “auto-ecole avec C et A – 9:30” scribbled on the posterboard schedule of the week dans le salon. J-P used to be a teacher. He explains, with hand motions and simple phrases, how a manual car works, what happens when I press the clutch, why the car “clonks” out on me, the importance of the hand-brake (um. emergency brake…I’m being British-ified).
9:37: J-P announces it’s time to start the car. And by the way, we’re going through The Round-About. I faint. Well, almost. Pennsylvania doesn’t “do” round-abouts, and the only vehicle I’ve taken through a round-about in France is a bicycle. I survive The Round-About into town, and the rest of Auto-Ecole.
10:15: Elated by the lack of dents on the Pugueot 205, and J-P, je me lance (I throw myself) into work. That pile of receipts in my bulging 4-H folder looks formidable. And Peter comes back from travels next week and will hand me 40 more receipts. Time to learn accounting from John, A Rocha France’s well-loved Welsh, mosquito-studying, Peter’s-receipt-recording, long-term volunteer.
11:50: Worn out by sorting receipts, and wearing John out with questions. Sarah gets a package from her Momma, a “package baursting with goodness,” as described by John in his thick Welsh accent. I pop my head in the door of our office to see the evidence. Her desk is covered with receipts as well, and she’s on Skype with Switzerland. My desk, in the corner of the same little office, is occasionally rejected for the more spacious A Rocha house next door.
12:30: I leave my spread of receipts for lunch. Martine makes the best meals…a quiche, a salade, and a stew. We discuss how to cut French cheese as we pass the fruit and cheese around the table. While the coffee perks, Sarah draws out the treasure of her mother’s gift: a package of Tim Tams. This chocolate-covered wafer/cake/cookie is the perfect companion to coffee. Sarah demonstrates to her avid pupils how to bit off the diagonal ends of the rectangular cookie, place the bottom end in the cup of coffee, and slurp. Our laughter grows as we all notice how silly we all look, hunched over tiny cups of expresso, sipping coffee through crumbing chocolate cookies.
13:45: we finally pull ourselves from the table and the laughter and return to our work. Sarah has some errands to run in town before leaving the next day, and I have mail to send. There is no mail pick-up in France, so sending pre-stamped envelopes requires some effort. My ulterior motive for tagging along is to practice manual. Peter hopes I can pick him up from the train station next week, as do I. Our errands fail entirely, as errands often do. We head back to Les Tourades, repeating the mantra, “well, we tried…well, we did what we could…”
16:40: Making headway on the receipts, and asking John questions every half-an-hour. I finally make a “questions” envelope and accumulate questions before testing his seemingly unending patience once more. I take a brisk walk to the office – the next-door building – to retrieve some supplies and get into a lengthy discussion about airfare to England with Sarah. Chantal and Priscille are debating the design of the next A Rocha France brochure in a mixture of French and English. Francois is on the telephone, again, with a farmer or the mayor of the next village over, and Jean-Pierre is fiddling with the printer, again.
19:30: dinner. Someone cracks open a bottle of rose wine, and I grimace a few gulps down. I’m getting used to wine, but rose still gives my tastebuds a punch and a tickle too many. We sit around the table discussing denominational differences between France and Wales and Canada and the US, and procrastinate in cleaning up the dishes.
22:20: somehow, the day’s evaporated. Poof. And I’m ready to drop. So I do…after sending a few emails and cleaning off my bed of clean clothes and chasing a few opportunist stink-bugs from my drinking cup on my bed-side table. I read Psalm 73 again. My friend Becca wrote that Psalm in a gift she mailed me. Read it. Particularly the last few verses.
Goodnight.
England to France to England to…
‘Ello from Salisbury, England! I’m ten minutes away from Stonehenge and will be at Oxford this weekend, sorting receipts in the Bod. Ahh…such is the life.
Really, folks, I’m working. A LOT. Maybe a little too much, at times. For the next week, I’ve joined a group of A Rocha leaders as they dream and plan for the future of the organization. As England is the most central country for most of the A Rocha International team, it’s a natural location for team meetings. Peter happened to set this team meeting at Sarum College, a quintessential British school in a lovely little town called Salisbury http://www.sarum.ac.uk/
At this week of meetings, there’s a particular hum of excitement – it’s not everyday a group of committed team members (many who’ve been with A Rocha since it’s birth 25 years ago) can plan and pray through major changes to the structure of an organization, crafting it into a Christian organization capable of growing global. Tremendously exciting – and scary, of course, as change can be! Pray that A Rocha’s leadership and board of Trustees will be blessed with foresight, wisdom, and trust in God’s plan as the A Rocha family transitions into a more coordinated A Rocha International team.
Transitions continue at “home” in France, as well. This is the first week in five years without Francois, A Rocha France’s conservation science director, and his wife Sophie, the A Rocha France garden manager. Francois accepted a conservation scientist position with another organization in New Caledonia. He and Sophie are expecting their third child in April, so do pray that their transition into their new home – a village of 200 people – will go smoothly and joyfully for all members of the family!
In the midst of this whirlwind of transitions, my role in A Rocha International and A Rocha France continues to develop. As Peter’s assistant, managing piles of receipts, mailings, phone calls, plane reservations, meeting preparations, and transforming business cards into electronic documents is all in a days work. Granted, I complete all tasks with plenty of mistakes, but I’m learning so very much. Pray that I can learn quickly and relieve Peter and Miranda of small tasks, allowing them to focus on the vision of the organization and point A Rocha in the direction that will best please God!
I am most pleased with my transition into the community life at Les Tourades in the past months. I delight in cooking meals, going on group excursions to nearby towns, and introducing “Saturday night pizza and video” to my international community (a long-held McMillan tradition). In my “spare” time, I am researching the carbon sequestration potential of wetland restoration as part of a larger, multi-year regional A Rocha France project. The natural, “old” terrain around here is marshland. We’re quite close the Mediterranean Sea, and when heavy rains come (i.e. October and November!), marshlands are the ‘give and take’ for the excess water supply in this flat region. Through my literature review, determine the benefits/losses of transitioning farmland back into marshland. It makes my little heart happy to be delving into science – and introducing my housemates to the joy of eating homemade pizza while watching a film!
Pray as I prepare to transition back home again for Christmas. I look forward so very much to reconnecting with family, friends, and supporters, but am aware that so many transitions at once can be very exhausting! Do pray!
And look at my latest photos at http://www.picturetrail.com/sfx/album/view/20487983
Alright, off to eat dinner at an English pub…
Chopping away
I am at the hacksaw stage of French learning. I swing my massive machete of a tongue clumsily around the language, bringing grimaces and laughter from my victims, known as French speakers. My verb tenses are backwards, my vocabulary is often French pronunciations of English words, and according to my French tutor, my sentences are too long. Quelquefois, je suis bouleverser avec la langue…hack, hack, hack…
Saturday afternoon notes
It’s a blustery Saturday afternoon. We’re sitting in the living room listening to John’s weekly Welsh folk radio show. Chantel sits on the sagging blue couch, talking softly to herself as she peers closely to the second finger on her new glove which grows knit by knit. John putters on his computer while the radio program plays, laughing as he finds a BBC article about how a township in Wales put the wrong Welsh translation of “do not enter” on a road sign. I’m slowly working through a pile of postcards to supporters. I need to buy stock in the postcard company. And the French postal system.
Yesterday I made significant headway on letters and postcards before leaving for dinner at Mariano and Marie’s house. Marie’s the CEO of A Rocha and lives down the road from A Rocha France, and her husband, Mariano, is a phenomenal Italian cook. So dinner invitations are exciting events for all. John, Chantel, and I were prepared to bike to Mariano’s house – a 40 minute cycle. We’d participated in downing three cakes in two days, so we were feeling a bit too eager for exercise. We were armed with lights, jackets, and backpacks…however, the pelting rain made me surprisingly confident about driving the Pugeot 205 manual instead. So we piled into this ancient car, which has more personality than should be permitted in inanimate objects, and sputtered out the driveway. With only one “clunk-out” at a stop sign, I felt pretty good about my manual abilities by the time we arrived at Mariano’s and Marie’s house. The house was dark, and, we read on the door a sign, in childish scrawl, inviting us inside of the ‘haunted house.’ The children piled in on us in laughter – Isaac, 10, with a white sheet over his head, Ellie, 9, a fortune teller with a head wrap and a ‘crystal ball’ made of a stuffed animal with paper crinkled on top, and Anya, 7, decked out in spy gear. Chantel proved strangely gifted at teaching Anya how to be a better spy, and John was defined as an “uncle 100 times removed” by Isaac.
After s’mores in the fireplace, listening to a display of piano talent, and almost falling asleep to John reading the longest “two pages” of Paddington Helps Out in his “BBC voice,” as the children raved, I drove us back at 10:30pm and managed to keep the car running until the driveway at Les Tourades.
After a late night and late morning, a massive omelet made with mushrooms an old lady with a cigar handed to me and John at the Beauchamps marsh two days ago, we’re in the living room. The wind has given way to gray clouds, and Chantel is finishing finger #3. The soundtrack is now Feist – Chantel’s contribution. Tonight is pizza and video – my contribution. John’s decided that we need to watch James Bond’s Goldfinger for cultural education tonight, and Martine happened to get us pre-made pizzas. Some McMillan family traditions live on in new ‘families.’
