December 2011

    Early in December we attached a U-haul to our truck and hauled it to Seneca Falls. The U.S. border guard gave us a hard time.  He didn't like the looks of an empty trailer combined with too much luggage in the back of the truck...whatever did it all add up to? In vain we tried to explain, as he held up the line of annoyed drivers behind us, that we were taking a niece's belongings back to Alberta and needed winter clothes for Alberta and summer clothes for California, New Zealand and Fiji, not to mention our food, camping gear and snorkeling gear. He sent us in for a more in depth inspection, but his superior was a kindly, tall, sensible ex-military type who quickly responded, "Well, what's wrong with that? I buy that." Then he laughed at his own joke about "the three best things about teaching: June, July and August", and finally sent us on our way.

    We had a fairly easy, mostly dry drive across the continent, with one day of extreme cold and a strong northern wind blowing against us all the way across Saskatchewan. We unloaded Andrea's goods in New Norway, and dropped the trailer in Camrose. 

    

In Edmonton we reconnected with family, and a week later we returned to New Norway to put Dad's ashes in the ground at a little cemetery beside the highway. 

(Don't forget that you can click any photo to enlarge it.) 

    We celebrated Christmas with Mom and a great crowd of family, 19 of us around the "groaning board".  

 

   

    The following week, Peter, Dylan and Georgie came over to help us bring in the New Year, which included a bit of guitar playing and singing. I've spent my time here building out an online family tree, and reading books and binders in my Dad's office - Grandpa's letters from 1928 onward, binders of genealogy archives, old photos, etc. It has been a good way to spend some time, getting in touch with a grandfather I loved and admired, mostly from afar, but barely knew well enough even for that because I was too young to read his letters and appreciate his situation fully before he died. I was 17 when my grandparents and Aunt Betty died.  I was upset about it for some time.  I was just beginning to understand the fight they'd carried on as Protestant medical missionaries in the repressive colonial regime in Angola. I did not have a full historical perspective, but I had learned enough for an anger to begin to well up in me that plagued me for five years afterward, and has never completely evaporated. 

    Growing up in the '60's, the zeitgeist taught us a World View that missionaries were handmaidens of colonizing powers, saving souls while the overlords raped and exploited indigenous peoples. I encountered this viewpoint most strongly when I was immersed back into Canadian culture as a sixteen year old at private school in Belleville, some of it coming from black Bermudian classmates. I was confused...and then furious. That was not my Grandpa, nor my Dad! Even today, peers will sometimes blurt out that deeply entrenched bit of neo-history. It makes for a great debate, because there was a lot of that going on within the past four hundred years, and there were even hypocritical church members at home who opined that Angolan missionaries actually shouldn't be demanding more medicines, health supplies, equipment, teachers and engineers - that their job was to evangelize (the cheapest activity the church could support), and to sacrifice themselves completely in the process. 

    What that shallow understanding neglects to consider are the dozens of Protestant missionaries of the past 120 years in West Africa, and the hundreds around the world, from southern Scotland, England, Canada and the U.S., who preached and taught equality and human rights for all, a philosophy that was grounded deeply in their Christian beliefs. They promulgated the vision expressed by Martin Luther King in his "I Have A Dream" speech almost forty years ago, which will resonate through history, and they were part of the religious movement that inspired it - it was no accident that Martin Luther King was a Baptist minister, and that there were a number of black missionaries from the U.S. and from Jamaica who served in Angola and other parts of Africa. This group of missionaries, black and white, were a thorn in the side of colonizers, including the Portuguese with their 450 year history in Angola.  They paid a heavy price for butting heads with colonial administration and trail-blazing the consciences of church attendees at home in Canada. Publicly, they walked a terrifyingly fine line, because if they spoke out too strongly against the colonists' regime, they put their Angolan colleagues and students in mortal danger - no exaggeration - and risked being tossed out of the country or denied a return visa.  Several that I knew were thrown in Portuguese prisons themselves.  

    Grandpa spoke out, and eventually wrote a powerful book called Angola Awake that sealed the borders against his own return.  He also spoke out against the lingering racism in Nova Scotia in the 1960's, and debated Western church folk who bought the propaganda of colonial governments hook, line and sinker.  They were predisposed by their own too-slowly dissipating racist heritage.  They argued that African nationalists were pushing too hard, wanted too much, too soon.

    Except for his war years in Italy (he was a decorated officer whose medals included Member of the British Empire) and a couple of years near the end in the Congo, Grandpa poured out his life in treatment, surgery, preventive medicine, sanitation and medical engineering and teaching in hundreds of villages over a wide geographic area with unbelievable distances to travel along difficult roads and trails.  He kept it up for thirty years, with less support during most of those years than any objective observer would expect to have seen from his sending church's head office. Many caring individuals and individual church groups, however, tried to fill the gaps in support and funding.

    The history of Sid's struggle illuminates my Dad's lingering disappointment about what he'd managed to accomplish in his own life and career; he tried so hard over many long years to join my grandfather in Angola, and was denied the opportunity by his own church until it was past the point of being politically feasible. He had an admirable passion and energy of his own, and considerable accomplishments including his own missionary service in Zambia. His was a long, illustrious career to look back on with satisfaction, and he was loved by many in the congregations he served; but I don't think he ever completely shook off the earlier vision of what he wished he might have been able to do with his life. That's a lot to reflect on as I travel the flat, smooth, well-kept highways from here down to California - so different from jarring, spring-breaking roads and tracks of Angola, where a fifty mile trip between mission stations could take half a day, or longer if there was jeep-swallowing mud or the bridges were washed out. 

    I've assured myself that Mom is going to be fine, strong woman that she is; she'll be enjoying friends, family, choir and other activities, a contrast from the last two stress filled years nursing Dad in his illness. 

    Two days from now Deb and I will be somewhere near Great Falls, Montana, on our way to Las Vegas. Neither of us has ever been there, and we're a little curious in spite of having no interest in gambling. Bright lights, live music, cheap food (I've heard), the desert, and the Grand Canyon not far away - should be worth seeing at least once in a lifetime. Next post: http://debnsteve2012.blogspot.com/2012/01/blown-awaythis-aint-kansasor-is-it.html