High School Graduation

Last week I attended a “senior celebration” at a high school within walking distance of my apartment. If you haven’t picked up on this yet, I don’t live in the best part of town and the high school near us is no exception to that general rule. Granted, it’s not like the school where I took my SAT, where there were rumors of weapons and gang fights (most of it was probably made up by the easily frightened white kids at my own suburban high school). But it doesn’t rank very high in Colorado. According to CSAPs the freshmen were 48% proficient in Reading last year. Now, I’m not a statistician but that doesn’t seem very good. A group called “Great Schools: Involved Parents, Successful Kids” only gave it a 3 out of 10 and the over all district received the same score. I read on another site that it’s the 128th district out of 136 in Colorado. Let’s assume the stats are somewhat accurate, despite the fact that I only just googled the information about five minutes ago.

Danny, Laisa, Haley, Sara, Helen, Emmerance, Tshite

Even with a reasonable margin of error, that high school still isn’t doing well.

On the opposite end of the spectrum from my neighborhood is a place like Douglas County where I later attended the graduation party of a young woman I once nannied during my college years. It was a very different experience from the previous night, and not simply because it lacked tedious awards ceremony with perfunctory speeches which no one will recall by the end of summer. It was a party with food in chaffing dishes and cupcakes that cost $3 each at the shop where they’re made. The women were in dresses, the graduate in heels. I wore my chacos and a pair of loose shorts that were $7 at Goodwill last summer. But it is more than that, the clothes and fancy food are only symptomatic. This young woman is attending CSU with the plan of graduate school afterwards.

I’m relieved my neighbor was accepted to two colleges and even has a small scholarship to help cover some first costs. When we leftthe ceremonylast week, another friend who had attended hooked her arm into a younger sister’s elbow–another refugee who will be a freshmen next year.

“Four years!” she said brightly as we skipped down the stairs outside in the warm night air. “We’re going to see you here in four years, right? You’ll be getting awards and scholarships too!” The new freshmen giggled but agreed.

That is the difference. Most days, I’m happy the kids in my neighborhood can read and that some can write. The syntax is often a mess, the grammar is usually backwards. But this is at leasttheir second language, for some it’s a third. I want them to graduate high school because I want them to have a chance in life. Education in America is the beginning of anything. It’s hard to communicate that to our refugees, but there are a few students who seem to understand.

The young woman in a wealthier part of town–I love her and I’m thrilled about her future plans. But for her, for me, college was just an expectation. It was a factual part of life that followed soon after high school. This is what is different about the children where I live. College is a dream. High school graduation is a journey.

But it’s the beginning of life in America. The start of life in a new land to which they’ve escaped, where they are rebuilding everything from the ground up. High school is no longer just a fact of life, it’s the foundation for a future that was vastly altered the day they left their homes and set out for this place.

High School Graduation never meant so much.

WHY: The Marriage Metaphor

I enjoy a slightly hipster-esque–Indie–Folksy–Blue Grass band by the name of The Civil Wars. One of the first songs I fell in love with is called Poison and Wine. I love the words, I love the timbre of their voices, I love the way they haunt and redeem my heart with every chord.

Last week was a bit of a rough one emotionally. Not only for me, but also for others that I know and love. Sometimes, there is this illusion that seminary students, counseling students, future pastors and teachers have their “stuff” figured out. But the truth is, we’re actually very messy people.

A few brief examples:

My friend who is “engaged” but is on break.
One that I look up to who is struggling with depression.
There’s another who is struggling with burn out from ministry (already!) and depression.
A new friend who is coming out of depression but has mixed direction on life.
Another who is dealing with childhood abuse.
Everyone who can’t afford their lives.
The one who is so desperate for love they keep going back to the same broken relationship.
My friend who longs to know that God does love him.
The one, surrounded by friends, who still feels alone.

These are the people I do life with, each and every day. It’s exhausting, it’s beautiful, it’s truth. Over the weekend I went out with a couple friends after one of them had moved into a new apartment. I had heard some basic things about his off kilter relationship, but that night I asked a few more questions. I wanted to get to know this man better, and as a friend, part of that required knowing his story, his relationships, his hopes, the things his world revolves around. The story given was not long but it was full of sorrow amidst lingering hopes. When we returned to their house from the restaurant, I stood outside with the roommate I am very close to suddenly found myself overwhelmed by sadness. I burst into tears. My friend wrapped his arms around me while I cried and repeatedly mumbled the same questions.

Why does He let this go on?
When is He coming back?
When will He put things to rights? Bind up our sores, heal our broken bones?

My friend, of course, couldn’t say. These are questions that have plagued human history and Christianity is no exception. The failure of God to come when we expect has always been a mystery in human suffering.

I managed to pull myself together enough to get in my car and make it onto the highway. I pulled the pieces together and placed trembling hands on the steering wheel as I guided the little sedan through late night traffic and construction. It didn’t take long, however, before my lack of control resurfaced. Two exits after my entrance to the highway the same sadness overwhelmed me. I cried the entire way home, a twenty minute drive of blurred lights and stifled sobs.

In the midst of this, as I pounded my steering wheel and demanded to know when He will return, the sounds of The Civil Wars whispered through my stereo. Poison and Wine seems, at first listening, to be a song of dried up hopes and long forgotten love. It is a relationship kept alive only by the power of will, by sheer stubbornness. Or so it seems.

There is a part in the song that suddenly hit home that night on the highway. The music crescendoes and the man sings in a terrifyingly raw tone, “I don’t have a choice, but I still choose you.” They surge into the chorus where their voices mingle together, singing desperately, “Oh, I don’t love you, but I always will!”

It seems so open, so broken, so lost and hopeless.

But I suddenly understood why the Prophets, Israel, the New Testament writers–why even Jesus himself–calls us His wife. The Scriptures have long said we are the promiscuous wife who runs to others, who forgets her first love, who stands on the street corners outside a house of sexual indecency, who lies and scorns the things of her husband. We have always gone running to other things, and God has always stood waiting.

That is only one side of it though.

It’s true, I’m a child of indecency, and I often go after things that lead only to my destruction. It’s true that I pursue other lovers, that I forget the One who redeemed me, who cleaned me, gave me new clothes and took me into his home with nothing to offer him.

But there is another side, the one we face day in and day out. It is the side of sinful reality. The world is broken. Jesus hasn’t yet come back. We speak of progress and the improvement of man, but we have only improved ways of killing each other, ways of keeping the poor underfoot. I railed at God in my car on Sunday night, beating the steering wheel with a tightly closed fist. It isn’t the first time my car or my body has been abused for the frustration of His postponed return. Sunday night won’t be the last time I get angry and tell God He’s wrong for waiting, it won’t be the last time I ask Him to come back right now and save us from all this mess.

But, I realized the marriage metaphor is not only about a wife who has abandoned her master.

It’s about a wife who waits patiently for her husband, trusting that he’ll be true to his word as he always has been.

“I don’t have a choice, but I still choose you,” they sang as I raced down the highway through a construction zone where even the cops themselves drive over the limit. I stood in the city, burning its way to the ground in selfish debt and hopeless sin. I drove on the edge of town to a place where the sin and violence are the stories in the lives of my neighbours.

And I thought, I’ve tried to run from the faith so many times, Abba, but you always hold on to me. I don’t have a choice. I don’t have a way of getting out of what I know to be true. I couldn’t leave even if I wanted to.

But I don’t want to leave.

I don’t have “freedom” to leave. But even if I did, I wouldn’t want to. Even when I don’t love God, I always will. I will always choose Him, even when I think He is dawdling in His return. It’s like a marriage. A covenant. I agreed to stay, and so I will. Just as He has waited and stayed for me, so I will wait on Him.

things to read

A convicting read on the importance of being educated about a crisis rather than simply following what’s going viral on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube or other social media sites.
Stop Trending and Educate Yourself 

 

A great reminder of the pressure that individuals in places of prominence find themselves under. Perhaps before jumping the gun and judging, one ought to consider the back story, the emotional stress and the way it would feel if our names were in the story instead of the person over whom we stand in condemnation.
Response to Jason Russell 

 

This article describes life at our apartment incredibly well. The author is brilliant, funny and poignant.
Oh Lord, Won’t You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz

shafts of light

There’s a section of the library, over the research and librarians’ desk where the ceiling is lower, sloped beneath the main window that sports a cross enmeshed in the panes of brilliant glass. The light is coming in that way, this time of the day, and it casts a shadow over the sloped ceiling and down onto the floor, where the light is cut into clean rectangles  by the bars of the cross.

The sun outside is clean and warm and the mountains have begun to give up their winter blanket. The foothills are brown, with only patches of white amid their trees. Campus, sadly, is still barren and the ground remains that tan shade of green from rotted death–but she will soon give way to rich life and brilliant shades of green and yellow and flowers whose beauty can hardly be named. Trees will flourish again and shade the grass where students will lie out and momentarily forget the studies that the came here for.

It’s beautiful this time of year, you can smell it in the scents that waft in my window in the early morning hours. You can feel it in the look of people as they pass you on the street. There is new life coming! There is hope and joy awaiting us!

But where do they wait?

Lent hasn’t ended. My body longs for it to end–literally in my physicality and spiritually in my soul. I want Lent to end because I want a latte, with soy foamed to tufts of silky white edged in carmel brown as it seeps into the espresso. But more than that, I want Lent to end because I’m tired of waiting.

The earth, this time of year, she throws off her dusty coat and declares that she too is finished with the longing, the craving, the groaning for newness. She knows that things will end again, and in only a few months she will return to deep inside herself to rest and sleep and wait. But now, in these months she bursts with hopeful expectation. Come quick! she cries to the waiting life. Come quick! she cries to the coming hope. Come quick! she whispers in resignation. Come quick. she sighs and dreams of the day when spring will not be only spring.

But spring will be new life.

{when Aslan shakes his mane
we shall have spring again}

cramped emptiness

As I drove to school recently I ended up sitting in traffic. It’s not such a bad thing, having a slow commute. It forces me to be mindful of time and how things are always outside of my control. And traffic is just a beautiful thing itself. On the hill coming down 225 just after the Parker exit there is a beautiful view of the six lanes becoming four and the mountains that are ever close and ever out of reach. I usually push my engine into neutral and coast down to the waiting brake lights as I watch the inhabitants of Aurora weave through one another’s exhaust. On cold mornings in traffic, the dance of shifting drivers is sluggish as engines and individuals still long for quiet solitude and thick blankets amid the chill that does not easily lift. On days like this one, however, when the sun is high in the clear sky despite the early hour and the frost had melted before my engine rolled over and I added windshield wiper fluid to the ever demanding hyundai, on days like this one which promise warmth and cheer the dance of traffic is fluid and swift. In music we would say it is allegretto or allegro. In the weaving and dodging of cars that still wear the drab winter dust, there is a bit of beauty.

But then the traffic comes to a halt when drivers like me have come to the end of the exit only lane and force a tight merge. In these moments I turn down the iPod that plays without end in the stereo system; less music makes it easier to concentrate and watch for open spas or the possibility of being swiped by an SUV who has moved here from Texas where bigger is better and he thinks he owns the world. It was in one of these quieter moments that I looked to my right and noticed the driver of a Chevy Impala, silver, with those round taillights that blink so obtrusively when signaling for a turn. She had hair the color of burnt orange, dyed, with the roots showing from at least two months growth and dark brown making the contrast one of painful poverty and mistaken identity. She held in her left hand, a cigarette, close to the edge of the window that was opened just a sliver to the crisp morning air. It perched precariously between the tips of her knuckles, wedged lightly between fake french nails just a bit too long for the pudgy edges of her digits. The hair as pulled back, away from the worn and soft fleshed face, the tired curve of her frown framed by the light streaming in the car. She didn’t glance my way, I can’t be sure of the eyes, but I imagine they were watery with the years of many long nights, close arguments and burnt out tears.

The night before I had driven home after work, exhausted and drained after a perfectly wonderful day. Highways opened to me, overpasses lit by glowing orange hues from lamps whose energy my neglected taxes pay for. The great pillars of cement stand on hardened earth, grappling and digging their claws deep into the soil that no longer gives life as they uphold the highway above my head. Like columns from ancient temples, columns of great remorse– but of necessity demanded by progress–misused strength supports the roads that I traverse, so wearied and burdened by the exhilarating knowledge of divine mystery and human telos. There were few cars on the road, the world felt eerily silent and empty as I gained mile after mile towards my distant home where the life never stops. After an evening in a roaring mountain town, Denver seemed, in all her cramped city life vast and empty. There are sprawling subdivisions, for Westerners like their space; the sky scrapers stretch and groan their way towards skyline fame and our roads lead ever onward to somewhere newer, and better. There is movement, life, but it is ragged and the hopes of the people have been bruised and broken by the very city they wanted to enliven.

The woman in the Chevy Impala, what is her name? Perhaps it is one of beauty, or one of mendacious parents who called her a name of ancestral origins for lack of creativity or for the honor of those who came before. She smokes, from a broken heart, from overburdened finances with tired frightened hands that can no longer haul the burden of her past. She dyes her hair to an unnatural color, as an artist, as expression of inner dissent from who she was born to be, or as an escape to the life she thought she’d have by now–the only means to have control over at least something. But she hasn’t the money to maintain the farce.

Who were you, as a child? Did you know that things would come to this? Or was it a mystery when plans were failed and dreams ruined? My sweet woman, do you know who you are and what you were meant for? Or do you only hurt and suffer the woes of fragmented humanity and lost identity? In this vast and empty city so crowded for living and jobs and misplaced peoples, how long have you held the trembling cigarette to your lips and wished the world would disappear with the embers of the flame?

Go to the mountains, woman! I thought to cry across the plexiglass and three feet that separated my car from hers. Go to the mountains and dream in the open spaces, beneath the starry nights and whispering winds that push the pines to dance. Or go to the basilica and feel your breath escape in tepid reverence as the hallowed walls soar to new heights and you are reminded of your humanity. You are broken, sure, but when you are humbled and frightened by your triviality then you will come to know the maker and feel His graceful presence begin to heal the long ravaged chasms of your heart.

Only do not sit in your car, amid the dancing traffic, on your way to work, at the job that cannot satisfy surrounded by broken dreams and fallen hopes and no hope for escape. Do not go back to the places that have always failed and always will. Go, my love, to the places of healing and to the hope of new life within this splintered world and the dream of wild places full of sunlight and glory beyond this marginal existence.

Lent: 40 Days of Only Water

I know it’s last minute, but I think you should consider this. Whether or not you celebrate Lent. At least think about it.

bloodwatermission

New Years

Well, this post will be quick. I’m heading out the door to see a friend’s new place before we head up the mountain for some ice skating and fireworks this evening.

 

I just finished lunch with an old friend from high school who I’ve kept in touch with over the years. There were a few awkward lapses in conversation. I suppose that happens when you only see each other once a year. But over all it was quite a lovely time.

I was sitting across the table from this friend and I couldn’t help thinking over all the things that have changed in the past year.

I like blue grass music for instance. I never would have predicted this, but the Avett Brothers have sidled up next to Mumford and Sons as one of my favourite bands.

I have learned a lot about intentionality this  year: with friends, with school, with family, with God and most recently with singleness.  It’s incredible that actually forcing yourself to consider why you’re single and why you must love God above all else can actually be incredibly beneficial.

I’ve learned a lot of humility. let’s be honest. I have a LOT more to learn. But I have learned some humiliation and I’ve learned the grace and beauty that comes with letting go and being happy with who God has made me to be (even when that person isn’t perfect and doesn’t know what she’s doing).

And I’ve learned that while a lot of things change: a lot of things stay the same.

I still have a temper.

I am still the most selfish person I know.

I still love geeky sci-fi shows.

I’m still a nerd who reads theology and history books for fun.

I still like to sing.

I still like to laugh.

I still like to drive too fast. I’m still competitive, after all.

 

I’m looking at this new year of 2012 and wondering if it will end the whole world? Or if we’ll just go on living as we always have? I’m looking at 2012 and wondering how much of it I’ll still live in fear and insecurity? Or if I’ll learn to embrace my clumsy steps and start running forward with arms flung open wide? I’m looking at tomorrow and wondering if it will just be like today? Or will something actually change?

and then, I’m looking at 2012 and I can’t help but think:

it doesn’t really matter.

I’m going to see fireworks tonight and go ice skating. I’m also going ice skating later in January. And there will be fireworks in July. Maybe I’ll be single this time next year. Maybe something will have happened and I’ll be married. Maybe I’ll have a steady job and a better plan for after school. Or maybe, in my procrastination, I’ll have just started looking at PhD programs and won’t have a clue about 2013.

Either way, I think I’ll be pretty happy with whatever the outcome.

Happy New Year my friends.

 

don’t make too many resolutions that we both know you won’t keep.

but don’t live in regrets. It’s a new year! go forward!

{I don’t have time to maintain these regrets when I think about…the way…he loves us!}

the generation of terrorism?

Apparently, I am somewhat unpatriotic. I read several friends blogs over the past few days and most of them had written posts on September 11th. I didn’t forget what day it was when I went to work Sunday. I didn’t forget last week as we prayed in nearly every class. But I didn’t feel compelled to commemorate the day. My mum told me about a movie they watched in their faith gathering–about a man who ran up and down the stairs, ushering people out of the tower. He never came out himself. He wasn’t even a firefighter. He just knew what to do and he did it.

My mum cried. Which made me cry.

I read a snippet from another’s blog that had been reposted by a friend. He asked the rhetorical question of whether or not eh was part of a 9/11 generation. He said that 9/11 happened two weeks into his college years. What do you do with that?

I was in eighth grade. I was coming out of a science class when someone came bursting in saying a plane had crashed into a building in NY. I didn’t know what the WTC towers were. For a few moments, we couldn’t understand what the other student was saying–was it an accident? How could a plane accidentally fly into a building? And then the startling news as we turned on the tv in my next class: not one, but two planes had flown into skyscrapers in NY. And neither had been an accident.

I came of age, I suppose, in a weird time for America. It seemed that people around me were newly frightened of the world. I didn’t understand that. I didn’t experience that fear. I haven’t lived in dangerous places. But I think I have always been aware. We lived in a bad section of town in California. We were in and out of TJ and Mexico City. There is no stability in those places. But it had always been stable here, at “home,” in America.

But so much has happened since then. We watched the stock market and the financial system come apart while I was in college and I watched as friends had to quit school because they couldn’t pay their bills. We watched while the Tsunami hit and took thousands of lives and I watched as my peers handed me money and I sent it to Red Cross and knew that it would never be enough. We watched as the Haitian earthquake happened and I stood lamely to the side with a worthless undergrad degree while others went to serve in ways that I could not. We watched as banks went default and countries belly up and I selfishly hoped that it wouldn’t happen here because I had loans and no  money with which to repay them if they came due. We watched as suddenly things in the world hit home for us, here. Because they weren’t so far away.

I don’t think that, for myself, they have ever been too far away. But I think that is because I ahve always longed to be in those places. Chechnya, Pakistan, Tunisia, Israel. Places where there is need and yet I have nothing to offer them and God has always said no. But it was interesting to watch my peers recognize the nearness of those tragedies and be able to relate to them.

Some have dismissed them as punishments by a vengeful God or simply natural disasters that will always blight our existence. Some have grown disillusioned and find themselves almost afraid or hopeless because the future can hardly promise anything good. Some have been driven to go, to help, to do something–anything. Some have sat back and watched and wondered about when it will end and what our purpose is in the meantime.

I only remember the news coming to class that a building had fallen in NY.

I only remember watching with horror the tsunami and the devastation on television.

I only remember sitting in OMH cursing the banks while reading the NY Times as the banks failed.

I only remember hearing about the Middle Eastern Spring on the radio first, from friends second, from the news third.

 

And yet, there’s something in those memories tha tis alive and well today. It has started to reshape the world for Americans. But in other ways, it has done nothing.

I’m in seminary. I have school loans even while Iceland has gone bankrupt and Greece is looking to default. I am studying even while schools are threatened in other countries. I am pursuing a career that may or may not exist by the time I am done with this education. And the world is a very unstable thing. But…life has gone on. And life will go on, sadly, in much the same way as it always has.

I think that is why I struggle to commemorate September 11th. What did it do to us? Send us in to two wars that were unnecessary and unwinable in the traditional meaning of the word? And yes people died. But people are dying of AIDS and Starvation and Genocide

.                    right

 .                                     now

and what are we doing about those things? What will we ever do about those things? What can we do about those things?

What does it mean to live in this world that is chaotic and coming undone at every seam?

What does it mean to live and serve? To bring life and hope?

Hanging Lake

You wish you lived where I do:

beautiful hike today with Ethan and Liz.

Bansha

And here, so very tardy and late, is the finish to that delightful story.

You’ll remember that on this particular Wednesday a five-way-car-accident had occurred in our parking lot and that I had already been invited to a dinner like snack at one family’s apartment and that the Nepali girls helped me cook curry while Molly was outside helping with the car accident and what not.

Ginesa, one of the four year olds, had finally left and the apartment assumed a relative calm as we played five rocks in the light of our two soft white lamps in the living room. I had finished doing dishes in the kitchen–one of the few places I feel at home in–when I noticed a small package sitting on the lopsided black table given to us by friends of Molly’s. It was a package of Maria Cookies. They were Ginesa’s.

And so, with Locksme as a translator I entered the first floor corner apartment just to return those cookies. But as I’ve said before, I should have known better. They waved me in and a table as pushed to the side while the men on the couch readjusted and made space for me. There were people everywhere. On the couch, on the bed in the corner, on the floor, at the table in the kitchen, and they were all chatting amiably when I stumbled in. A beer was pushed into my hands–Budweiser (which is barely a step above Coors) and plates were filled with food and set down on the table in front of me. I began to eat as the conversations resumed around me.

The rice was grey and flecked with spices. It was spicy, but I’ve had worse in my mouth. What really unsettled me were the chunks of…something and the fact that some of those chunks had a snappy crunch. It reminded me of breaking open the chicken bones at Ethiopian meals and sucking out the marrow. But it wasn’t quite that hard…not quite.

While we discussed my family, my home, my parents and my lack of husband (always a favourite among the Nepalis), I muscled my way through the crunch and tear of those chunks–some of which I was recognizing as gristle and chicken skin. And yet, skin doesn’t crunch, I thought to myself. But then I pushed the thought away and kept going. I’m a missionary kid. You eat what you’re given and you don’t ask questions until after you’ve eaten.

Tal told me that they are actually Bhutanese who had settled at the refugee camp in Nepal after being forced to leave Bhutan. I asked if they would ever go back, assuming they had been forced to resettle for economic reasons or something related to survival. “Awh, I wish,” he said with that goofy smile which makes his eyes crinkle into slits and yet has a sad edge to it. “If I were to return to my country, I would be arrested.” I nodded slowly, snapping whatever was in the rice between my back teeth.

“So you are here–”

“We are against the political leaders. We can not go back,” he said and the two men sitting beside me nodded their assent to his description of the situation.

It reminded me of the time when Asmita, noticing a picture of my brother in uniform said “sometimes in my country, the police come to your village and they take people, and sometimes those people don’t come back.” She said it with a shrug of her shoulders, unconcerned as I hastily explained my brother flies an airplane and he protects us and the police here are not allowed to do such things. She was nonchalant though, as though this is how things are done in every country. I know this to be true. I have friends who have lived in countries like this.  But this was a nine year old telling me this. She is nine. She should not discuss the disappearances of individuals with such a casual air.

Tal is educated. And so were the men next to me on the couch. The old woman I took to be a grandmother, with her gap toothed smile, was nursing an infant while sitting on the floor (who was later handed to me to hold) is sweet and gentle. They are smart people. And they live, perhaps seven or eight people in this apartment? With a double bed that  sleeps two sisters in the living room? Because they come here, fleeing their country and we struggle to find them a place in society where they can use their gifts and talents? It is a tragedy of humanity that we are unable to pursue who God made us to be because of political corruption and insatiable greed and war mongering.

But we moved on to happier subjects. Madav works at Panda Express. He came home midway through the conversation and seemed startled to find me as the greeting face when he opened the front door. The two brothers and Tal work at the airport. What do they do there? Luggage. Food service. They told me of the beauty in Nepal and Bhutan. Mountains that the white folk come to climb which soar higher than the Rockies and are more severe in their majesty. And the vast green valleys. And the rivers. And everything that is their home.

At one point, during a lull in the conversation, the man beside me asked if I liked what I was eating or if it was too spicy? I shrugged. It was delicious, I said with a smile. And spicy, sure, but not too spicy. They laughed. It’s okay, one said, if you can’t finish becuase it is spicy for white people. I smiled slightly, but shoveled another bite in anyway. And then, the man beside me said “so you like it?” And when I nodded, “it is made of…how do you say…” he pulled at the skin on his arm, “the outside of the chicken…mm…oh! the feathers. Yes, the feathers.”

Delicious.

I just ate fried feathers. Or cartilage of feathers.

Yum.

But, this is good to them. In some way, shape or form they find feathers to be as comforting, as familiar, as perfect as the snow tipped mountains and the wide valleys and the home they’ve been forced to abandon.

 

But I wouldn’t say it was my favourite dish ever eaten in a foreign home.