It’s just gone Saturday afternoon in Luganville, and I’ve got hummus on the brain. I’ve collected the cans of chickepeas (didn’t soak this time soz) and as I get home after a busy morning at work #volunteering, I walk around to the back garden to check for fallen lemons. We have a pretty productive tree out back, maybe every second or third time I go out I find 1 or 2 on the ground, but there is always the chance there will be none.
As I around the corner I spot two siting in plain sight. Instant relief, joy, gratification. An irrational moment of thought that somehow, in this moment especially, I have earned these lemons. Science and growing up in western society have taught me that this no link between our actions and random acts of nature, say a lemon falling from a tree. But this mantra escapes me momentarily as I feel in some small way I am being rewarded for the intentions I have put into the universe this morning.
The lads and I from the Department of Water Resources were out this morning cleaning and delivering Portaloos to an evacuation centre in Luganville. More than two hundred people of Ambae have turned the Apostolic Church downtown into a mini urban-village and have had the use of only two toilets for a couple of weeks now. I have been working with the WASH cluster, and after much number crunching and meetings, we finally got organized to actually (hopefully) deliver some relief items this week. Toilets for the church being the top priority.
Finding the lemons was a lesson in faith. That creeping curiosity that for some reason, a power greater than myself is showing favour through providing bounty. Have I joined the church? Not yet, but I am endlessly intrigued by how this kind of faith may/may not have been manipulated throughout the ages. Mother Nature is a beautiful creature and I’m looking to untrain what science has taught me that she is dictated by quantifiable actions and re-actions alone. Embrace the in-explainable, make lemons rain from the sky like raindrops. Surely it make life more interesting.