Good Friday
2-3-2010

This Good Friday is good. Homecoming is what it is, and this is what I longed for since a long, long time, an ill defined but forever deeper craving for home, and today I feel I have arrived. Maybe I will arrive again tomorrow or maybe I’ll be lost who knows but today is an authentic ‘home-day’. Not the homecoming to the Dutch windmills or even cheese and apples, not to the temperate climate or even speaking Dutch again, not a homecoming to family of whom there are very few left, no, it concerns the homecoming to a deep inner place of rest, the place I got separated from. Nothing to do with Ghana too. It was the separation from my deeper ‘self’ which made me homesick and in search for Holland again at this stage in my life.

And today I touched my hidden self in the soul of Holland on Good Friday. Despite the rush in the supermarkets on chocolates and colored Easter eggs and other unessentials. From an inquiry it appears that 53 percent of the Dutch don’t know the story about Easer anymore, no wonder with all the crazy Easter bunnies and yellow painted chickens and furniture drive-in shows on Easter Sundays and all that. But the people I met today do know the story and know it is greater then themselves. And the music I heard remembers. The Mathew Passion in all kind of shapes and forms.

Today a performance of Stabat Mater by Pergolesi in the local church, so delicate that it evoked a deep sense of awe in the handful of graying people gathered there, awe that still resounds in my soul. I am contented and for today my heart is not restless for it rests in God. And in people. It is a spiritual homecoming today which also has to do with the fact that I have found voluntary work that suits me. First in accompanying blind holidaymakers during their vacation and now also visiting old people in our parish. After nearly a month away from Ghana I have found new life and when I return in December I will have stories to tell!

Today, April 2nd, is also ‘Autism day’ or so I read in my paper this morning. For moment I see the faces of our autistic children in my mind’s eye and again, I am content. Cynthia and Boadu, Ema and Kwaku, they are at peace where they are and their situation is not perfect but as good as it gets. Since a few days Ab and Jeanette are in Nkoranza for the continued leadership of PCC, and Ema has returned after his one year course away from home. Sue gives her telephone advise. So all is well and life is good! For our children with autism too.

Tomorrow my old girlfriend Liesbeth is coming to stay with me for the Easter. So I have been cleaning the house and arranging things, buying flowers and filling the fridge with food. Yesterday I vacuum-cleaned. First the stairs (dirt of a year) then my floor and carpet and finally I took the mouthpiece off in order to vacuum those corners that otherwise get forgotten, ending up vacuuming the curtains and blinds in front of the windows. I would even have done more hadn’t the long rope of one of the blinds got stuck in the hose of the machine. That was the end of that. No amount of force could dislodge it again. So instead of removing the rope from the hose I removed the hose from the vacuum-cleaner and now this big hose hangs like a snake, an enormous black cobra, alongside one of my windows. A single giant garland.
 

My friend abhors luxury and begged me not to indulge her with cake, chocolates, wine or anything special and I will oblige her happily.

Except for the special treat of a giant snake that will swing over all our meals at the table!
I say these things mostly to make Charity and Mercy in Ghana laugh! They know I am clumsy and spoiled. It gives them good laughs when they call and hear the latest. ‘What did you cook today, Maame?’ I call them after doing a household thing just to entertain them. ‘Maame, you did your laundry? Wow!’