Joel the European traveller (part 1) 1 August, 2010

We moved to Somerset in time to put the children into the last two weeks of school here, thanks to the different term dates in Cyprus and the UK. While it meant the children had to finish the school year twice, they have enjoyed getting to know some new friends and their teachers, so starting school won’t be too hard in September.

Joel’s friends have quickly built up a mythology around him. One started the rumour that Joel had killed lions with his bare hands in Kenya. When he did well in an English test on his first day, his mates complained that it wasn’t fair as ‘he isn’t even English’. They are also astonished at the number of countries he has lived in or visited.

A thumbs-up for Italy from Joel and school-friends from Cyprus

This rose by one just before we left Cyprus, as he joined an American Academy school trip to Italy. Venice was a high spot, but they managed to cover a lot of ground and even spent a day in a theme park based on a central Italian lake. It was a great way to end his year, and helped to cement a number of good friendships. As his head teacher, Mr Onesti, turns out to be a regular visitor to Somerset, even he may become one of those!

At the time of writing this, Joel is in France, on a Christian camp with two of his friends from Kenya, Stefan and Ian.  A week after he gets back, he will be flying to the Netherlands (thank you, EasyJet, for helping to make all this affordable) to spend a week with Dutch friends from Cyprus.

So, yes, he truly is becoming a world citizen. My mother reminds me that, at around his age, I begged to be taken to another country. She secretly arranged a trip to Wales!

Check out Joel’s news, if you’re lucky, on his blog - one that is even more infrequently updated than this one.

Bring back the tram! 22 March, 2010

In Geneva for a couple of days work, I was pleased to be given a free ticket for the city’s tram system, and spent a couple of hours one evening travelling on the network. To be exact, what I was on was a trolley bus, rather than a tram in the pure sense, as it didn’t run on rails in the road.

It’s a fascinating way to get a flavour of the mixed workforce in the city; as I sat on the number 10 into town, watching hundreds of people get on and off in the evening rush hour, I listened to conversations in Mandarin and Filippino, an Indian language, and English. And French, but not as much as often as you’d expect.

Running a bus-like vehicle using overhead electricity is much more efficient than powering the same vehicles with independent engines. At any given moment, a good number of the vehicles on the line are likely to be decelerating or stopped, drawing no power, allowing the system to provide only enough for the vehicles that are actually speeding up. In quieter times of the day less power needs to be provided.

It was a good reminder that some of the quickest and best solutions to our traffic and energy crises already exist, and I ruefully wondered whether anyone would take any opportunities in the near future to bring back trams and trolleys to other cities. How amazing, then, that barely a day back in Cyprus and I read that the British city of Leeds may be doing just that, at a cost of 254 million GBP. (Read the story.)

I became something of a devotee of electric city transport as a young reporter. In Chard, which was my home town in the 1980s, I was thrilled to discover a company called Brecknell Willis who made pantographs – the aerial-like structure on top of a tram that collects electricity from overhead wires. The old company dates back more than 150 years, and set up in Chard before the First World War – not a bad record, as it still seems to be going strong, and is a market leader in what we can all hope will become a boom industry once again.

Power for the people; the number 10 trolley bus in Geneva, which runs from the Airport to Onex Cite

A week in Iasi 29 December, 2008

In November (during my temporary absence from this blog) I was invited to visit Romania by World Vision’s regional office in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, to take part in a training event for communicators.

It was a privilege to visit the region and to work with a dedicated and good-humoured group of people who were largely new to me. Most of my 11 years with World Vision has been focused on Africa.  The contrasts in characters and attitudes, in working procedures and the expression of poverty between the two regions are considerable.

Beautiful Romania, out of the shadows of communism

I was taken good care of by the Romanian team (special thanks to Magda C!) and had a good look at the historic city of Iasi.  As with the culture and character of the people, the architecture and city plan of Iasi owes a lot to six centuries of influence from European migrations and invasions, with a largely regrettable overlay of a few decades of authoritarian communism.  For each historical building, there is a vast concrete slab left by Nicolae Ceausescu’s brutal Communist rule. (For more about him, see the commendably concise http://www.ceausescu.org/)

Clearly, absolute poverty is far more pronounced in Africa; but the difficulties of organising people into collective responses to poor living standards in post-Communist Europe are greater.  Suddenly there is EU money available to help Romania develop, but a day of field work suggested to me that getting farmers to organise themselves into collectives to access these funds means overcoming decades of mistrust.

Historically, Iasi has played a huge role in Romanian and Moldavian life. It was even the capital of Romania for a while, and held strong royal connections from the time of Steven the Great onwards.  One treat was to attend St Nicholas’s Romanian Orthodox church, the oldest church (out of more than 100 churches) in the city.  Built in 1492 and extensively renovated since, its walls and ceiling coated with icons, the building resonates with history as the spine-tingling Byzantine choral music rings through it.

If you’re not used to the Orthodox rite, church as a crowd of standing people watching the priests do their stuff with incense, bells and chants takes a little getting used to. There is no doubting, though, the powerful cultural hold this dramatic religion has on its people and their identity.  Ceausescu’s name is already becoming history; the church built by Steven cel Mare more than 600 years ago is as well-attended as ever.