Making ends meet...

I know you must be wondering. Has Jeanette disappeared from blog world? Is everything okay?

No, I haven't quite disappeared...not quite! Yes, everything is okay, but it would be my longest post ever if I were to explain why I feel like this rope! So I will give you the bare bones.

New Grace, the quartet Barry and I sing with, traveled to New Jersey in June to provide the special music at our church's annual convention. This required significant practice time prior to going, as we have not really been singing together for the last year, so for quite a while before we left, my stress level was high as I tried to cover work, Coral's normal care, extra practice, working out the details of Coral's supervision and care during our absence, and then actually packing and remembering everything to take with us. Aunt Paula took charge of all Coral's care for the 10 days we were gone, and Andrea arrived from California and was able to help for the last week or so.

The convention went well, and besides that, we were able to see Barry's mother and actually stayed at her house the whole time we were in New Jersey. This was great, as I have not seen her for quite a long time, and it was wonderful to catch up a little bit with extended family and friends. After the convention was over, we (Barry, my brother Gord, and I) drove north from New Jersey to Toronto, Canada, where we spent two days visiting my mother and Carol-Ann and her family (which, as you know, is one of my VERY FAVORITE things to do!)

All in all, the time away was a blessing and refresher for me. But, as with most of my little jaunts away from home, there is a price to pay when I get back, and this time was a doozey. We jumped right into work catch-up, arrangements and funeral services for our friend Warren who passed away just before we left home, and helping with Gord and Paula's departure for a 5-week trip to Liberia.

It seems like each day I get up at the usual time and hope I can get a good start on my work. But then the time gets eaten up by other very important things, and I arrive at the evening with most of my work still to be done. I have been working until 2 or 3 a.m. and getting up again at the usual time each morning with less and less "oomph" for what has to be done.

So I have been a little shadow in blogland, but I hope -- oh, how I hope! -- that things will soon be back to normal! I may never totally catch up, but as soon as I can, I will visit you!
.

Catch up time!

It's hard to believe that it is over a month now since I went to visit Carol-Ann and her family and my mother. I was in Canada for the last week of March, and it went by so quickly. I don't know why time has to act like that... skipping along when we are having fun, dragging its feet when we're not! It's high time I gave a little report!

Carol-Ann fixed up my bed in her large office area in the basement. This was perfect, as I took my laptop with me, and so down there I could keep up with my medical transcription whenever I wanted to. We settled into a homey routine, and most days I worked in the mornings. Then Bruce came home from work at noon time and shuttled me over to Mum's where I enjoyed the best lunches with her and her friend, Ruth. Then up to Mum's room where we would talk and laugh and catch up. One day I was so tired, I just curled up in her bed and took a nap. When I woke up, she was a bit disappointed that I had not gotten the full two hours of sleep she had hoped I would get! That's my Mum!

At supper time, Bruce would come and pick the two of us up to go back to their house for supper and the evening. I got to watch some of Kinza's favorite shows, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and I just had the best time sharing in their everyday life. I even got to help with homework!!

Here's a picture I took on the day I was leaving. Mum was sitting in the big chair in her room.

My Mum

March 31, 2009
She will be 92 in July.

I showed her this picture on my little camera display, and she exclaimed,
"Oh, there's Daddy's picture in the background!"
And so it is.

My Dad -- Part 4

My father first met my mother, Margaret, at the beginning of 1935 when he was 27 and she was 17. About a year earlier, she had accepted an invitation from her friend Iris to attend a service at the People's Church in Toronto, and she trusted Jesus as her Savior that night. A few months later, she and another friend decided to go and check out the nearby Sunday school they had heard about. They were warmly welcomed, and my mother was assigned to the teenage girls' class where Cecil Hodgson was the teacher. There were some mischief-makers in that class who loved to give the teacher a hard time, and one Sunday a girl named Florence asked him very deliberately, "Mr. Hodgson, don't you think Miss English is pretty?" (I wish I had been a little fly on the wall!)

Here she is around that time!

I remember once my father told us about his first impressions of my mother. She had been attending his Sunday school class, and one day she went to him and asked him when the church prayer meeting was held. And he said to himself, "That's the kind of question a girl should be asking!"

But lots of changes were going on. My mother began teaching a Sunday school class herself, my father was away at times in the city, and so they saw each other only infrequently at church. Then one day my mother and her friend Gladys met my father and his friend Fred on the street and stopped to chat awhile. My father invited the girls to go with him and Fred to the next meeting of the mission organization he was considering joining, and so they agreed and went in Fred's car -- the men in the front, and the girls in the back. Not really a date!

Time passed, and my father did indeed join that mission organization, planning to leave for Africa. In the book she made for her grandchildren, my mother wrote: "By this time, I knew he had an interest in me that I didn't feel I could return, and although I had thoughts of the mission field, they were at that time vague, not concrete. I was far from ready, and any thoughts I did have didn't include Grandpa!"

Here's a little story I love, because it tells so much about each of my parents! Soon after this, my father invited my mother to have supper with him at the Stoodleigh Restaurant downtown. This was a special event, because eating out was not an everyday thing then. She met him there, but after the usual greetings, he told her he was sorry but he could not take her to supper because he had nothing in his pocket! She knew she had enough money to pay for supper, but after a few quick thoughts decided it would not be the thing to do, so she did not offer. They walked round and round in the ample space in the nearby Union Station and finally went home! And it was just as she expected! Everyone wanted to know what she had for supper! But somehow, the incident made her think more highly of my father, not less. It was not until much later that she found out that he had money when he invited her, but a sudden need had come up at the Mission headquarters, and he felt the Lord wanted him to give what he had.

In her little book for the grandchildren, my mother wrote: "Later, one rainy evening, Grandpa walked home with me. We stopped by the lamppost in front of my house, and under a dripping umbrella, Grandpa asked me to marry him. And Grandma said, 'No.'"

(Oh, how I loved to hear my mother tell us these stories when we were sitting around the supper table so many years ago!)

(To be continued...)

My Dad -- Part 3

As far back as I can remember, my father had to be careful about his health. Any little cold quickly became a deep bronchitis, and I remember that he often had what he called "hard indigestion." These problems were not new, and even as a young man, his health was fragile. Now that my Dad was planning to be a missionary, his family and friends were greatly concerned about how terrible this would be for his health. He had a promising career as an architect, and many of them just could not see any human wisdom at all in leaving North America to go far away to die young of a terrible disease in a foreign country! I'm sure there were many attempts to talk him out of it! (Believe it or not, in his late 20s he was considered to be a little too old to be going as a foreign missionary!)

And my Dad, being the kind of man he was, expected God to give him a verse in his normal everyday Bible reading that would answer that concern and give him clear guidance, and he was not disappointed! This is what he wrote:

"After study and preparation, I considered the advisability of seeking, at my age, a field of service which might be easier on the health than West Africa. I was reading at the time in Jeremiah where the children of Israel were commanded by the Lord to submit to Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, but they sought a way of escape into Egypt. The Lord spoke to them, saying that the sword that they feared in Babylon would take them in Egypt. I said, "Yes, Lord," and set my face steadfastly toward Liberia."

Early in 1941, my Dad was ready to set sail for Liberia. It had been 10 years since Meryl had been born, and she was being cared for by her grandparents, Madeleine's mother and father. It must have been very, very hard to leave her and go so far away, all alone, with very little ability to communicate -- no telephones, no email, none of the immediacy we expect now. I remember meeting Meryl's grandmother when I was a little girl, and I don't remember much about her except that she was elderly and very busy whenever I saw her. But I think about how terribly hard it must have been for her to lose her daughter so young, and I hope that having Meryl was a comfort to her. Meryl's grandparents will forever have my respect for the way they raised their little granddaughter to love and adore her father who had gone so far away.

What had my father been doing in the 10 years between Madeleine's death and the day he got on that ship?

For one thing, he was working. He had completed his 4-year course in architectural drafting and was immediately employed as a draftsman, work he loved. He also began studying at Toronto Baptist Seminary in preparation for going to Africa as a missionary.

I have just one picture to show you today, and that is of my father and his bicycle with the specially made sidecar container on the back. He wanted to win others in his profession to Christ, and so he cycled through Ontario visiting architects' offices, witnessing and leaving "tracts" that he had made. They were emery sticks for sharpening drafting pencils, and he had carefully printed a Scripture verse on one side.My father became a Christian when he was a teenager. He listened as his cousin, Ted, talked to his brothers about the Lord. Then one day he stopped to listen to some men who were preaching on the street corner. After the sermon, one of them asked if he had trusted Jesus as his Savior. My father knew that he believed in Jesus, but he was not sure he was saved, so that man showed him God's promise in the Bible that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but has everlasting life. From then on, he was sure of his salvation.

A few years ago, my mother wrote a special book for her grandchildren in which she tells so many interesting things about her life and my father's, so I am depending heavily on that for writing about my Dad today. Here's something she added to this part of the story:
"Someone has said that opportunities do not come with their ultimate value stamped upon them. That servant of the Lord, whoever he was, didn't know that the teenage boy to whom he was speaking that day would one day be a missionary to Africa."

My father also didn't know the end result of those little emery boards that he rode so many, many miles on his special bicycle to personally deliver...

Then in 1935, he met my mother!

(To be continued...)

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 07/25/2008

Margaret (my mother) and her brother Harper with their grandparents
(Probably around 1925)

I don't know what the occasion was, maybe church on Sunday.
It is always hard to picture your mother as a little girl, but I have an especially hard time imagining her with huge hair bows! Ever since I have known her, she has steadfastly refused any such showy adornments that would call attention to herself!
(But look how cute she is here!)

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 07/24/2008

The boa constrictor that swallowed the deer!

My mother and Isabel, one of her coworkers. This had to have been a REALLY big event for my mother who had not been in Liberia all that long when this picture was taken.
This boa constrictor swallowed a small deer, and it was killed and cut open to show what was inside it! (Some of the other pictures show the deer but aren't very good quality anymore.)

The ladies are posing with this reptile, but at a decent distance!

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 07/23/2008

Getting off the ship!
(About 1955)
(I'm sure we were getting off the ship in Liberia in this picture, not on it, because I was younger than this when we left for our one-year visit to Canada.)

My mother is holding Gord's hand, and Esther Monus (another missionary) is holding me.
(Carol-Ann was not born yet.)

Our family traveled back and forth between Canada and Liberia on freighter ships, a trip that took about 10 days. We did not do this very often. The next time we crossed the ocean, I was 8 years old and ready for the 3rd grade.

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 07/04/2008

Kinza giving Grandma her birthday cake!

Carol-Ann, Bruce, and Kinza live very close to my mother, so they went over to visit her and took a cake and some red jello -- perfect for Grandma! [Please read yesterday's post to understand about the jello!]


While they were visiting, I called on the telephone to wish her a very happy birthday. Carol-Ann snapped a picture of her talking to me!


Kinza is holding the flowers that were a gift to my mother from all her children and our families.

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 07/03/2008

My Mother's Baby Picture

Today is my mother's 91st birthday. I searched through my picture box to find this one of her when she was very little, maybe not even one year old yet. How much this little girl has seen happen in the past 90 years!

A few years ago, my mother put together a book for her grandchildren, and in it she told about her family and what things were like growing up. Here is her memory of birthdays long ago...

"I did have one brother -- a "big brother" because he was three years older than I was. He was born on August 28, 1914, and I was born on July 3, 1917, so we both had our birthdays in the summertime. Strange, but I can't remember any birthday cakes! Our very special treat for those birthdays was -- jello! We didn't think of it by flavour, but by colour. We always had a red one, and then we could choose one more, a yellow one or an orange one. And what a decision that was to have to make! We didn't have a refrigerator in our home, or even an old-fashioned "ice box," so how to get the jello to "set" in summertime was a problem. Our father sunk a large crock into the dark, cool, earthen floor of our cellar, where it was not nearly as warm as in our bright, sunny kitchen upstairs. The bowl of jello was placed inside the covered crock, and we hoped for the best. We made ever so many trips up and down the cellar steps to see how it was coming along, and I remember being told that it never would set if we didn't leave it alone!"

Happy Birthday, Mother!
(in the jello colors!)

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 06/20/2008

My Mum!
This picture was taken on June 17, just 3 days ago!
In just 13 days, she will have her 91st birthday!

I had such a wonderful visit in Canada with Carol-Ann and her family and my mother. We had serious talks, weepy moments, laugh-till-you-cry times...just the best visit ever!

Thank you so much, Carol-Ann, Bruce, Kinza, and Mum!

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 06/11/2008

Bob and his plane

This little airplane is the way we made any significant travels in Liberia when I was growing up. We walked or used a motorcycle in our immediate area but to get to the city and other places far from us, we flew in this airplane (or sometimes another one like it). If you zoom in on the picture, you can see that right behind the propeller are the words "Wings of Service for Jesus." That was exactly right. Bob was a missionary pilot and did so many things in service to others. He helped other missionaries get where they needed to go, delivered mail and other supplies, and saved many lives by flying very sick or wounded people to the hospital.

My mother never enjoyed flying, especially in little planes like this one. She always said she felt like she was up on a postage stamp! I think I may have inherited my dislike of flying from her, but nevertheless tomorrow I am flying, not on a little plane like this but on a big one, to go to Canada to see my mother and Carol-Ann and her family for a few days. Which means I am not writing any more now, as I have absolutely a ton of things still to be done.

(Hopefully I will be able to keep up with my "Picture of the Day" while I am gone.)

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 06/04/2008

The little table by my dining room window

Back in December when I visited family and friends in Canada, my mother said, "Jeanette, I have something that I thought you might like to have." She took me up to her room and took a box out of her closet. It looked like she might have had quite a few things in it at one time, but now it was nearly empty. She took a little roll of fabric out of the bottom and shook it out for me to see. It was a doily!

I love to crochet, and many years ago when I was first married I used to always have my crochet bag nearby so that I could work on my current project. I've made all kinds of things from afghans to potholders to fancy doilies to little animals that fasten over a button on a child's clothing.

This particular doily is one that I made for my mother probably at least 25 years ago and which she had used on her little table when she was living in Liberia.I found it in one of the pictures in my album, and she used it like this with some of those orange lilies that grew around "The Circle." (Picture of the Day from 05/14/2008). Since my mother can no longer use it, I am so pleased that she thought of giving it back to me! It feels like I made my own heirloom!

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 05/20/2008

This is a page from a book my mother filled out for each of her three children, each one of them individually written by hand. I guess this proves that we come by our love of cats very honestly! (You can click on the page above to see it better.)

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 05/17/2008

We just had to have several pictures to finish this week off!

After the final version of the translation was done, my mother typed all the stencils. Then began a tussle with the mimeograph. It had a mind of its own, and added to that was the fact that in the very humid weather, the ink did not dry quickly, and she often had the ink from one sheet bleed onto the next sheet that landed on top of it. Finally, though, piles of each sheet were stacked everywhere waiting for the assembly line.

Here are my sister-in-law Paula (right), Sharon who was a co-worker with my parents (center), and a girl who was part of a group visiting from Prairie Bible Institute (left). Long tables were lined up, and someone began by taking the last page of the book and laying down as many as possible. The next person put the second-to-last page on top of it, and so on, and so on, and so on...until page 1 was on the top. These piles were all stacked on top of each other, alternating them the short way on top of the long way of the paper so they were kept as separate books. Then the process began all over again until all the sheets were gone!





Then it was time to put the covers on! Here are my brother Gord, Paula, and my mother putting one pink sheet on the back and one on the front. It looks like they are enjoying it, too!











Sharon is tightening the staples with pliers.









My mother, carefully covering the staples with tape to bind the edge of the book.









All that hard work, and she is so pleased! A little bit more of God's Word that people can read in their own language!


This is the end of the Mother's Day week in pictures! I hope you have enjoyed this little glimpse into the life of my mom and what I remember her doing when I was growing up. If everyone's mom was like mine, how much better this world would be!

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 05/16/2008

The checking conference

They are checking one of the little sections of mimeographed sheets that I talked about with yesterday's picture. Robert (or his wife Edna) and my mom had written a few chapters down, she had carefully typed it on stencils, the stencils had been duplicated on the mimeograph, and the sheets were assembled and stapled into booklets. These booklets had been distributed to some of the Christians in the area who had agreed to read them over and then gather together to discuss and improve on or clarify the translation so that the final version could be decided on and published.

It was sometimes very obvious that an expression or word needed to be changed after hearing the possible understandings people got from the first draft. And sometimes there were other better words or phrases that could be used that my mother and Robert had not thought of. This pooling of knowledge and ideas was a very important part of the process.

I think they all looked forward to these get-togethers! They usually met in a large open room in a building not too far from our house, and sometimes we would hear a roar of laughter coming from that room as they all enjoyed a joke together!

(You can see my mom's made-to-order book turntable in use sitting beside her!)

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 05/15/2008

My mother in "The Alcove," a little open area off the livingroom where she did a lot of her Bible translation work.

There was no such thing as a computer then to make any of the job easy. She spent long hours working with Robert (the father of Amy in yesterday's picture) writing down the first draft of a few chapters at a time of the Old Testament. It took them a long time sometimes to figure out how to express things properly so the meaning would not be changed somehow in the translation. They checked concordances, various English translations, and other resources to try to come up with the best wording. To help make that easier for my mom, my father made this turntable to hold all her heavy books at just the right angle for easy reading.

After that first handwritten draft, she would use the typewriter you see on the left to type it all onto stencils to use for printing on the mimeograph. The typewriter basically cut the stencils in the shape of each letter so that the thick gooey ink from the mimeograph could seep through those cuts and onto the paper as it was hand-cranked through the mimeograph.

Many were the times when we children would hear her being interrupted in her typing over and over by many other aspects of everyday life. This was very tedious work, because the language is a tonal one, and there had to be additional tones -- up, down, and other ways, too -- added to many of the letters. With each interruption, her frustration would grow as she would lose her place in what she was copying onto the stencil. Then we would hear, "Oh no! Now look what I did!" Next we would smell the pungent odor of the stencil correction fluid which fixed the error by sealing the letter that had been cut into the stencil, giving her one last chance at another letter in that spot. But soon there would be another interruption and another.... and then... RRIIIPP!! She would yank the stencil by the top and pull it right out of the typewriter, scrumple it up, and put it in the trash! An unfixable error, and now she had to start all over again! (I am so spoiled by my computer! If I had to be sure to do it right the first time, I don't know where I would be!)

These mimeographed pages, when finally printed, were assembled into booklets and given to people who had agreed to read this first draft, then gather together for a "checking conference" to discuss it and give their input.

(More on this tomorrow...)

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 05/14/2008

This picture is really a combination of two things my mom did when I was growing up.

One of them I'll post more about tomorrow -- Bible translation. This little girl is holding the newly published book of Genesis, translated by my mom with the help of many other people (more later on that).

What I wanted to post this picture for today, though, is the beautiful flowers. My mom planned out and oversaw the planting and upkeep of flowers on the little mission compound where we lived. This is "The Circle" which had lilies all around the edge and trees inside the circle including gardenia, frangipani, and bougainvillea. When all those lilies were in bloom, it was absolutely gorgeous! As an earlier picture showed, we lived in the middle of the African rain forest, and when I was little, there was no access by car to where we lived. Sometimes we had expatriate visitors who came walking through the forest, and they were always delightfully surprised to find our neat well-kept paths lined with trimmed hedges, The Circle of beautiful flowers, the pineapple patch in straight rows, and the lovely coconut, plum, grapefruit, orange, and lime trees.

(This is definitely making me homesick today!)

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 05/13/2008

My mother making toast on the wood stove.

She spent a lot of time in this hot little room with the wood stove, either cooking or supervising the cooking. There were no convenience foods, so she made everything from scratch. She is still the queen of ingenious ways to use leftovers and was a past master at magical substitutions in recipes when the called-for ingredients were not available! She knew how to use sour milk to make something good and was used to sifting grubs and weevils out of the flour. She coexisted with cockroaches because there was no other option. She learned how to protect her sugar from sugar-eating ants by setting the canister in the middle of a dish of water. She made sure our fruit was safe to eat by washing it all in a purple solution of potassium permanganate.

She learned 101 ways to fix rice -- rice porridge in the morning, rice and gravy at noon, leftover rice in fried rice balls or rice pancakes at night, and the best rice pudding ever made. (I think she secretly thanked God every night that she could not get any potatoes, because she never liked them anyway!)

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 05/12/2008

This is my dad getting a drink at "The Filter."

When we were growing up, the thing always at the top of my mother's subconscious was making sure we had enough water to drink. All our water had to be boiled to purify it, and that was a HUGE JOB. We had a wood stove, and there were always large pots of water on it being watched so they could be timed boiling for 20 minutes. The boiled water was then dumped into large covered white enamel pails. From there it was used either in cooking or in keeping The Filter full. The Filter had a chalk-like "candle" (that's what my dad always called it, anyway) through which the water we put in the top passed through to get to the bottom of The Filter. This did not purify the water at all but just helped to take out the smoky flavor it had after boiling on the wood stove. I would have to say that keeping up with the boiled water was one of my mother's biggest responsibilities for her family.

(I think every bit of furniture we had was made by my father. Check out that perfect made-to-measure filter stand with the handy-dandy little shelf for the glass!)

PICTURE OF THE DAY -- 05/08/2008

One more picture of my Mum and Dad.
A little celebration of 40 years as missionaries in Liberia.

This was taken in the living room/dining room of the house where I grew up. No caterer, no music, no balloons. No rich food, fancy cake, or flowery speeches.
Just a little handmade sign -- "40 YEARS" -- and the love of friends and family.

If you could zoom in on the picture, you would see whitewashed mud walls, a cement floor with the surface long worn off, a ceiling with big watermarks from the tropical downpours, and insects everywhere (no getting rid of them!).

Don't store up your treasures on earth. Instead, store them up in heaven where moth and rust won't destroy them and where thieves can't break in and steal... because your heart will be where your treasure is. (Matt. 6:20-21)