These entries are going to be a little out of chronological order. I finally completed my account of our travels in Uganda near the end of our time in Michigan and posted it; Susan is still polishing up her account of our trip to Ethiopia—a fascinating land that seems a million miles from all the other places we have been in Africa—and will probably post it after she arrives here in Ghana in a few days. I have been here three weeks, the calendar is just about to turn over to September, and I have a little time to breathe after the first few frantic weeks getting Calvin’s Ghana program organized.
And you are reading this blog (all three of you!) to share our impressions of Africa, not of West Michigan. So this entry will be brief (by my standards, if not by yours). On leaving Kenya in late May we made a week’s stopover in the UK. (The extra cost was only $50 each—when else can you travel to Europe for $50?) Susan did all the planning on the internet, fulfilling a long-held dream of visiting England’s West Country, which I remember in considerable detail from the family trip we made in the spring of 1966, during my father’s Cambridge sabbatical. Using a cottage rental site Dot recommended, she found what sounded like a charming flat to rent in the tiny fishing village of West Looe, on Cornwall’s south coast about halfway from Plymouth to Land’s End. The cost was high, but nothing in the UK comes cheap. Since they required a week’s rental we booked it for all but our first and last nights. Our hope, and our initial plan, was to spend a couple of days with Dot and Roger, but Dot had rehearsals and concerts every couple of days and could not make a trip south, and we decided it made little sense to leave our expensive hired flat empty to spend two days on the train in order to have a day with Dot (who would soon be in Michigan). So we spent lots of time talking on our mobile phones instead.
We did see our friends Abraham and Claire Waigi, whom we met when they were graduate students at the Akrofi Christaller Institute in Ghana in 2004 and 2005. Though they are friends from our time in Ghana, neither is Ghanaian: Abraham is Kenyan, Claire British. While Abraham works on a PhD at Liverpool Hope University, they and their beautiful 2 year old daughter Leslie are living with Claire’s father in Surrey, just outside London. Abraham very generously offered to pick us at the airport and accommodate us overnight. Better yet, they too were planning a trip to Cornwall, to visit Claire’s uncle on the north coast. So we traveled together to the town where we had hired a car to carry us the rest of the way.
I can’t describe what a delight it was to settle into one place for a week and explore the village and the breathtaking beauty of the coastline and countryside. We are nearly always on the move when we are traveling, and now we wonder why.
Getting to and from our flat was a journey in itself. We reached the car park via a circuitous little lane, so narrow that at some points Susan could have reached out and plucked flowers from the steep bank on the right side while I could have gathered other blooms from the window boxes of the houses on the left. Then we trundled our luggage down a steep access road, along another road for a half kilometer or so, then down three flights of narrow steps and another steep walkway to access our flat. It was a narrow three-story unit, in a row that stepped down the slope toward the town. It was comfortable and well equipped, with a balcony up on the top floor from which we could look out over the boats coming and going from the harbor.
To get to the village we descended another five or six flights of steps—the “street” in front of the houses was a staircase several blocks long—and then another steep and narrow lane til we reached the shops at the level of the river. There were only few shops on the west side, but they included a grocer and a charming pub, the Jolly Sailor, which has been a public house since the 14th century. We were told that the beams in the pub’s family room were salvaged from ships in Lord Nelson’s navy that limped home after the Battle of Trafalgar. During our week the pub’s kitchen was never open—only the taps—but a healthy crowd gathered all the same on Tuesday evening for a song circle, on Thursday evening to sing sea chanties. The singing was lusty, in all senses (my junior high choir sang sea chanties, but none as bawdy as some of these), the ale excellent (hand-pulled, of course), and the company congenial. At the song circle—for which the room was packed, mostly with vacationing Brits—a visitor from Yorkshire led us in his favorite Dylan tunes; others shared West Country ballads; and I shared an American folk hymn.
Each day we plotted out a different itinerary with some common elements—a prehistoric stone circle here, a menhir there, a Norman church or two with interesting gravestones and memorial carvnings, and always a meander along a portion of the Coastal Path, the footpath that winds along the coastline of Devon and Cornwall for more than 600 miles. Miraculously, we brought Nairobi’s weather with us to notoriously rainy and cloudy Cornwall: apart from one rainy morning and some mist, early and late, we had sunshine nearly every day. There was a countywide art exhibition going on, with open houses in a hundred little artists’ studios in the cities and villages and on remote country lanes. We visited half a dozen of these, which sometimes entailed walking a mile or two on unmarked footpaths at the end of which, if we had guessed correctly, we would find a painter or potter or sculptor waiting for the occasional visitor. Once a chance remark about our recent travels led to the disclosure that the mother/grandmother of the mother and son whose paintings were on display had spent many years with her late husband, a physician, working in clinics in several areas of Kenya and Tanzania.
We ate well, usually taking one meal in a restaurant or pub and another as a picnic to economize, and we savored half a dozen fine pub ales made in St Austell and elsewhere in Cornwall. In the evening we would often wander across the town’s only bridge to East Looe, the commercial center, and watch the daylight fading from the waterfront and quay.
If only airfare to the UK weren’t so expensive! It would be delightful to spend a week in the very same flat each summer, hiking new stretches of the coastal trail each day, sampling the Cornwall ales we did not have time for, and perhaps making a foray farther afield to Stonehenge or south Wales. But we would want to get a few of our close friends to hire the adjacent flats, so we could share the delights of the West Country. And we’d need to arrange a repeat of our exceptional weather. Dot reported that, in the week after we departed, Cornwall was enshrouded in heavy rainclouds every day.
And then on to home, after a scare at the airport when British Air insisted we had to pay a $300 excess baggage fee. The free baggage allowance is four bags for travel between the US and Africa, two for travel to Europe, and our travel agent had assured us that on one continuous ticket there would be no problem with four bags. But BA insisted that because of our stopover the Europe rules apply. Fortunately, the supervisor agreed to make an exception this time. We had a short layover at Dulles, a long one at O’Hare, and arrived home on the afternoon of June 7. Everything was in good order at our house, thanks to Ken and Jan Sink, who lived there for a month before we returned and did lots of garden cleanup and the like.
And then followed exactly two months, for me, or nearly three months, for Susan, of more or less normal life at home. Among the highlights were a grand celebration of my 60th birthday on our first weekend home—thirty friends were able to come despite the short notice—and a week’s visit each, at different times, from Klaas and Krista and from Janna and Barb. Klaas rode the 24 Hour Challenge again, but since I had clocked no more than 100 miles on my bike since 2009 I skipped the ride this year and volunteered at the checkpoint instead, punching riders’ number cards from 4 to 8 am. Klaas did well—more miles than last year, and fewer digestive problems in the afternoon and evening. Krista had just gotten over a long bout of morning sickness, and was adjusting reasonably well to her grueling new schedule of three 12-hour night shifts as a nurse on the medical-surgical floor of Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital. (This is old news to anyone in our family: our first grandchild is expected to arrive in mid-November.) At the time Janna and Barb came up for a week Janna was just winding down her work as children’s book manager for Barnes and Noble—a job she enjoyed but for which the pay was just a smidgen over minimum wage—and preparing for her new position as Program Director for Asheville Community Theater. She’s worked with their summer children’s program for many years and knows the organization well, including its severe financial problems and its difficulty finding the right supervisory staff. So far she is finding the job challenging but also rewarding, and although it’s officially a part-time job (a polite fiction, of course) the pay is considerably better than in her previous full-time job.
In July we had an unexpected opportunity to gather all four Hoekema siblings for a weekend at our house. Dot had come to give a presentation at a conference at Calvin (sponsored by an independent software testing organization), Jim was in the middle of a lengthy Accenture project at the Chicago home office, and Helen was back from the Oregon Bach Festival, and we found we had a free weekend when we could gather by the lake. It was a delightful couple of days of swimming and sunning and catching up. We hosted a lunchtime gathering of Brink cousins, which lasted all afternoon as most of the guests enjoyed the warm lake water (see below). On Sunday morning Dot and Helen and I sang two trios at our church—always a joy!
For Susan summer was a time to reopen her studio and reacquaint her hands and eyes with the ceramic arts. In the past month she has been amazingly prolific, putting out kilnload after kilnload of wares to be put on display at the annual Art on the Riverfront art show in Grand Haven. It took place a week ago. Sales were not what she had hoped for, especially of her best (and most expensive) majolica lake scenes, at which she has been working so hard, but it was a good chance to think about how to display her work in her own solo display. And she had a terrific crew of friends (some from our Grand Haven church, at least one from our former Grand Rapids church) helping to set up and tend the booth and take down. Some visitors urged her to submit her work for sale through the Muskegon Museum of Art--not only a good suggestion but a recognition of the quality of her work.
For me, the summer months were a time for review of my Fulbright work at Daystar (including some frustrating and so far unsuccessful attempts to sort out the source and rationale for alterations in the grades I had submitted for my students), submission of several articles and book reviews (on topics related to philosophy, theology, and development in Africa), and a long list of projects around the house. We had decided last year that we should replace all the front windows of the house this summer, since thirty years’ wear and some shifting of the structure have made most of them inoperable. That was a huge financial commitment (about one-third of what we paid for our first house in Northfield), and it took time to get the units in, so in the end the project was done after my departure but before Susan’s. We have a friend staying in the house for the fall, which means fewer worries about freezing or other system breakdowns. And Susan decided not to shut off the heat in the studio, as we had for the spring, so we didn’t have to drain all the plumbing and move all the clay indoors.
One of the most remarkable features of this summer—will it ever happen again?—was the seemingly endless weeks of warm Lake Michigan water. Already in June the water warmed up to nearly 70 degrees F, then dropped down to the low 60s for a week or two, but then reached 70 again before the month was out. We hosted the Bosma family Fourth of July picnic once again, a commitment we made as part of our purchase agreement for the house (informally, not in the sales contract). Last year the water was so frigid that only the youngest kids ventured in, and not for long. This year it was in the middle 70s and nearly everybody was out swimming and kayaking and throwing frisbees. Week after week through July and early August, and for the two weeks after I left, the temp never dropped much below 70, and several times there were official temperature readings of 80 or 81. Storms came and went, but the common effect of swapping warm surface water for colder water from underneath never happened. It was pure bliss to be able to swim morning, noon and night when the air was hot, and to enjoy the shimmering stars overhead at midnight without feeling the least bit chilled. A wonderful gift—maybe a consequence of global warming, maybe not, but I’m lodging no complaints.
And then, on August 6, I left home – in order to return to what has become our second home, Ghana. That warrants a new entry and a new heading. (Didn’t I warn you that this one would be brief only by my standards?)
