Learning

Separation from the kids is a rollercoaster ride . Some days i long for their bickering and other days i thinks how nice it is have break from being the all seeing eye always needing to anticipate , facilitate, negotiate, be a referee, chaffeuse, coach, cheerleader and that age old clairvoyant that is generally known as parent and more specifically as mother. Truth is i love all that stuff and much more in-between. An old fashioned thing to say but there is , before anything else i'm a mother and now grand-mother.



My grand-baby is 7 months old now and i missing all the changes she's going through. I saw her at Christmas and New Year and thankfully she remembered grandma. I'll be back home in the summer so there's alot of time to make up. I miss our nonsense conversations and the sound of her asleep in my arms.



I'm not the first nor will i be the last parent experiencing separation form the kids in an effort to give them a better life. I'm just doing it for a year. My hat is off to parents (especially women) who have to accept separation as a long term-solution.Heroes and heroines one and all.



Anyway, yesterday my friend B invited me to a meet and greet for some of the social / voluntary sector projects at the residence of the Ambassador to the European Union over here.



I went dressed in my muddy snow splattered boots , jeans and a fleece and felt quite under-dressed . B looked lovely and very diplomatically told me to get a life when i started whining. She was right . I just put on some fresh lipstick and had another spritz of my lovely Jo Malone perfume and i was good to go .The Ambassador (her boss) was/is a lovely down to earth guy and i met some really interesting people.



I got home late-ish .. about 11pm. Ganna wasn't impressed she'd been phoning me to see where i was and i didn't answer my phone.



I try to phone Ganna's twin- mum -in London if not everyday then every other day. I didn't fancy another lecture on my lateness so i didn't phone. I've been invited to a 50th birthday party next week given current form it would probably be wise to start the psychological preparations for both of them now or I'll never have any peace !

Good morning Mrs Obama !!

That was my welcome back to Moscow as i walked across the courtyard to begin my first day back at language school.Shaftaq was his name and in my walk across the courtyard and up the stairs to the entrance door to school i went from being the Presidents wife to being given inducements for me to give him my phone number and become his private plaything . Oh how the mighty fall ! Good thing I'm not one of the thousands of blondinki who sashay across this city on their imaginary catwalks. I would have needed therapy to help me accommodate my fall from fleeting greatness!

I flew back into Domodedovo airport to be greeted by -21degree weather.As i inhaled i could feel the icicles forming on the hairs in my nose . Everyone kept telling me that it was unusual even for Moscow. It has snowed constantly since I've been here . Everyday and night the valiant Kazakh and Kirghiz men and women are here shovelling and shovelling side streets ,paths and pavements. Snow falls again and they shovel all over again. I think that they are magnificent but typical Russian style nobody acknowledges their valiance mainly because they are considered a lowly migrant people.

I rarely see 'Russian' dvorniks (roadsweepers/cleaners) on the roads. They're in or near the Metro. On the streets it's our valiant Kazakh or Kirghiz. As i trudged to the shops a couple of days ago to buy food ( Ganna's constant moan is that i don't eat enough) passing mounds of snow near waist high. I saw a mini snow plough and breathed a little sigh of relief. Then i noticed that the man sitting in the snow plough was a 'Russian' and the guy outside with the snow shovel was a Kazakh. I wished i had my camera at that moment. There wouldn't have been any need to comment.

Anyway , Ganna and i have fallen back into our usual playful ' have you eaten? No, i haven't' routine.
She's an absolute star and i love her to pieces. Her sense of humour is fabulous as his her comic timing. Slowly, slowly I'm getting to know more of her past. As always this knowledge brings with it a need to acknowledge the scars of suffering.Ganna is Jewish. Her father was a Latvian Jew. On the invasion and occupation of Latvia all Jews were made herded into a Jewish ghetto. Eleven members of her Latvian family dug their own graves and were then murdered by the German soldiers. She has no connection with Latvia anymore.

One of the research projects that I'm going to do for university is on the media presentation ( in the Ukraine and in Russia) of the famine the 1930. I was showing her one of the books that I'd bought while i was in the UK on holiday. It had the word 'holocaust ' in the title . She got very agitated which is very unlike her.She wouldn't even look at the book and told me quite emphatically what happened in Ukraine wasn't a holocaust. For her a holocaust is when 6 millions people were deliberately murdered and no one cared. For some reason i chose that moment to ask her whether she goes to the synagogue. Without hesitation she replied ' I don't believe in God. Tell me, where was God when millions of people facing death called his name and begged for life?' No , i don't believe in God'.

As part of my reading for my project I'm reading about other unheard cries..... 800,000 of them in Rwanda. I remember my fathers people in Biafra . In these and all the other killing fields that humanity has created where was/is God ? I must ask my great friend and liberation theologian Delroy about this and see what his answer is.