“Dawn service gnangarra 03” by Photographs by Gnangarra…commons.wikimedia.org. Licensed under CC BY 2.5 au via Wikimedia Commons.
Yesterday was Anzac day, and like most Australian public holidays it’s interesting to explain to people here. It seems the explanation has to either be very short, or very long. Continue reading
I spent part of yesterday looking through old photos. They’re never the photos I wish I’d taken, of course, and they often don’t capture the memories I really want to hang onto.
Like my photos from Arizona a few years ago.
So… The most blog-able thing I’ve done recently was to lose my sense of smell.
Not quite sure when it happened. Maybe last weekend. Do you know what’s really hard? Wracking your brains trying to think when you last remember smelling something. Seriously, try it — see, now you’re also wondering if you haven’t smelt anything for weeks.
But I like to think it was fairly recent, because surely I wouldn’t have gone very long in Italy of all places without noticing I couldn’t smell. Continue reading
Happy Easter, if you celebrate it.
I had the most cliche moment on the bus the other day.
I was sitting there thinking about all the annoying things that had gone on that week, I’m tired and my bank’s being a pain about sending me a new atm card and my water heater’s carked it and I have to book a follow-up MRI in a medical beaurocracy I don’t understand at all and and and… And — I know this is on made-for-TV movie level — I looked out the window and it was the clearest sunniest afternoon I’ve ever seen in Torino, the sky was cloudless and the mountains looked like they were just down the street and I realized, I really do have it pretty good. Imagine me looking out the window, and suddenly breaking into a grin, maybe add some inspiring background music.
“Extremely glamorous” is extremely stretching the truth this week. I mean, even more so than usual.
“Maybe if I fall asleep in this dream, I’ll wake up in my own bed,” I thought, as I tried to get comfortable on the stretcher I was lying on, somewhere in a corridor in the emergency department. Around me, nurses distributed drugs, chatting with patients in rapid Italian. “I can’t believe I’m dreaming in Italian!” I thought, as I drifted into a doze.
I woke up. I was still in hospital.
Just a very quick note in lieu of a proper post last week (and this week!) – for those who follow my goings-on via this blog, you may not have heard that last weekend I tried crossing the road the same time a car was coming through.
I’m absolutely fine – everything happened quite slowly it seems and I bounced pretty well – but it does mean I’ve spent the past few days focusing on discovering the ins and outs of the Italian medical system. Which will make a great blog post eventually, but probably not until next weekend.
(In the meantime, I can’t help but leave the teaser that some of my friends found me at the hospital by asking for ‘the Australian’, to which the staff replied, ‘you mean the one who’s been vomiting the whole time?’ I guess this counts as maintaining the reputation of Aussies abroad.)
Here’s a question I’ve been pondering this week, and I’d love input from other people living away from their “home” country: How involved are you in your home country’s politics? How involved should you be? I mean politics here in the broadest sense, not just elections and governments but social issues generally. How closely do you follow the news? Do you keep giving money to causes you supported previously? If you’re allowed to vote, do you? Should you?
What prompted all this was a friend here asking me how I felt about Australia’s refugee policies. For years now, governments from both sides of politics have had policies of mandatory offshore detention for anyone coming to Australia by boat. The stated goal of this is to undermine the business model of people smugglers, apparently by trying to make coming to Australia even less appealing than, y’know, for example, getting killed by the Taliban in Afghanistan. The detention camps are squalid and mental illness and sexual abuse are reportedly endemic. Whatever the solution is to people smugglers preying on the desperate, torturing the same desperate people is surely not it.
This sums it up. (From the Asylum Seekers Resource Centre.)
So my answer to my friend’s question was: I am appallled. My country is literally trying to be more unattractive than the Iranian government, warlords in Afghanistan and human rights abusers in Sri Lanka. And just the other week, our Prime Minster said he felt no guilt “whatsoever” about the situation. (Oh, my blood pressure after I read that…)
So yeah, I’m angry. I’m also sad. And I feel guilty.
Guilty because this is being done in my name as an Australian, and what am I doing to stop it? Or even to register my disapproval?
Which brings me back to my opening question. What can I do? What should I do?
It’s tempting to say: not my problem, what happens in Australia now has nothing to do with me. Maybe I should even butt out, after all, do I want to become one of those meddling foreigners who has a vague connection to a country and therefore feels qualified to lecture it on how to conduct its affairs?
But that doesn’t sit right with me, to say “whew, glad I’ll never be a refugee” and to get on with more pressing concerns like, “what’s for lunch?” And anyway, I’ve been asked about Australian politics often enough that I don’t think people around me are going to let me shrug it off any time soon.
So, what to do?
Australia lets you stay on the electoral roll and vote for several years after you leave the country, and I did vote in the last federal election. But so did 94% of voters (and we all tutted about low turnout — that’s compulsory voting for you!) and we still wound up with a government that seemingly no-one is happy with at the moment.
I can write emails to politicians. Does that do anything? Here is the frustration of being abroad — I’ve heard that in-person visits are really the way to go if you want to be heard, but that option is out for me. I can post things on facebook — I can barely type that with a straight face, has anything in the world ever changed because someone posted something on facebook? (Besides your friend count, as people decide you’re “that person”?)
As a Christian, I do believe that I can pray. But I also believe God usually answers prayers through peoples’ actions rather than thunderbolt or angelic visitation, so sitting here piously praying without also doing what I can feels false to me. (Like the apostle James says: “Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it?”)
Any better ideas? Thoughts about political involvement generally?
PS: I still miss Australia. I mean, look at this:
Most cafes in Turin are deeply traditional — fittings that have been lovingly maintained and never updated since the 1930s, carved dark wood and floral fabrics everywhere, seasonal window displays. Old ladies in fur coats having their morning cappuccino made just so, the way they’ve taken it every morning for the past 50 years. A few tables, mostly with couples or men reading the newspaper.
Photo: “Turin cafe” by Signe Karin CC BY
No laptops, obviously. Why would you mix your coffee break with your work?
I love the traditional cafes, even if I always feel underdressed compared to the staff in bowties and waistcoats. But sometimes you just need some free wifi and don’t mind if the coffee isn’t quite as good, which is how I ended up yesterday afternoon at exki, a chain of what I suppose you’d call ‘American style’ cafes. Ikea-style furniture, big open spaces, a children’s play area available.
It seems half of Torino goes there on a Saturday evening. The children playing in the toy kitchen were accompanied by their immaculately-dressed mother, wearing a black lace dress and high heels. A few tables over from me was a chap who I will generously assume was actually a professor but oh my goodness he so clearly also wanted to look like a professor I had a hard time not giggling. A cluster of students were sitting on bar stools around a high table, studying for exams. Outside it was raining and as people came they added their umbrellas to the pile at the door.
I sat there eating brownie, idly people watching with the background white noise of conversations going on around me, and I found myself compelled to write (this post, actually). It was a sort of sensory memory — something clicked and I was back in a very similar cafe in Glasgow, where I wrote the bulk my PhD thesis during early-morning cafe sessions, fuelled by americanos and interspersed with people-watching.
My thesis remains the longest thing I’ve ever written — I much prefer short-form blog posts! — and writing it taught me to write. Not necessarily with grace or style, but just the act of writing, of getting my thoughts firmed up and on a page whether I feel writerly or not.
And apparently it also taught my subconcious that if you’re in a cafe with a laptop, you should be writing. Well then.
Where's Zoe now? 