Inspiration Pilgrimage

The Camino ever on my mind

2011-07-15T21:52:00.000-04:00

How can it be that more than a year has passed since I wrote here? It's known as life.

Yet I have this crazy dream of setting up a chapel on the side of the camino where I can do foot washing, offer eucharist to those pilgrims who wish… be it in France or Spain... as one who walked the whole way from Le Puy, France to Santiago, I know what it is like to engage in that long-distance walking that leads to prayer and quietude.

I hearken back to this scene we found to the west of León. The woman responsible for it had walked the camino and was so taken by the journey that she dropped everything and moved to be near the camino to offer hospitality to other pilgrims. Under the little tents were artichokes. There was a tin with tea, and oranges and all manner of goodies for the walker.

I try to be a 'trail angel' to those walking the Long Trail/Appalachian Trail as it goes through nearby but I would love to be a trail angel on the Camino.

Just a crazy dream.

Still deep in my heart

2010-02-26T22:26:00.001-05:00

About this time six years ago, we were beginning to crank up our planning for our first segment of walking the Camino. While this might be ages ago, the Camino still resides deeply in my heart.

This posting is simply to keep the blog alive with the hope that someday I can get back to it... and who knows, maybe there will be real entries of walking once again on the camino?

Meditation 3: Arrival

2009-03-01T23:14:00.002-05:00

Keeping to the main road is easy, but people love to be sidetracked.
Lao Tzu

I’ll labour night and day to be a pilgrim. Hymn 564

As you may know, we did not walk the entire 1521 kms/960 miles in one trip; we broke it up into four segments. Hence, for the next three springs, we researched where we were going, I would phone across the ocean to make reservations for the first two weeks, we’d pick up the packs, and hit the road. Only that first spring did we have the sense of total confusion and feeling lost; on subsequent trips we better understood how the system worked and could re-enter with minimal difficulty.

After the first spring, we knew what the daily routine would be and I would find myself looking forward to its simplicity. Just as a monastic community has its rhythm, so does the pilgrim community. Depending on where you stayed determined reveille. If we stayed in one of the dorm-like refugios, the rustling of plastic bags (always!), thundering footsteps, no matter how quiet people tried to be, and whispers would wake us up. If we stayed in a more civilized place like a small hotel or B&B, we’d get ourselves going. No matter how many times we did it, it still would take us an hour to pack up (because the night before we had totally unpacked, especially if we had to use our sleeping bag because it resides in the bottom of the pack), get our water set and boot up. If it was raining, putting on the rain gear added time. Before leaving, I would pull out the little slips of paper on which people had written their prayers, and I would go through them so I could carry them with me in the course of the day. I had a rota going so I would say: OK, you need to remember to pray today for so-and-so.

Sometimes we would set off having had breakfast, other times we would have to walk a while before getting that first cup of coffee, orange juice and croissant. The first half hour was getting the kinks out of one’s system, adjusting boot laces, wondering if that tendonitis in the knee was going to kick in, or if that deep blister was going to hurt more than it did the day before. At the beginning of the day, there sometimes would be short stops to get organized. Then we would walk for another three hours or so before stopping for a break. On long days, we’d try to knock off 20kms in the morning before lunch because after lunch, the walking was always harder. On super long days (35kms) we would crank out as much as we could and take as few and as short breaks as possible. Afternoons and early evening, we’d begin to wind down — not intentionally but simply because we’d been walking all day and it was one day piled up on top of another. The last hour, no matter how far or short a distance remained, could be the worst and there were days I felt like a moribund tortoise.

When we’d get to where we were to spend the night, we’d change into our one other set of clothes (our ‘evening clothes’) and do laundry of what we’d had on. Everything we wore is synthetic meant to dry quickly. I would try to journal where we’d been or anything of interest. Sometimes sleep would get the better of me. Then it was off to dinner, meeting up with other walkers, and then back for an early bedtime because we’d be doing the same thing the next day.

Anyone who has walked either the Long Trail or the Appalachian Trail knows that there is a whole trail mentality and community. On the LT and AT people give themselves trail names, leave messages in notebooks at the shelters, help one another out and sometimes even share food (we do because we are always short haul walkers).

So it is on the Camino. We rarely knew other people’s names (I sometimes felt it was like being in a huge twelve-step meeting) so sometimes would end up giving them nicknames like Dog Man (because he walked with his dog) or the Swiss woman, the horse people (self-evident), the photographer, or the nice Danes who shared their lunch with us. (I suspect some called me gimpy the third year of walking.) Still, we tended to walk with a pack of people insofar as most people started from and ended up at the same places. You’d recognise faces, wave to one another, ask the essential: how their feet, knees, shoulders and back were holding up. We’d share chocolate, bread and cheese. If someone looked lost, we’d whistle and wildly gesticulate to get them back on the path. The Camino community watches out for itself.

Most walkers were what I would call ‘seekers,’ the folks who would say they were spiritual but not religious, in other words, plugged into the institutional church. It being France and Spain, we ran into a lot of lapsed Catholics. Despite their lack of church affiliation, they would pick up on the inherent spirituality found in walking a pilgrimage route that dates back to the 9th century and on which thousands and thousands of feet have trod.

Claiming the title, ‘pilgrim,’ took some time, however. Initially, I was someone from the Untied States, a French medievalist, an Episcopal priest. But pilgrim? Gradually, the name took. Perhaps it was being wished every day buen camino, have a good trip, by so many people along the way. Or it was people calling us pilgrims. Well, we were. That’s what it said on our credencial: we were walking this pilgrimage route on foot for spiritual reasons. We would stop in any open church we could find (in the Alteplano of Spain, our success rate was dismal); I would light any candles I could find (lots of real ones in France, lots of electric ones, which I just can’t bring myself to ‘light’ in Spain) and we would sign the book that countless pilgrims before us had signed. These books both in Spain and France contain the prayers and thoughts of pilgrims and I would always read the page on which I signed. If I had time (i.e., if we were taking a break in a cool church on a hot day), I would go back several pages. We were walking for the MDGs in 2007; in previous years, I had other intentions for which I was walking. Eventually, I claimed being a pilgrim in my heart as well as in my mind and on subsequent trips, I refound the pilgrim spirit within hours.

Oftentimes people set off on a pilgrimage with a set idea of what they are going to discover. I tended to go with an open heart and mind, trusting that over the course of two plus weeks of quiet time, God would reveal Godself in some way to me. My first year I think the message was a continuation of sabbatical: what does it mean to live simply in a pared-down life? The second year, I was discerning whether or not to go forward in a conversation with a congregation and on the second-to-last day, the message was quite clear that I should. The third year I learned what it meant to live with daily pain and to have more compassion for others who suffer with it, and to have patience with myself. And the last year, I lived in one of life’s hard lessons, letting go. I found that the patterning rhythm of walking, the quiet (we would talk sometimes but other times walk for an hour or two in silence) would allow for God to come close.

We experienced four departures and four arrivals. Each arrival had a different impact on me. Obviously the most significant arrival was that of Santiago. After all, those who walk the last 60 miles (100 kms) receive the coveted Compostela (mine hangs in the office here) which I received on 6 May 2004 in a jubilee year. The closer we got to Santiago the more crowded the Camino got and the harder it was to find lodging. That was when I was set to make phone calls to hotels to book us rooms ahead of time so we could walk in peace. We decided not to stay at the massive pilgrim center, a former army base, five kms out of Santiago but instead walked in our last day on a 18 km walk. As we got close to Santiago the heavens dumped on us for good measure. We got to the outer road of the city and realised this was it; we were about to arrive. We came in through the side street, walked through a passageway and found ourselves at the cathedral, this huge gaudy Baroque building (the façade covers a Romanesque tympanum). My first unvarnished thought when I saw it was: So this is the object of my desire? This is what I have been walking two weeks for? My next thought was: And we have to climb up all those stairs to get inside?

When we arrived two years later in Saint Jean Pied de Port, the end of the 450-mile French Way of Saint James, I started to weep. It wasn’t just because I had just walked two weeks with two broken toes, it was because I realised I was finishing this part of the pilgrimage. Even though I knew the next day that we would be walking over the Pyrenees to Roncesvalles, Spain, I still had this deep ache that we were leaving the pilgrimage route.

In 2007, when we walked the last 20 kms of this 1520km trek, it seemed unreal. For four springs we had packed up our lives, entered into this flowing stream of humanity headed westwards and now we were truly ending the quest. We walked into a very small hamlet in the mountains and it was at a little chapel run by a monastic order that I lit my last candles, said my last prayers and left the Camino. The next day we watched the pilgrims begin their day but we had already stepped off that treadmill. It was very hard to see. Each spring, I get intense longings to rejoin that stream of humanity.

We learned as so many other pilgrims do in those moments is that the ending is not an ending and it is not what matters. What one finds out is that the journey is what matters. A mural on a wall outside of Nájera contains a poem painted over several panels. It asks: ‘Pilgrim, what attracts you to the road?’ It then gives possible reasons why and on the last panel the answer appears: ‘Only the One above knows.’ Elsewhere in a refugio, pilgrims will read: Peregrina, you do not walk the path, the path is YOU, your footsteps, these are the Camino.

What one realises is that throughout one’s entire life, one is a pilgrim. One may never set foot on a pilgrimage route, but one is a pilgrim as one tries to hear what God might be saying, as one prays, as one participates in the community’s life of prayer.

T. S. Eliot wrote:

We shall not cease from exploration
And at the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Arthur Paul Boers reflects on this stanza: ‘We shall not cease exploration’; we are always sojourners moving along the way, not just when we are official pilgrims. That ongoing restless wandering perpetually brings us back home to ourselves. Just as the Camino showed me more deeply things I already knew about myself, so it invited me to be acquainted with my home and life in new ways, ‘for the first time.’ And, as Scott Russell Sanders notes: ‘Pilgrims often journey to the ends of the earth in search of holy ground, only to find that they have never walked on anything else.’ (1)

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We are about to start our Lenten pilgrimage. We will find that the path is us. We may not know where the road will lead; we follow day by day…. Come Easter, we will arrive at a point and place in time but we know that next year the pilgrimage route will call to us once again. There is some consolation in that knowledge; whatever we don’t get to this Lent, we have all year to walk with it. When we arrive at Easter, remember to let your soul catch up with where you have been. Be in the present moment.

As we walk into Lent, may we pray: Lord, take me where you want me to go; let me meet who you want me to meet; tell me what you want me to say, and keep me out of your way. (Mychal F. Judge)

END NOTE
(1) Arthur Paul Boers, The Way is Made by Walking: A Pilgrimage Along the Camino de Santiago (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2007), 178.

PHOTO
Saint Jean Pied-de-Port, 28 May 2006.

Meditation 2: Pilgrimage

2009-03-01T23:08:00.003-05:00

The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.
Loa Tzu (570-499 BCE)

You cannot travel the path until you become the path.
Buddha (563-483 BCE)

So after all the preparation, we found ourselves flying across the Atlantic to London, then onto Madrid and finally onto Pamplona. Jet-lagged, we arrived in Burguete, via taxi, as planned, in the late afternoon. For those of you who have spent the night up like that, you know how your head begins to spin from fatigue.

Part of where we were was familiar, that is, I had been in Spain before, I spoke Spanish. I had even been in Basque country in the Pyrenees on both sides of the border (French and Spanish). But to realise that from here on in, we were on our own, on our feet, was a different matter.

We had all our photocopies and books. We even had a fairly good idea of how long we would walk each day but that was all theoretical. So, rather than deal with the whole pilgrimage, we decided to go for the particular: we walked the 2 kms over to Roncesvalles to have dinner and then go to the pilgrims’ mass.

We got lost heading up to the monastery because we didn’t yet understand how the signals worked: if the shell points one way you go left; if it goes the other right and finally a third way, straight. We ended up on someone’s barnyard and knew that wasn’t right so simply walked up the road some until we saw another yellow shell that got us on the path which was much nicer walking.

There was a sense of feeling it all was surreal. Perhaps it was because I had studied about this area and now I was in the place where it had taken place. But most of it was because we were about to walk some 250 miles across the top of Spain and were going to be calling ourselves pilgrims, too.

The pilgrim mass, which is held every night, helped us take those preliminary steps. I have no idea what the priests must think, doing this every night. Most of the people there were staying in the cavernous refugio across the street from the church so we were a bit disconnected from the mob that had walked across the Pyrenees that day from France. We all had gotten our credencial, the little booklet that proves you are a pilgrim and gives you access to refugios and sometimes breaks on prices on museums and restaurants but mostly affirms that you have walked the requisite 100 kms to get the Compostela, a certificate that one gets at the end of the pilgrimage. We hailed from all over but mostly Europe. People were surprised that people from the United States had even heard of the Camino, which always led into a discussion of how that might be possible.

I wasn’t expecting the liturgy to be moving but when the priest blessed us all at the end of the mass and prayed that Saint James would accompany us all the way to Santiago, I felt as though this pilgrimage was officially launched.

But growing into what it means to be a pilgrim, and owning the label ‘pilgrim’ did not happen right away.

We went to bed with a combination of excitement and exhaustion and slept through to the morning when it was time to get up and out. We packed up our packs (making sure to have water to get us through the day) and then stepped out the door.

It was pouring rain, not just a nice mist but pouring rain. No lovely sights of the Pyrenees — we could barely see down the street. So on with the rain gear and off with the glasses (which always makes life impressionistic). Off we went on our first day of our pilgrimage!

Walking with a book bag or a purse is a different proposition than walking with a pack that weighs 22 pounds. Add in another 3-4 pounds of water and you’ve got an extra 25 pounds on your knees and feet. But that thought is for another moment, another time.

We walked down the main street, the very road on which the taxi had brought us in. We couldn’t find our yellow and blue shell anywhere. We crossed the road to where we thought it might be but didn’t see it. We went in circles for about ten minutes and then, frustrated and grumping at each other, decided to walk on the road. Not an auspicious beginning! That was not a terribly nice choice because the edge of the road was narrow and the cars tended to go very fast even though it was a winding, mountainous road. Every time a car would go by, we would have to jump to the side to avoid its spray and getting clipped.

We walked probably a mile and a half, wondering all the while where this stupid (that is what I was thinking by then) pilgrimage path was. How come we couldn’t find it? Why wasn’t it better marked?

Finally, our path and the Camino met. The camino had been across the road — we had figured that out by then — and it had to cross the road to climb up into the woods above the road. When the two paths converged, we felt better: NOW we were en route.

But what we ended up walking was hardly easier or nicer. The Pyrenees are old mountains and have a lot of ridges. Add to that, hundreds, thousands of pilgrim feet walking the same path, rain or shine, snow or dust, and you get erosion. Our going was slow: the camino had been worn down to a spiny ridge that was on an angle (we were walking across a slope). It was incredibly muddy which made things very slippery. I was already questioning our sanity. We had no choice but to go forward. We had a tight calendar, Debbie was already an hour plus ahead of us and we had to walk our way out of this mess.

It was also very cold and our fleece gloves soon got soaked. I discovered that even if they are soaked they can reasonably keep my fingers warm. I thought of how crazy it was to be doing this activity: willingly walking in the pouring rain with all this stuff on my back.

We sloshed our way through the mud and gradually made our way down from the mountain. We arrived in another village and took refuge in a jai lai court. There we met a French woman who asked if we had walked from Le Puy, France. No, we answered. She said we absolutely had to — the region of Aubrac was gorgeous. We didn’t realise at the time that this discussion would set the course of the next three years and that we would, indeed, go to France the next year and walk from Le Puy to Moissac, going through Aubrac which is gorgeous and very similar to New England. At the time, we simply ate some fruit, chatted and commiserated.

As the day went on and as we walked out of the mountains, the rain let up and by early afternoon, we could take off our rain gear. That felt good! We walked past a concrete factory, which was dismal but on the other side of it we entered a hamlet and I saw a house that had four cats, two in each windowsill, one on top of a geranium flowerpot and the fourth lying in the sun. It was good to find something familiar in the midst of the unfamiliar.

We finally arrived at the place to where we were supposed to spend the night [Zubiri]. We had looked at our guide in the morning and selected three or four possible places (we weren’t making reservations) and given the names to Debbie who would have arrived before us. While it hadn’t been raining for a while, we were still muddy and wet. We stopped at each one of the places. No Debbie. We even stopped at the refugio, which was in the municipal building. Even though it was afternoon, the place was a beehive of activity — people drying out, cleaning the mud off their boots and packs and staking out their bunk. We weren’t ready to deal with that yet so we walked to the end of town to a small restaurant that had rooms for the night. We booked a triple so that if we found Debbie, there would be space for her.

Then we also unpacked. We discovered that the reason I was soaking wet from within and without was that the fancy new waterpack had split and the two liters of water had streamed down my backside, turning my new pants an interesting combination of khaki and blue dye. So they would remain for the rest of the walk. Our passports, plane tickets and credenciales were also soaked so we hung them up to dry on some parachute cord we had brought with us.

Still no Debbie. Here it was the first day of our walk and we had lost her!

Sometimes things don’t always go according to plan.

We found that lesson out later on in the Camino when we went through a stretch of days where the Camino veered off the routes that were so carefully printed on our maps. For three or four days, I shoved the Xeroxed map into my pants pocket because it had become totally useless. The directions told us we would cross railroad tracks, go through a village, come out the other side, and walk along such-and-such a road. Instead, we found ourselves crossing a bridge over an eight-lane highway (detour number one), then walking three of the four sides of a wheat field (detour number two), going under another bridge that was very new with thundering traffic overhead (detour number three), and meandering along a river (detour number four). At least on that particular stretch the locals knew we’d been taken off the predicted track and had placed a wonderful plaque on the bridge which asked our forgiveness for this detour.

On days like that, I just walked, not worrying about what the map said since it no longer reflected reality as I found it in front of me and under my feet. I trusted that somewhere there would be a scallop shell that would give me a clue of where I was to go.

As for claiming the name of pilgrim, I will reflect on that in the next meditation.

And Debbie? She had stopped one town before we were stopped, spent the night and then walked 5 kms the next morning. Just as I was about to call her sister in France, she walked into sight. After that moment, we were more clear about where we going to stop and we never lost one another again.

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What does it mean to walk in prayer? Even if one is not walking physically, one should think about the speed with which one lives and prays. Jane Redmond in her reissued book, When in Doubt, Sing, cites Kosuke Koyama, a Japanese theologian. He writes in his book Three Mile an Hour God: ‘We live today in an efficient and speedy life… There is a great value in efficiency and speed. But… I find God goes “slowly”’ in helping human beings to grow. ‘Forty years in the wilderness’ points to God’s ‘educational philosophy.… In the wilderness we slow down to the pace at which we walk: three miles an hour. Entering prayer… is, in many ways, entering a kind of wilderness, where the essentials of life stand in starker relief than they do outside, in the world’s rush. ‘Love has its speed…. It is an inner speed… a spiritual speed…. It is the speed we walk and therefore it is the speed the love of God walks.’ Redmond say: To encounter the love of God in prayer today, we may need to slow down to ‘three miles an hour.’ (1)

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In each of us dwells a pilgrim. It is the part of us that longs to have direct contact with the sacred. We will travel halfway around the world and endure great sacrifice and pain to enter the sanctuary, whether it is a temple, shrine, cemetery or library. This is the way that is no way, but a practice. Your practice is your path. If so, ‘the Way is uncontrived,’ as Lao Tzu said. It is simply the way of seeing, the way of hearing, the way of touching, the way of walking, the way of being, with humility. (2)

In the end all our journeys are journeys to find God, and therefore to find ourselves.

What happens when we get off-course? How do we get ourselves back on course? Certainly returning again and again to a life of prayer, returning to the community at prayer helps one regain one’s footsteps and direction. Sometimes we have to ask others to pray for us; that is why there is the community.

There are times when our prayer life doesn’t go the way we want it to. We think that God should be telling us in clear terms what we should be doing. Usually in those moments, we create enough static that God can’t get through to us, in the same way the Job did when he yelled at God. Finally, when he quieted down, God spoke to him. There may well be times when our prayer life seems to take us way off the track. In those moments, we have to trust that God will get through to us and steer us back in the right direction.

Finally, carving out quiet time to find the three-mile-an-hour God (which actually still is a good pace when walking) can help keep us on the Way. Simon Weil, the French philosopher, spoke of practicing mindfulness, that is, attentiveness. She said absolutel attention is prayer. Taking time out to notice the small things in life will heighten our connection to God.

So, let us begin our pilgrimage into the day’s quiet and into the mystery of Lent.

END NOTES
(1) Jane Redmont, When in Doubt, Sing: Prayer in Daily Life (Notre Dame, IN: Sorin Books, 1999, 2008), 24.

(2) Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker’s Guide to Making Travel Sacred (York Beach, ME: Conari Press, 1998), 92.

Lenten Quiet Day meditation 1, Preparation

2009-03-01T22:13:00.004-05:00

This weekend I did a Lenten quiet day for the church's chapter of the Daughters of the King. I used my journey on the Camino de Santiago as my example and extrapolated some reflections from it. The first is here.

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The day on which one starts out is not the time to start one’s preparations.
Nigerian folk saying

Five years ago when I was thinking about sabbatical, a first for both Saint Mary’s and for myself, I cast about how I might spend the three months away from the daily routine of parish life. I knew somehow that I wanted to be physically challenged, spiritually engaged and participating in some form of outreach.

I had thought of doing an Outward Bound program about which I had heard from our neighbour who had led it once upon a time. It involved cross-country skiing and camping in Minnesota in the winter, a solo trip in extreme cold and simply being out there. What intrigued me was her description of sleeping on the ice of a lake and hearing it ‘talk’ throughout the night. Even though I feared for my digits, I thought it would be neat to do, to push my body in ways it never had been before, to get away from civilization and to experience beauty that otherwise was inaccessible. But the timing and the cost of the program made it impossible so I laid aside that idea, waiting for the right one to come along.

At the same time, I was trying to figure out the outreach component and spiritual engagement piece of sabbatical. The spiritual seemed the easiest to work out: I had long wanted to experience Holy Week at the Convent of Saint Helena in Vail’s Gate. It would be my first Holy Week not in charge of everything in a decade and that also would be a change. Getting a room at the convent was easy and so that part was all set up.

Likewise, the outreach part of sabbatical seemed to present itself without much thought: go to El Salvador and live there, doing whatever the bishop wanted me to do. Again, those pieces fell into place rather easily: we agreed on the dates, there was a room where I could stay and when I got there, we would figure out what I would do.

But what about the physical challenge part of sabbatical which seemed so important at the time? I was running into dead ends until a dear friend, Debbie, who wanted to go on pilgrimage said: What about the Camino de Santiago de Compostela? All of a sudden, little bells started to ding in my head and I remembered how in 1984 I had encountered churches along the Camino as a group of medievalists and I travelled through northern Spain. More bells went off: of course! I had written my Ph.D. dissertation on the Song of Roland, which describes the ambush of the rear guard high up in the Pyrenees. The Camino starts at Roncesvalles, the site of the massacre.

It all made sense and the sabbatical was then in place: I would spend six weeks in El Salvador, return, go to Saint Helena’s for Holy Week and then we would take off on the Camino for two and a half weeks.

Getting the itinerary and timing was step one in the sabbatical process. Then it was preparing the congregation for the time away, lining up who would do what in my absence (as I called it, ‘the little things that just happen’) and making sure there was supply clergy for the Sundays I would be gone. With help from vestry members, those needs were also taken care of and I felt I could leave for sabbatical without worry.

One can prepare for El Salvador only so much because life there is so unpredictable. I could take a big suitcase with me (back in the days before the airlines charged so much money) with enough clothes for six weeks; I didn’t have to worry about money because El Salvador uses the dollar and therefore using ATMs wasn’t an issue. The actual agenda down there was a whole other matter and I knew from experience that one just went with the flow and tried not to let it wear oneself out.

Preparation for the Camino was a whole other matter, however. And being in El Salvador got me off the hook; it was Anne who did all the work. As I was trying to keep my head above water with the cultural and linguistic challenges, I was getting emails like these:

I have tried on six different boots so far. A couple are possibilities…. Am also checking out rain jackets. There is [one] that is about $100 that looks good. The best is another, but it is $179. The store has a medium on sale for close to $100 that would probably fit you…. There is yet another one that looks interesting that the person at the store said is in between the other two quality wise. They only had large and all of them are blue. Might work for you.…

Are your eyes crossing? Think about reading these words when it’s 90 degrees outside and you are sitting in an office in front of an air conditioner.

Another note said: I am obsessing about the backpack situation. It seems dumb not to use the ones we have but I think they are too big and too heavy. The new one I got is light enough and it is quite comfortable but it is also big. I have put a bunch of clothes in it, and I realise that though the pack is far from full, it has way more in it than we will carry in Spain. So I have gone back to researching light packs.

OK, there was less disconnect simply because I wasn’t thinking about jackets. I could understand backpacks, sort of though I couldn’t really imagine what 20 pounds felt like since I usually haul that much around in books and laptop.

Then she started to write about the weather: I found a site that has temperatures for Spain. I copied into a Word document the average April and May temps for five or six cities on the Camino…. Looks like it will be fairly cool and probably rainy. Good walking weather if it isn’t too rainy.

Well, it was moving into the rainy season in El Salvador so I could relate to the dampness but not the idea of cold rain.
Then it was onto our sleeping bags.

I got your sleeping bag out today. It does not say what it weighs, though it says it has 20 oz of fill. But unless you think it might be too hot, I think it is probably light enough to take. I don’t think it can be over 3 lbs whereas mine is between 4 and 5.

Did this make any sense? What is three pounds any way? Why would that matter? I couldn’t imagine what the difference of a pound would make even though I knew she was right. Weight seemed to be a big problem.

In another email, I read: I do want to weigh your sleeping bag and if it is not too much more than 3 lbs, I’d say it will be OK. The refugios might be cold. D emailed this morning and said she had a bag that is 3.75 lbs. It is a big heavy one but it may not make sense to pay for another one. Mine is just too huge and heavy.

My head just wasn’t getting the weight business. I knew it was important; I have hauled 30 pounds of stuff up the NH Whites, all of it necessary, but that was short bursts of putting out energy, not day after day.

Having pretty much settled on the equipment, Anne then started researching plane tickets, train schedules and anything related to ground transportation. She also started working on our calendar — how many kilometers we would walk each day, from where to where and how long it might take. That sounds easy but it meant looking up a lot of things on the web as this email said:

The current plan is to meet D at the airport. The bus to Roncesvalles leaves the center of Pamplona at 6 but it seems to me we would be better off taking a taxi. D’s friend suggested staying in Burguete which is a bout 2 miles on the Pamplona side of Roncesvalles, and walking to R for the pilgrim mass which is at 8pm, having dinner and then walking back. She said the refugio at R is cold and cavernous. So we could take the taxi to Burguete, stay in a decent place since we will all be tired, walk to R for the mass and back, and then start out on Thursday. I am thinking we might walk to Estella (four days) and then take buses to the place we chose for the last part. Anyway, things are coming together!

The next thing I need to find out is the train and bus situation to get through the parts we won’t walk. The guides have a bit of info but I want to see if any schedules are accessible on the web. If I find some I can’t understand I will send you the addresses and you can check them out.

In her research, Anne found a neat place down in North Carolina that sells maps and guidebooks and so she ordered a few. Armed with maps (gold!) she now could get down to details.

When I came back from El Salvador, she had figured out the entire walk, where we would skip by bus and train, where we would pick up again and how long it would take. It was a labour of love that ultimately made for a far less stressful pilgrimage. As the adage says The day on which one starts out is not the time to start one’s preparations.

+

Preparation for an endeavour like this — walking 260 miles — is essential. Joyce Rupp who wrote Walk in a Relaxed Manner: Life Lessons from the Camino, says: ‘Reflecting back I now laugh at how needing to prepare for the Camino never occurred to me. I thought I would simply take a backpack and a pair of hiking boots, get on a plane to Spain, and start out. If I had actually done that, I would probably not have lasted more than a few days. She writes how her spiritual director said to her: “Remember, the preparation is as important as the journey itself.”’ (1)

Another Camino pilgrim, Arthur Paul Boers, in his chapter, ‘Your Pack’s Too Big,’ realises in his preparation that the key to surviving is: Simplify, simplify, simplify. He remembers the directions from Jesus to the disciples as recounted in the gospel according to Matthew (10.9-10): Take no gold or silver, or copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals or a staff: for labourers deserve their food. (2)

+

This past week, just three days ago, we observed Ash Wednesday, a moment when we look at our limitations and our mortality. It is the first day of a season that asks us to become pilgrims in the walk of love. To become a pilgrim, we have to make ourselves humble, humble like dust and ashes. We have to understand that there is no direct way to this love, to God, we have to make the way as we walk.

In some ways, our route is already laid out ahead of us with distinct markers in place (Sundays). There’s no surprise about where we are going… or so it would seem. But not until we start walking will we find out if it is that straightforward or if God is going to write straight on the crooked lines of our paths. Part of the journey is the preparation; part of the journey is simplification. How do you prepare?

END NOTES
(1) Joyce Rupp: Walk in a Relaxed Manner: Life Lessons from the Camino (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2005), 43.
(2) Arthur Paul Boers, The Way is Made by Walking: A Pilgrimage Along the Camino de Santiago (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2007), 57.

PHOTOS
What was to go into the pack... and the pack put together.

Thoughts of the Camino

2009-02-14T19:11:00.001-05:00

It has been over a year since I have posted anything here and since then, I have moved so the whole idea of raising money for the MDGs for the youth group has ended.

It is usually this time of year that I get the yearning to go on the Camino, but since I am in a new place, there is no way I can get the time off to do it.

This post is prompted by discovering on Facebook (the great time eater) several groups about the Camino.

Having posted this URL on the page about blogs related to the Camino, I feel inspired to tackled in bits and drabs the reporting on the 2007 Camino walk.

Meanwhile, I dream....

Annotated bibliography

2008-01-05T12:37:00.000-05:00

I am doing a talk on the Camino to a local reading group on Monday and so put together an annotated bibliography. It is, by no means exhaustive — it represents some of what I have at hand — but it might be useful for the person who googles the Camino. [photo: 765 km mark in Spain in the Pyrenees in the fog, 29 May 2006]

Guidebooks
Brierly, John. A Pilgrim’s Guide to the Camino Francés: From Saint Jean Pied de Port to Santiago de Compostela. Findhorn, Scotland: Camino Guides. 2003. A thorough guide, with maps, lodging recommendations for each stage of the Camino, complete with elevations to inspire or discourage, and meditations.

Clouteau, Lauriane and Marie-Virginie Cambriels. Miam Miam Dodo: Le Chemin de Saint Jacques de Compostelle, El Camino Francés. Les Sables d’Oronne, France: Les Editions du Vieux Crayon. Published annually. If you speak French, this guide is the Cadillac of guide-books for lodging, food, internet cafés, and anything else practical. It also has pithy quotations on otherwise blank pages.

Facaros Dana and Michael Pauls. Northern Spain Cadogan Guide. Guilford, CT: The Pequot Press. 1996, 1999, 2001, 2003. Very good descriptions of the places through which the Camino meanders as well as thorough historical overview. Written with a gentle sense of humor. One needs to stitch together a through-plan of the Camino but worth the effort.

Gitlitz, David and Linda Kay Davidson. The Pilgrimage Road to Santiago: The Complete Cultural Handbook. New York, NY: Saint Martin’s Griffin. 2000. The title says it all. Way too big to carry while walking, it is wonderful to consult post walking.

Jacobs, Michael. The Road to Santiago, third edition. London: Pallas Athene. 1991, 2002. A good, compact book with lots of photographs and information, worth consulting before leaving.

Lozano, Millán. A Practical Guide for Pilgrims: The Road to Santiago, 8th ed.. Madrid: Editorial Everest, S. A. N.D. Works very well with Brierly and the other guide books. Even comes with a map pouch and separate maps!

Mullins, Edwin. The Pilgrimage to Santiago. Northampton, MA: Interlink Books. 1974, 2001. While the author drove as much as walked the route, the narrative is a treasure-trove of details of places along the way in France and in Spain.

Roddis, Miles et. al. The Lonely Planet: Walking in Spain, third edition. Oakland, CA: The Lonely Planet. 2003. The guide contains a 35-page section devoted entirely to the Camino. The stages are slightly different from those of many other guidebooks but it is worth using in tandem.

Raju. Alison. The Way of Saint James: Le Puy to the Pyrenees. Cumbria, UK. 2003. Obtained in the US through a North Carolina map website, this guide works well with other guides (especially when operating out of either French or Spanish guides as we were). Once one deciphers the British expressions for road surfaces, the guide is useful.

Symington, Andy. Footprints: Northern Spain Handbook. London: Footprint Books (distributed in the US by Publishers Group West). ND. Same operational principle as the above two guidebooks: once one pieces together the Camino from the various sections of the book, one has a good guide. The writing in this book is quite funny at times but the information is accurate.

Narratives/Spiritual Reflections
Buck, Jean Ann. Walking for Wildlife: El Camino to Santiago de Compostela. Leicestershire, UK: Upfront Publishing. 2004. A grandmother of four walks to raise money to protect Manx wildlife. A light read but contains interesting nuggets and is authentic (based on her journal).

Christmas, Jane. What the Psychic Told the Pilgrim: A Midlife Misadventure on Spain’s Camino de Santiago de Compostela. Vancouver, Canada: Greystone Books. 2007. An entertaining yet accurate description of a 50 year-old woman’s walk across Spain with a group of 14 women that the author manages to lose halfway through her pilgrimage.

Egan, Kerry. Fumbling: A Journey of Love, Adventure, and Renewal on the Camino de Santiago. NY, NY: Broadway Books. 2006. Egan walked the Camino with her fiancé after her father’s death. Her account is honest about her struggles both on the Camino and spiritually, as well as funny at times.

Rudolph, Conrad. Pilgrimage to the End of the World: The Road to Santiago de Compostela. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Divided into four sections, the book contains a brief but accurate history of pilgrimage to Santiago, the author’s pilgrimage, views of the journey, and a how-to section.

Rupp, Joyce. Walk in a Relaxed Manner: Life Lessons from the Camino. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. 2005. Rupp, a well-known writer of spiritual meditations, reflects on her walk on the Camino. While the book could have used better editing, and at times tends almost toward a New Age-y tone, Rupp’s main observation of learning to slow down is well taken.

Schell, Maria and Donald. My Father, My Daughter: Pilgrims on the Road to Santiago. New York, NY: Church Publishing. 2001. A short, entertaining read written by a father and daughter team who walk the camino that describes the outward and inward journey and development of their relationship.

General Books on Pilgrimage With References to Santiago
Cousineau, Phil. The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker’s Guide to Making Travel Sacred. York Beach, ME: Conari Press. 1998. A general meditation on what pilgrimage is in general, with references to pilgrimages throughout the ages, and the spiritual how-to of embarking on a pilgrimage.

Lash, Jennifer. On Pilgrimage: A Time to Seek. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press. 1991. This book describes Lash’s setting off on pilgrimage after cancer surgery. Travelling by rail and foot, she covers the major pilgrimage sites in France and Spain.

McPherson, Anne. Walking to the Saints: A Little Pilgrimage in France. The book describes her visits to major Romanesque sites along the way of several pilgrimage routes in France.

Mahoney, Rosemary. The Singular Pilgrim: Travels on Sacred Ground. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 2003. Her journey to Santiago is one of six pilgrimages she describes with piercing honesty. (Her description of the Camino is rather bizarre.)

Robinson, Martin. Sacred Places, Pilgrim Paths: An Anthology of Pilgrimage. London: Marshall Pickering. 1997. This anthology contains quotations from across the centuries and is fun to open up and read a few selections on a whim.

Internet Resources
http://www.santiago-compostela.net/ This website has photographs of every stage of the Way, both in France and Spain. It has lots of good resources as well as chat boards.

http://www.caminodesantiago.me.uk/ This site is still under construction but has some interesting material.

http://www.globecorner.com A fantastic bookstore in Cambridge MA has books on the Camino.

http://www.omnimap.com A good source for the French guides to the GR65 and also various walking guides for the Camino.

If you google Santiago de Compostela you’ll come up with many more sites.

A Camino Day

2007-11-13T11:12:00.003-05:00

It's a Camino day

... at least in thought. Maybe it's because I collected up all the various guidebooks and travel narratives about it last night. I have to do a presentation on the the camino in January to the local ladies' reading group so it has been on my mind. It also has been on my mind because this coming spring for the first time in four years, I won't have the rhythm of the camino to look forward to. It's partly because we have finished it, there's little enthusiasm to redo parts of it right now and mostly because the dollar against the euro is so low that we couldn't afford it (1E = $.145).

I ran across this paragraph the other night in an online essay, A Pilgrim, but a Tourist Too by Denise Fainburg:

None of the guidebooks tells you that walking the Camino is something of an extreme sport. It lacks the cachet of, say, sky-diving, but everyone has a tale to tell of pinched nerves, fractures, tendonitis, or the more prosaic blisters. Each evening in the refugios you will see walkers tenderly anointing and disinfecting their feet.

Gee, I have been engaging in an extreme sport all these springs and I didn't even know it!

My feet sure say so. I have lasting effects from walking all those kms and miles. My left foot shows no inclination of completely healing from the plantars fibramatosis; the lump in the arch remains. And the tendon around my ankle that goes to the arch still cramps up. Even with orthotics and switching my exercise activity to rowing which doesn't use the foot in the same way, it's still funky.

But, oh, how I want to walk. How I miss it. The big question is: with what walk in a place that uses the dollar can I satiate that need? I still need to have a long walk to look forward to.

Perhaps I want the walk to know that I am still mentally able to meet such a challenge, to keep on going when it would be so easy to get on the bus and knock off 50 kms in an hour rather than in a day and a half. (In so many of the books I have read of other people's experience, the authors talk about bailing out and taking the bus or train... usually for health reasons, like being too sick to walk from ingesting bad water.) I am glad that I have walked every single inch of that camino, including bonus miles. So I want another like challege as a way of proving to myself that, yes, I am capable of rising to a challenge and finishing it.

[feet, day 2, May 2006 29.5 kms outside of Moissac, France, in Saint Antoine, a week and a half after I broke the pinky toe and fourth metatarsal.]

Article from the New York Times on malaria

2007-10-09T09:35:00.000-04:00

DISTRIBUTION OF NETS SPLITS FIGHTERS

By REUBEN KYAMA and DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Published: October 9, 2007

MAENDELEO, Kenya — Veronica Njeri, 45, says she has “never healed” since losing two of her six children to malaria 20 years ago, and she still feels vulnerable. While her oldest are adults or teenagers, and have presumably built up immunity to the disease, she worries about her youngest, Anthony, who is 4.

A health center sign in Mwea, Kenya, says malaria kills 36,000 children under 5 every year.

But since hundreds of free mosquito nets came to Maendeleo, her rice-farming village in west-central Kenya, “malaria epidemics have become rare,” she said happily, even though the village sits amid stagnant paddies where swarms of mosquitoes breed.

Villages like Maendeleo are at the center of a debate that has split malaria fighters: how to distribute mosquito nets.

Recently, Dr. Arata Kochi, the blunt new director of the World Health Organization’s malaria program, declared that as far as he was concerned, “the debate is at an end.” Virtually the only way to get the nets to poor people, he said, is to hand out millions free.

In doing so, Dr. Kochi turned his back on an alternative long favored by the Clinton and Bush administrations — distribution by so-called social marketing, in which mosquito nets are sold through local shops at low, subsidized prices — $1 or so for an insecticide-impregnated net that costs $5 to $7 from the maker — with donors underwriting the losses and paying consultants to come up with brand names and advertise the nets.

“The time for social marketing of bed nets in a big way is over,” Dr. Kochi said in an interview. “It can become a supplemental strategy for urban areas and middle-income countries.”

Two years ago, social marketing was at the heart of a scandal when it was revealed that the United States Agency for International Development, or USAid, which distributes foreign aid, was spending 95 percent of its malaria budget on consultants and 5 percent on goods like nets, drugs and insecticide. Under attack from several senators championing the fight against malaria, the agency later announced that it would spend at least half its budget on goods.

Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, called the new W.H.O. policy “a great move,” adding, “We knew social marketing doesn’t work.”

In practice, nothing much had been working. In 2000, a world health conference in Abuja, Nigeria, set a goal: by 2005, 60 percent of African children would be sleeping under nets. By 2005, only 3 percent were.

The theory behind social marketing, which is also used to distribute condoms and oral rehydration salts, is that the poor see more value in brand-name goods they pay for than handouts they get free, and that the trade creates small entrepreneurs.

The usual comparison made is to Coca-Cola, which reaches Africa’s remotest corners. But Dr. Kochi rejected that model, saying, “I’m not sure whether the poorest of the poor actually drink Coca-Cola.”

He argues that the insecticide-filled nets, when used by 80 percent or more of a village, create a barrier that kills or drives off mosquitoes, protecting everyone in the area, including those without nets. Individual nets tended to just drive mosquitoes next door, to bite someone else. As such, he said, nets ought to be treated as a public good, like the measles or polio vaccines, which the world does not charge the poor for.

Free net distributions are usually done in a week or two, by armies of workers who are paid a few dollars a day by the Red Cross or health ministry to cover a country or other large region. Distributions have been tried in Sierra Leone, Niger, Togo and elsewhere, sometimes in conjunction with measles shots or deworming drugs.

The new model is beginning to prevail but has not completely swept the field. Some donors still use some social marketing. Unicef, the world’s largest buyer of nets, distributed 25 million last year, of which 92 percent were given away, said its medical director, Dr. Peter Salama. The main American program, the President’s Malaria Initiative, plans to hand out more than 15 million nets by 2008, of which about 75 percent will be free, said its coordinator, Rear Adm. Tim Ziemer.

In June, Admiral Ziemer and the first lady, Laura Bush, who has made malaria her crusade, helped hand out 500,000 free nets in Mozambique and Zambia.

Social marketing may be useful during gaps between mass distributions, said Trent Ruebush, a malaria expert at the initiative and USAid. The best insecticide-filled nets last three to five years, but babies will be born in that time, or new families will move into an area. “We feel it is one of various effective ways to go,” Dr. Ruebush said.

Experiences in Kenya played a large part in persuading the W.H.O. to change its policy, said Dr. Peter Olumese, a medical officer in the agency’s malaria program.

Maendeleo, a village of about 140 mud-walled shacks with tin roofs, was part of a five-year study of 40 health districts. When it started in 2002, the only nets were those for sale in small shops, Dr. Olumese said, and only about 7 percent of people had them.

Social marketing was introduced by Population Services International, a large aid contractor. That increased coverage to about 21 percent by early 2006.

Then, late last year, the health ministry got a big grant from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria that allowed it to hand out 3.4 million free nets in two weeks. Coverage rose to 67 percent, and distribution became more equitable. Under social marketing, Dr. Olumese said, the “richest of the poor” had 38 percent coverage, while the “poorest of the poor” — like Maendeleo’s rice farmers — had only 15 percent. After the handouts, they were about equal.

Deaths of children dropped 44 percent.

It also turned out to be cheaper, Dr. Olumese said. With consultant fees, transportation, advertising and shipping, social marketing added about $10 to the cost of each net beyond the $5 to $7 that Danish or Japanese makers charged. But even with payments to volunteers, the added cost of free distribution was only about $1.25 per net.

“There has been a paradigm shift,” Dr. Olumese said. “We need to use the momentum we have right now.”

Between the giveaways, he said, nets should be handed out free to all pregnant women and mothers who visit health clinics. Some women struggle to afford even the 10 cents per child cost of identity cards that let them visit clinics. “Asking a mother to make a decision to feed her child or buy a net is not fair,” he said.

In Maendeleo, a village elder, Benson Gacu, confirmed that price was a major impediment. “Our people are poor, and very few could afford to buy a mosquito net even for 50 shillings,” or about 75 cents, he said. “We are happy that the nets are free.”

Francis Mureithi, a local shopkeeper, said he still had some 50-shilling nets for sale because the government had given free ones only to families with children under 5.

But, Mr. Mureithi noted, sales of malaria pills were way down.

Reuben Kyama reported from Maendeleo, Kenya, and Donald G. McNeil Jr. from New York.

Burgos - Hornillos del Camino

2007-07-27T21:31:00.000-04:00

Day 8 — 20 kms

We slept in this morning until 7.30, then splurged on breakfast (7 euros, yikes, but it was well worth it because it gave us food for snacks, too): croissant, ham, bread, orange juice, coffee.

On our way out of town (late! we left at 10.00) we stopped at the farmacía for antihistamenes, and more tape for my foot and toes. We walked past the cathedral and, as we went by a column nearby, a stork atop lost two feathers. Since they are considered to be lucky, I grabbed them up and stuck them in my backpack in the side pouch by the plastic I have rolled up for the times when we need to sit on the ground.

On the way out of Burgos, we passed this church that had this amazing stork condo. It was pretty funny to see.

We went past the law school at the former Hospital del Rey, an elegant 16th-century complex. Then the camino took us through construction for the University of Burgos — tons and tons of apartment buildings, classroom buildings. We went through a HUGE future housing development — the infrastructure (lights, roads, parking) were all in but as of now, no buildings are up. The camino did nothing that was on our maps — we were supposed to be over to the left somewhere on the other side of the railroad tracks but we were clearly heading to the right away from them. This was one of these times when there was no point consulting the maps; I shoved mine into my pants pocket and simply followed the yellow shell/blue background markers.

The route had us meander through/around more wheat fields (oh my poor watering eyes) when it would have been so easy to cut straight across, but nooo... we ended up under a bridge for a four-lane highway that led into a tunnel. On the first pillar was this sign:

Pilgrims — please excuse this small detour. May the searches of your infinite wanderings become reality. The Arlanzón river and we say to you: ¡Ultreya!

That sign nearly made me burst into tears because I had been mulling over something while walking through the detours. It truly seemed to be a message from God.

We stopped in Tardajos for lunch. The restaurant even advertised my favourite power lunch: two fried eggs, fries, bread. Add in a glass of red wine and I am good for walking. After lunch we went uphill. The day was getting quite hot.

The camino took us up between two ridges which lead us to the alteplano. Here we saw far-off views and it was windy, windy with racing clouds, really quite dramatic.

The alteplano gives the pilgrim BIG views. I was intrigued by the lone tree on an otherwise desolate landscape.

Another view from the alteplano before descending into Hornillos del Camino, a tiny town with one store almost across the street from the casa rural where we stayed and a crowded bar-restaurant (the only game in town so we had a 30-minute wait, along with a bunch of other pilgrims). We shared our table with a young German pair (not a couple, however).

The shower in our room is a hoot. The young owner of the casa rural is so pleased with it: it has massage nozzles, mirrors all over (oh dear), a radio with speakers and an overhead light. None of us was able to figure out how it all worked but we were glad for the good water pressure at the end of our walking.

Atapuerca - Burgos

2007-07-18T22:11:00.000-04:00

Day 7 — 20.5 kms

As written above, we'd been following horses. Finally, we got to see them as they were staying at the same hostal as we were. It seems like quite an involved process to get the horses saddled up with all the people's gear. The people (from France) took about 20 minutes to get everything ready.

It was a misty, overcast and grey morning when we set out.

It was cool enough in the morning when we set out that Compa decided to dig down into her pack and get gloves. We went up to the top of this hill, the Sierra de Atapuerca, where we found that someone had left a sofa (the second one we'd seen on the camino!). We walked past a cross and then we saw the plain ahead of us with Burgos still 18 kms away, 18 very LONG kms away.

As far as shots of our walking, from this point on, it was pretty grim. We went down the hill, with a mining firm and cell towers off to the right. When we got to the bottom, we went through two little villages (where I stopped to tape my arch because it was hurting and tape the blisters that were really bugging me) and then crossed the highway, the A-1. We had the choice of going two ways: we went left, through a construction site (or something like that — there were dump trucks all over). At one point, there was a lagoon and the only way to go forward was to unch ourselves like crabs along a chain link fence, walking on a three-inch wide strip of concrete while hanging onto the fence. I wish we had a photo of that. The fence went around the perimeter of the airport. Then we walked through non-descript burbs for 5kms until we finally hit the main drag, the Calle Victoria, that led us to our hotel, the España, a funky 1930s hotel.

My maps didn't correspond to anything we walked once we came down off the summit ridge. Such is life on the caminio. And my eyes watered like crazy today — from pollution or wheat or both?

Three years ago when we took the bus and train from Estella to Leon to Astorga to Rabanal, we had about an hour in Burgos. Compa's knees had gotten afflicted with tendonitis, so we didn't trek from the railroad station to see the cathedral which, in Guide Michelin terms, is 'worth a detour.' The Camino takes one right past it on the plaza (this shot is taken from a 16th-century gate). One now has to pay to get into the cathedral, but with the pilgrim's credential, it's one euro. It is well worth the cost.

This upward shot is of a side chapel in the cathedral. Truly the cathedral's trademark has to be these perforated towers that let in light between the gothic ribs. Extraordinary!

In the west end of the cathedral, way up high on the south wall, one finds a clock with a jester. It still works. Note to its side another smaller set of bells. Since it was so high up and we didn't spend all afternoon there, I am not sure if the larger clock is for the hours and the smaller one for the minutes.

One characteristic of Spanish cathedrals is the choir which always is in the middle of the cathedral nave. It is hard to see from the west end to the east end because the choir breaks the view. To the right of this photo, looking up into the crossing tower, you can make out the cross from the choir reredos.

This is the crossing of the cathedral. It is absolutely amazing to see the light through the central tower. No wonder they call this cathedral 'diaphonous.'

After visiting the cathedral, we went to the mobile phone store to find out how to get messages off our Spanish cell phone and then I went to a smokey cibercafe to write a post to this blog. Then, before retiring, we said goodbye to the Colombian/Australian couple.

That is part of life on the camino: you meet people, walk with them or bump into them for a while, and eventually lose them because their schedule doesn't correspond to yours. We left a lot of people behind in Burgos because they were taking a day off (which we didn't) and picked up a whole new crowd.

Belorado-Atapuerca

2007-07-11T17:24:00.000-04:00

Day 6 — 30.4kms

We got up and out with another good breakfast of croissant, fresh squeezed orange juice (zumo de naranja) and coffee. The morning was cool and overcast, the way we like it.

Once out of town it was pretty flat, walking on a dirt path by a river and, after
we crossed it, on a muddy dirt track which ran parallel to but not right next to the N120. Four kms later, we got to Tosantos where I took this photo of a fountain with a neat cross on the top of a pole.

Right out of town as Compa went to photograph the Ermita de la Virgen (across the way and in the cliffs), she had a panic attack, thinking she had left the battery charger in the hotel 5 km behind us. We started to think of how we could get back there, how much time it would take out of the day and then I remembered that I had unplugged it and given it to her the night before because I also feared we would leave it behind. Beyond that, I couldn't remember what we'd done with it so I took apart my pack and there it was (I carry it). A major crisis averted.

We walked on a ridge in open fields, lots of sun and hard, hard wind. It was really blowing hard, almost small craft warning strength. We saw lots of large vistas. We went along fields and then down a hill past a ruin of a 9th century monastery.

In Villafranca Montes de Oca, the guide said there were three restaurants, one at the far end of town. So we walked past the first two restaurants that were full of pilgrims, got to the turn-off for the camino and found that the third restaurant wasn't. We didn't feel like backtracking, so just before slogging up a STEEP and very muddy road, we sat down on the sidewalk, had a snack and I worked on the blister on my pinky toe.

We could have bypassed the mud wallow if we had taken the street on which we were sitting but we didn't figure that out until we got up above it. It connected with the muddy path and the paved street turned into a dirt road that went up and up and up until we were in a large grove of oaks and then later pine trees. We'd entered a wonderful eco-reserve in the oldest mountains of Spain.

The sign describes the flora and fauna up on top, identifies the various mountains and gives a description of all the creatures that inhabit the eco-reserve. There are wolves, fox, deer, wild cats and all sorts of animals and birds. It seemed wild up on top there, with all the trees and the WIND that was blowing us backwards, until we connected back up with the N120 and a stupid ATV driver who went by us twice, stirring up the ground and disturbing the quiet.

We came downhill out of the wind for a moment and sat down by a brook for cheese, bread, cherry lunch. A Danish walker, and two other Scandinavians joined us, offering us wine and chocolate but we declined their kind offer. We would bump into the Danish walker off and on for the next week.

Then we went straight uphill again and walked for ever it seemed on a wide open track through pine woods with all sorts of different flowers. It was long and it started to rain so we ducked into the woods to put on all the rain gear. Though gentle, this part seemed to go on and on so it was a surprise when all of a sudden we found ourselves coming out of the forest, down a hill and into San Juan de Ortega.

There in San Juan is a hostel, restaurant and a beautiful gothic church that was open (!), with San Juan's tombstone. Even though the signs said that one should be quiet, I sang my usual Veni Creator Spiritus. It has nice acoustics.

We spent an hour in the crowded bar having a beer/glass of red wine and talking with a couple: he's Australian, she's Colombian, they live in Australia for right now and decided to do the Camino as a sort of in-between place. We would bump into them again in Burgos.

Then we walked the last six kms to Atapuerca. We were out in open space again with this fierce wind blowing in our faces.

To the west it was clear, to the north it was stormy. It's not easy to make out in the photo but there was a big wind farm in the distance. The use of wind turbines in Spain is impressive.

The last six kms were hard. My feet were hurting: I am working on two huge blisters on my pinky toes, blisters on top of blisters. There's a nascent blister on my left heel, too in about the same spot where I got the deep, deep one last year that eventually got infected. I was also tired and lordy my eyes were windburned. We dinked along until we got to Atapuerca.

We had to take a photo of the Medusa who arrived at the nice hostel (a redone old house) with good food and friendly hosts (lots of political commentary as they watched the returns for mayoral elections in Spain).

Atapuerca is the home of the being that links the two family trees of Homo Sapiens and Neanderthall, about 250.000-350.000 BCE. They have found bones up on a plateau which one can visit. We couldn't do that but we did visit the exhibition hall. It has many artifacts from the site including bones, pots, arrowheads and other stone implements. It is pretty wild to be on a medieval pilgrimage route that crosses a history far more distant than the 8th-12th century.

Santo Domingo — Belorado

2007-07-08T22:07:00.000-04:00

Day 5, 23.5 kms

Photowise, this was a quiet day. More will come along, but I need to get them off my laptop. Check back later.

We got off later than intended, stopped for coffee and croissant and finally took off at 8.00. Fifteen minutes out of town, it started to rain so we had to stop and put on all our rain gear, costing us yet more time.

We walked through rolling hillsides all of wheat, almost 'big' and dramatic skies. It was relatively good walking, though because it was overcast and not hot.

We stopped for water in Grañon, a small town and the café bar didn't have a WC (it was a long day in that regard). It was still drizzling on our way out of town. We went through a huge mud wallow and then up a long, rolling hill at the top of which we found the sign at the border of the department of La Rioja and Castille y León (where one stays until Galicia). Compa is standing by the sign which has a map of the Camino. (Within the department are provinces and we went through several.)

We went down a long hill into Redecilla del Camino where we had been looking forward to lunch in a restaurant but it was closed so we bought yet another chocolate croissant, some bread and sat outside and talked with a woman from Germany.

We then trudged up a long hill on pavement. We're now out of vineyard country — it's just wheat on rolling, vast hills, which is pretty in its own way.

We went through many small towns, all very quiet. My big event was scratching two friendly cats on their backs. They were a good diversion.

The rest of the afternoon was spent on a dirt track next to the N120 (one follows this road off and on for ever). It wasn't horrible, nor was it great. We were still in rolling hills of wheat (!).

Then we dropped down into Belorado.

We walked by this church as we were hunting for our hotel (well past the hostel). As you can see, there are more storks and their nests. This is a multi-nest condo.

Our hotel, the Jacobeo, is a nice one, an 1850s building that has always been a hotel. I had a good bath and a nap (I couldn't budge) and then we went out for dinner (on a cool evening).

We're back in the part of Spain that does a great ensalada mixta: greens, carrots, corn, hard-boiled egg, tuna, tomato, asparagus (often white), olives and whatever else they like to throw in. This is just the first course but it is terrific. I look forward all day to it.

Our waitress spoke only a little Spanish; she finally said, Soy Roma — I am a gypsy. This all came about because we wanted to make sure she would get her tip (which is not a required thing).

The fun part of the evening came after dinner: we stumbled upon a group of very celebratory 30 year-olds. Apparently they all decided on ONE day that they would celebrate their birthday. So everyone in town born in 1977 got together to party and so they did. They all had on green t-shirts that read, 'I am not 30; I am 18 with 12 years of wisdom.' They had a local band that played tunes and they all marched around the plaza before taking over the bandstand. They tried to get us to join them but we opted not. Later on the folks born in 1982 (the 25 year-olds) came along with their band and they had a little competition. I asked if the 50 year-olds (my age) had such a party, and the answer was yes.

There were a bunch of kids running around in a group. It was fun to watch them, all caught up in the excitement of the night, and also poignant to think that in many years they, too, would be doing the same thing some day perhaps: celebrating their 25th or 30th with the next generation of kids zooming around in circles.

It was fun to tap into the local life, to remember that this camino wends its way through towns that still have their life that is not dependent on a bunch of pilgrims.

A word about our lodgings: we are not doing the hard-core, tough-it-out pilgrim routine of staying every night at albergues (hostels). Maybe it's our respective ages, though loads of people older than us stay at the albergues, but frankly, we like to have our own room for the three of us, a hot bath without having to wait in line and an easy place to do our nightly laundry. We sleep better for it (only one person snores, me, rather than an entire chorus) and, therefore, stay healthier, I suspect. We don't struggle with the 'purity' or 'sacrifice' of the pilgrimage — walking as much as we do every day is plenty. Besides, we 'carry our house on our back': everything we have is in our backpacks (about 12kg including water); we don't ship them on ahead of us; we lug them and walk with the extra weight. Likewise, two of us like to have our three-course dinners at the end of the day. It's our reward :)

Nájera-Santo Domingo de la Calzada

2007-07-05T13:22:00.000-04:00

Day four — 21.3 kms

This was a short day for which we were glad because it got so hot in the middle of the day and we were walking through an endless new burb. More on that later.

First thing in the morning was climbing uphill out of the Nájera downtown over the ridge that separated it from the ever-closer alteplano (though we were not nearly there). On the other side of the ridge, we walked past vineyards interspersed with poppies. We also started going by big cement irrigation channels that ran alongside the vineyards.

Compa took this wonderful photo of the poppies that grow between the rows of vines. The soil here is so, so red.

Unlike some of the walking the Chemin de Saint Jacques in France where we went up and down in river valleys and never had a sense of where we were going, more often than not, we had a very clear idea of where we were headed — usually quite far away. This vista was one of those 'onwards' shots, where we knew that we would follow that white ribbon for as far as the eye could see and then some. Oh my, look at all that WHEAT (as I wrote in my journal: 'nice landscape, rolling hills, wheat and wheat and wheat!')

Noon found us climbing up a hill to a golf course/high income suburb development, Ciruñuela. The heat was brutal and there were NO trees anywhere for shade. There didn't seen to be any place to eat either. We had a few things to eat but what we really, really wanted was a cold beer. Once we passed through this empty construction site that looked as though it could house 10.000 people, we landed on a small local village, totally eclipsed by the growth. There, we found the local bar-restaurant and while the food was a bit greasy, it had cold beer and free internet. It was from here that I sent this posting. I shared the space with a Frenchman. I really couldn't see what I was doing and being a Mac user, I am always at a disadvantage with a PC, so I had to ask for a little help.

A word about the white shirt. It was brutally hot that day and the sun shone brightly. From that day on, I no longer wore short-sleeve shirts but wore a light-weight white cotton shirt to protect my skin from the sun. At that, even with SPF 35 on my hands, they got burned and tanned. I upped the lotion to SPF 50 and still I burned and tanned. So the shirt seemed a small sacrifice in the comfort zone to stay a bit more healthy in the long, long run.

Finally, we got to Santo Domingo de la Calzada, known for its holy chickens. The story is one of those crazy medieval ones that has now stuck.

Dana Facaros and Michael Pauls in the Cadogan Guide to Northern Spain write of the holy chickens in their Gothic cathedral:

'The Gothic interior is simple but lavishly decorated, but what everyone remembers best are the rooster and hen, cackling in their own late-Gothic henhouse. Their presence recalls the miracle that took place in Santo Domingo's hostal: a handsome 18-year-old German pilgrim, named Hugonell, travelling with his parents, refused the advances of the maid, who avenged herself by planting a silver goblet in his pack and accusing him of theft. Hugonell was summarily hanged by the judge while his parents sadly continued Compostela. On the way back, they passed the gallows and were amazed to find their son still alive and glad to see them, telling them it was a miracle of Santo Domingo. They hurried to the judge and told him; the judge, about to dig into a pair of roast fowl, laughed and said their son was as alive as the birds on his table, upon which both came to life and flew away. Since then, a white hen and rooster have been kept in the church, and are replaced every month; pilgrims would take one of their feathers and stick in it their hats for good luck. Under the window you can even see a piece of the gallows (138).'

The administration doesn't allow photos inside the cathedral but the image I grabbed from the web shows the glorified henhouse well. There are other treasures in the cathedral, too: a beautiful 12th-century Madonna and child behind the high altar in a nice and simple chapel. The 16th-century tomb of Santo Domingo is also amazing: a two-storey affair, one can look down into the crypt to the lower level of the tomb which also serves as a small chapel.

Kerry Egan writes of this in her Fumbling,

'The Holy Chickens made me very happy, almost irrationally happy. They seemed to make everyone happy. In the stores in town, a dozen different postcards with the images of the chickens could be found. Some were taken from a distance, with the entire chicken coop edifice on golden display, and some were close-ups of the chickens' faces in profile, like 1930's movie stars. I sent out a dozen postcards.

'While walking the Camino, I just accepted that chickens would live in a cathedral. At that point, it seemed as reasonable as a woman who used an attack dog to alert her to pilgrims passing or the wine fountain in Irache…. Chickens in a church were par for the course at that point. When I got back, all those people who received chicken postcards were baffled...' (126-27).

Logroño-Nájera

2007-07-04T10:59:00.000-04:00

Day 3 — 29.5 kms

A word about the distances: what I post is the 'official' distance. It doesn't include the walking one does once one arrives at one's destination. That walking can include going an extra km trying to find the night's lodgings, any touring one might do after showering and then wandering around. In Nájera, we probably added an additional 2 km to our official walk. One has to wonder about the logic: we spend all day on our feet and then we willingly go and walk some more? But when feet are all there is for transportation, there's no choice.

The morning saw us leaving the city of Logroño, going out through new suburbs and buildings and not the dismal garbage heaps that the guides had advertised. For a good hour or more, we enjoyed walking through a huge park, complete with lake. The signs are new, a stylised shell. We followed them through Logroño and its outskirts, past vineyards until we came up to a highway. I didn't take a photo but the fence that separates the highway from the camino is completely covered with simple wooden crosses that pilgrims have stuck into the chainlink fence. The overall effect was overpowering. From my journal: 'There were hundreds if not thousands of crosses other pilgrims had stuck in the fence. The overall effect was that of a giant weaving, a huge tela. The supply is inexhaustable because there's a wood mill nearby. I am still not quite sure what I felt seeing it.'

We stopped in the next town, Navarette, for an early lunch (at 11.30) of fried eggs, frites, bread and wine/beer. We have found that that sort of lunch sticks to the ribs and helps one walk.

The next segment was utterly dismal. The camino, as printed on the maps, doesn't always go the way one anticipates. In this case, we found ourselves slogging alongside construction of a new highway. There was no shade for miles, except for the underpass from which I shot this photo. We found a Brazilian woman at an intersection, wondering where to go, so for the rest of the afternoon, the three of us walked together. It was awful: hot, hot, hot and very hard under the feet. Add in the noise and pollution from the traffic and it was most unspiritual.

We went up a hill that finally got us into a forested area where people had created a little community of rock 'elves.' It was kind of cute.

But, on the other side of the hill and forest, we went back out into the hot afternoon sun. The ground was so hard-packed. As we walked, we kept seeing horse manure, so we knew there was a horse or two ahead of us and, if ever we weren't sure of the way, we'd wait until we saw a yellow arrow or a pile of manure. This shot looks toward a bump that commemorates Roland's defeat of the giant, Ferragus.

After settling into our hotel, we walked across the lovely river in Nájera to the abbey church that has a grotto built into the red-stone mountainside. In the grotto is a medieval statue of the Virgin Mary. The cool air of the church was most welcome.

One can make out how the church is built into the cliffs behind it. The next day we would go up the cliffs. One can also discern the ever-present stork nests and a stork flying toward the tower.

Storks clack their beaks together when they are defending their territory so I took to calling them 'clackers.'

Los Arcos - Logroño

2007-07-02T18:55:00.000-04:00

Day 2, 28.5 kms

Regaining the Camino is like seeing a good friend after a year's absence. You pick up where you left off and take it from there.

The morning was overcast — always fine by us. Even by day 2, it's quite clear that this 421km segment of the Camino is largely going to be flat. We're not going to be walking on little narrow mountain paths. We were able to make good time in the morning because it was so, so flat — going at least 5km/hour.

The 12th-century church in Torres del Rio is a gem. It's a beautiful octagonal church with exquisite acoustics (I had to try them out). Sadly, it is a museum and not a church insofar as it is no longer used for worship. The church is quite reminiscent of the funerary chapel at Eunate, outside of Puenta la Reina, a three-day walk back east. We bumped into two women cyclists from Montana, who were pretty much going at the same pace as the walkers because it was hilly enough still. There are a lot more people from the US this time than previous years. Perhaps it's because we are walking later.

Outside of Torres del Rio, we started walking through lots of vineyards. We are in La Rioja, wine country (nice to have at night), so grapes are everywhere.

Coming down into Logroño, we came upon Felice's daughter, who had just set up shop again after a downpour. Her mother, from 1982 until her death in 1995 at age 92, would greet pilgrims with love, water and figs (as the stamp from her indicates). Her daughter continues the tradition, by greeting pilgrims and dispensing the same. I said she was famous (she is in several books), and she said no, it was the pilgrims who had made her famous.

Then we walked down into Logroño, where we would spend the night at a pension. After settling in, we walked over to the cathedral. If you look hard, you can see a stork on the right-hand side of the bell tower. They are considered good luck and a town takes pride in their presence. But don't EVER stand below a stork nest!!! We watched a plume of stork guano come streaming down and had we been nearby we would have been coated.

By day's end I wrote in my journal: 'The party is over. I have a blister on my left pinky toe, despite coating it with benzoin beforehand. I just wait for the right one to catch up. Legs are very tired as well. The end of the day they were getting tight."

Back to the Camino

2007-07-01T21:07:00.000-04:00

After many weeks away, I am back at home and will try to post photos from the most recent Camino walk, going day by day.

Day 1 of walking, Estella to Los Arcos, 20.4 kms

We took a bus from Pamplona where we had spent the night to Estella where we would be picking up the Camino again. Right outside of Estella within the first five minutes of walking, I spotted this sign on the side of a bar-café: 666 kms to Santiago. These signs are fairly frequent, advertising for San Miguel beer, put up in the last jubilee year of 2004 (when the feast of Santiago, 25 July lands on a Sunday).

Within an hour of walking, we'd arrived at the Irache winery, famous for its free wine. The bodega (winery) has two fountains, one with water and one with wine. The sign tells pilgrims that if they want to arrive in Santiago in one piece, they need to fortify themselves with wine and make a toast.

Right by the winery is the Irache abbey church, a pretty Romanesque church that has a Baroque facade. This church also has an attractive cloister. It was one of the few churches open on the entire segment of the camino we walked.

In the afternoon (as the heat cranked up), we found ourselves walking through vineyards (we are in Rioja) and olive groves. The scenery is pretty and made for an easy first day of walking. (We were glad we didn't have to go to the top of that bump in the photo.) It makes a big difference not to be walking with two broken toes to say the least.

In the early days of this segment of the Camino, we could still see mountains and there was some variation in the terrain. It would be a while before we got to the alteplano/meseta. For the time being, we enjoyed seeing nearby mountains. There are lots and lots of wildflowers, which makes for restful walking, too. Nonetheless, the photo hints at some of the vast vistas we would see later on.

More to come

2007-06-15T20:32:00.000-04:00

Starting the beginning of July, when I have finally landed, I will start putting up photos and narrative about the Camino. For the time being, here is a photo of early morning on the alteplano, going up a slight meseta, with loads of wheat fields populated by wild poppies.

de regreso

2007-06-10T07:15:00.000-04:00

Back home last night... staying up as long as possible to adjust back to EDT, though it's hard (I woke up at 4.15 this morning, 10.15 hora local en España) to get back fully in one night.

Here's a photograph of the alteplano from a meseta taken ten days ago.

Photos and narrative will follow in course. For now, suffice to say that we walked over 272 miles/421 km, completing the 960+ mile/1570 km pilgrimage we started in April 2004. It will take time to live into that reality.

Meanwhile, as I write, the pilgrims are walking. The flow of humanity headed toward Santiago will continue.

A wheatfield kind of day

2007-06-01T07:55:00.000-04:00

Now we understand why the author of Fumbling went nuts and starting going around in circles in a wheatfield.

It is 33 kms day, and we have done all but 9. The first 6 kms were on the infamous souless ´senda´a path that the Department of Palencia has created alongside the major road that leads from one city to another (notably to Carrion de los Condes). After Carrion, we then spent 16 kms on an earthern path out in the middle of nowhere except that one goes along wheatfields.

The sun is out today and there isn´t the stiff wind that has been blowing in our faces so.

It has been long and flat, a new definition of monotonous and tendious, or shall we say, trudgery.

I have a bad blister on my left heel that is quite painful but will slog it out until we get to our lodging for tonight before operating on it.

Last night we stayed in a wonderful hotel with a room that looked out at a 13th century Templar church.

Meanwhile I write from a bar cafe hotel that is an oasis after the 16 kms slog through the wheatfields. Whew.

(I am not wearing my bifocals when I write these notes so I can´t really see what I am typing. Cleanup will happen when I return stateside.)

From Burgos

2007-05-28T13:19:00.000-04:00

We are about to start walking the most tedious (try the new word, ´trudgerý), the Alteplano. We are in Burgos right now - a city with a gorgeous cathedral and lots of esplanades and such.

The Alteplano is high and flat. We´re talking big skies here, big vistas, a path that is straight as a dime with no variation, no trees, no shade and lots and lots of wind.

I am windburned already from the past six days. It has been a mixture of weather, sun, rain, hard rain, and cold! Today almost demanded putting on fleece gloves.

Feet are holding up though I have twinges of tendonitis in my left foot (always the left foot).

It is hard finding open churches and harder still even to find a mass. I haven´t been to church since I left last week. I spent Pentecost in the rain, and wind up on Spain´s oldest mountain range.

Nonetheless, it has been wonderful to be back on the camino, to meet people from all over, and to have the time to be still in mind and heart, and to begin to listen for God´s small still voice.

Next post from Leon for sure.

Adelante!

Four days and counting

2007-05-25T06:41:00.000-04:00

A short entry from a cafe bar on top of a plateau in the midst of rolling hills of wheat, poppies, vineyards and other greens to say that all is well. At the end of this day we will have walked nearly 100 kilometers.

Feet are holding up somewhat -- there are the usual blisters but otherwise all three pilgrims are holding up well.

We have had many interesting conversations with people from all over: France, Spain, Holland, Brazil and surprisingly more people from the United States than on other pilgrimages.

We have stopped in every church that has been open and have left a prayer for all those who have asked for them. It is a bit harder lighting candles because they tend more to be the electric sort and I don´t do that sort of candle.

We have a short day today, 20 kms, after yesterday´s 29 kms. And tonight we will stay in an abbey by a church that has a small cage of chickens on its side.

There is way too much to say in a short time but I just wanted to check in and say that all is well.

Caminante no hay camino
se hace camino al andar.

This is the Day

2007-05-20T07:35:00.000-04:00

There's a fog settled over the mountain ridge across the way. It looks like a camino morning, like the morning we set out from Ostabat, the last leg before Saint Jean-Pied-de-Port and the Pyrenee crossing into Spain. I can well anticipate quiet mornings like today. By now we'll be on the road, walking. I am telling my feet to enjoy the next day's rest because it's all over on Tuesday.

This is the day we leave after so long. Again.

The cats know. The only way to leave them is to walk out the door and not look back. It is always very difficult for me to leave them behind even though I know they are in superb hands.

This segment of the camino takes the pilgrim through the barren alteplano where there are no landmarks, only a straight path, now lined apparently with saplings that someday will provide shade for the pilgrim.

It is said that people have visions on the alteplano because they become disoriented. That's better than the more perilous saying that demons will assault the pilgrim's soul.

I figure walking this chunk of the camino will be like crossing the Atlantic Ocean (which I did on the QE2 in 1977). For three days there was only sky and sea. We didn't even see a single bird. It stormed, the sea was rough, and there wasn't much of a vista. But it was vast and awesome. That's how I anticipate seeing the alteplano (or like being in Texas where everything is huge and you get 'big skies').

Regardless, we are off.

Vaya con Dios.

Two days....

2007-05-18T23:57:00.000-04:00

In two days we will be en route to Spain to walk the last leg of the Camino.

It's incredible. Something awaited for so long, something that even though, for the fourth time and therefore is more familiar, demands such preparation, and now it is almost here.

By Tuesday, we will once again be looking for yellow shells on a blue background or something to that effect to guide us through towns.

Unlike last year, we will not walk our first day abroad; we'll end up arriving in Pamplona and then have the afternoon to explore the city. The next day we will get on a bus, our last conveyance until 16 days later, and walk 20 kms.

My mind knows what the rhythm of the day is: get up, get into the same clothes that have dried overnight, go have breakfast (in Spain, un cafe doble), come back to the room, fill up the water bottle first (camelback), stuff it into the pack and THEN pack the pack making sure I don't step on the bite valve (it's so easy to do and such a pain to clean up the water puddle that has formed, plus have to empty the pack out again). Go through everyone's prayers (I carry with me handwritten prayers on little slips of paper), so they will float with me for the day, read the daily office readings, and then... start walking.

On the way out of town, if necessary, we stop to get food (bread, cheese, fruit). And, sometimes, yes, we have to hit an ATM.

Usually we stop for a snack (banana and perhaps some form of pastry, in France, it was a croissant, of course) around 10.30 or 11.00, if we've been walking since 8.00. Then we walk until 1.00 or 2.00, sometimes waiting until we can find a place in the shade to sit. We settle down, take off our boots and socks, let our feet get some sun and air. Lunch can be half an hour, and then it's back to walking. The afternoon drags on more than the morning and we take more breaks, albeit short, about 10 minutes. Of course, the schedule can be completely thrown out of whack if there's a church to visit. The last hour always drags on and it seems as though we are never going to get to our destination.

We try to arrive at the next night's lodging by 5.00 or 6.00, though in Spain, dinner is later so it's not quite as much of a crunch as in France where dinner starts at 6.00 or 7.00. Once at the place, it's take off the boots, get out of the day's walking clothes, wash them and whatever other accrued laundry there is (though there isn't much) so that they can have a night to dry on the parachute cord we string in the room. We're not into having our smalls air on the back of our packs as we walk :) (There are some folks whose packs are such a mess you wonder how they stay balanced on the person's back!)

Then there's dinner and then back to our room. I write up the day in my small journal. And then, it's to bed... sometimes with aching limbs that impede a good sleep, sometimes just out like a light.

Then, it's up to start all over again. We'll do this for 16 days straight. I am ready.

Photo: shell in Ciraqui, Spain, 2004

Prayers for Pilgrims

2007-05-17T17:12:00.000-04:00

Photo: statue at the top of Alto de Pardon, outside of Pamplona, Spain, April 2004

Prayers for Pilgrims

Pilgrimage is traditionally a journey to a holy place — a place where saints have walked, a place where God has met people and blessed them.

People through the ages have journeyed with God on pilgrimage — to perform a penance, to ask for healing, to pray for places where there is war or national disaster, to pray for friends.

Pilgrimage is an opportunity to travel lightly, to walk free of daily routines, to meet people, to make friends, to enjoy and celebrate God’s creation. An opportunity, too, in the travelling, the conversations and the silences to reflect on the journey of our lives and on our journey homewards to God.

Prayers before setting out on a pilgrimage

God of the guiding star, the bush that blazes
SHOW US YOUR WAY
God of the stormy seas, the bread that nourishes
TEACH US YOUR TRUTH
God of the still, small voice, the wind that blows where it chooses
FILL US WITH LIFE
God of the elements, of our inward and outward journeys
SET OUR FEETS ON YOUR ROAD TODAY.
MAY GOD BLESS US WITH A SAFE JOURNEY
MAY THE ANGELS AND SAINTS TRAVEL WITH US
MAY WE LIVE THIS DAY IN JUSTICE AND JOY. AMEN.

[P]ilgrimage is … a sign of contradiction, and of resistance to our prevailing value system, that of the market. Pilgrimage, after all, has no function other than itself; its means is as important as its end, its process as its product. Its utility value is small, and its benefits cannot be quantified or costed. Its value is intrinsic. It is something that is good to do because it is good to do. It states clearly that the extravagant gesture (because it is extravagant in terms of time and commitment) is an irrepressible part of what it means to be human and to walk on the earth. And whether the context for pilgrimage is solitude or community, we will be drawn deeper into the mystery of God and the care of creation. (Kathy Galloway)

Bless to us, O God,
the earth beneath our feet.
Bless to us, O God,
the path whereon we go.
Bless to us, O God,
the people whom we meet. Amen.

To finish

Pilgrim God,
our shoes are filled with stones,
our feet are blistered and bleeding,
our faces are stained with tears.
As we stumble and fall
may we know your presence
in the bleeding and in the tears
and in the healing and the laughter
of our pilgrimage. (Kate McIhagga)

Pilgrimage

Pray for all pilgrims and seekers
and companions on the way;
for all travellers.
Christ, may I walk together with you,
in solidarity with the poor and
with all of God’s creation.

+

Pilgrimage is feet-on-the-ground spirituality. (Jan Sutch Pickard)

Follow truth wherever you find it.
Even if it takes you outside your preconceived ideas of God or life.
Even if it takes you outside your own country
into the most insignificant alien places
like Bethlehem.
Be courageous. But concentrate on your search.
Truth is one. All roads lead to home. (George MacLeod)

+

The World Peace Prayer
Lead me from death to life,
from falsehood to truth.
Lead me from despair to hope,
from fear to trust.
Lead me from hate to love,
from war to peace.
Let peace fill our hearts,
our world, our universe. Amen.

+

A Creed for Peace
We believe in you, O God,
you who love all humankind
because you are a God of Peace
not of violence nor vengeance.

You created us, women and men,
and your dream is that we discover
community, justice and peace
between all persons
and among all peoples of the earth.

Your holy prophets of old
proclaimed peace,
rejected the powerful of the earth
who tyrannized, creating injustice,
unleashing conflicts,
violence and death.

And so all of us, with faith and hope
proclaim our faith in you,
Confessing that we believe in the God of peace and justice.
We believe in Jesus Christ,
servant and martyr for peace,
who was born among the least
and most peaceful of your people.
In the night of his birth
the angels announced peace
to the shepherds.
Christ came to the world
to bring peace not division.
He rejected sword and violence
and offered instead the special way of non-violence:
the way of truth, goodness, justice and love.
He was condemned to death for proclaiming
the Reign of God and God’s justice,
but God raised Jesus from the dead.
Therefore, together, with faith and hope
we proclaim our faith in you,
Confessing that we believe in you,
Servant of peace.

We believe in the Holy Spirit,
Giver of life.
Peace is the gift of the Holy Spirit of God
and is the fruit of the lives
of those who make peace.
We believe in the church,
The community of those
Who are peacemakers,
In the forgiveness of sins
And in reconciliation.
We believe in the promise of a new heaven and a new earth
Where life, justice and peace
Will triumph.

Therefore together, with faith and hope,
We proclaim our faith in you,
Confessing that we believe
In the Spirit of peace.

[With the exception of the Creed for Peace, everything else comes from This is the Day: Readings and Meditations from the Iona Community, Neil Paynter, ed., Glasgow, UK: Wild Goose Publications, 2002]

The Pilgrims' Progress

2007-05-14T22:56:00.000-04:00

This sign is about 1 km from the cathedral in Le Puy, France, from the start of the Via Podensis that leads pilgrims through Aubrac, Conques, Quercy, Moissac, le pays basque, over the Pyrenees to Spain and then to the Via Frances. By the time we finish up on 9 June, we will have walked all those kms.

This go-round we will walk the following distances:
Day 1, 22 May, 21.4 kms
Day 2, 23 May, 28 kms
Day 3, 24 May, 29.5 kms
Day 4, 25 May, 21.3 kms
Day 5, 26 May, 23.5 kms
Day 6, 27 May, 30.6 kms
Day 7, 28 May, 21.2 kms
Day 8, 29 May, 20.5 kms
Day 9, 30 May, 31.4 kms
Day 10, 31 May, 28.2 kms
Day 11, 1 June, 33.1 kms
Day 12, 2 June, 32.1 kms
Day 13, 3 June, 28.2 kms
Day 14, 4 June, 29.9 kms
Day 15, 5 June, 32.1 kms
Day 16, 6 June, 20.6 kms

Oh, my feet!

There are bibles and there are bibles

2007-05-14T22:35:00.000-04:00

This little book, Miam-Miam Dodo, French for 'Din-din, beddy-bye,' is indispensable. Revised every year, it contains a wealth of information about lodging, restaurants, which places have laundry facilities, covered sheds for horses or donkeys (one does see such critters on the way), internet (usually not an interest but this year, more important), and which towns have stores for food, pharmacies, banks and so forth. The publishers issue one for the Chemin in France and the Camino in Spain. For the past three years (that is, 2005, 2006, 2007), we have used them. Their maps are fairly vague so we add in other maps from other sources.

So while there is THE Bible, there are other bibles which sometimes (for me at least) give clearer directions.

While walking there are always waymarks that show the way to go. The shell, in particular, is common in Spain. It's like walking on a long treasure hunt, looking for the next yellow arrow or shell on a lamp post, side of a house, in the pavement, wherever, that will indicate a turn.

If one goes along for a while without seeing a sign (unless there's nothing else in creation nearby), one begins to wonder if one missed a turn. We've only done that twice in all the kilometres, both in France and Spain, and we usually were able quickly to figure out where we missed the turn.

Following the camino is not like life where turns are not so clearly marked and where it is far easier to wander inadvertantly (never mind the conscious times) from the path. Often, too, there are not companion pilgrims nearby to yell or whistle to let one know that one missed a turn. (Though one day when we intentionally left the Camino to go to our inn, we had someone insist that we had gotten off the path and needed to return.)

By this time next week, we will be asleep, ready to start walking our first day. Wow!

One week and counting

2007-05-13T23:52:00.000-04:00

Somehow, all this stuff needs to get into my pack. Since this is the fourth go-round, the packing happens pretty automatically, and in little time, I have managed to get practically everything into the pack. I haven't weighed it yet, though... partly because that means I have to weigh myself first.

In short order, everything is organised for next Sunday's departure, including my 'evening clothes,' the fleece, shirt and pants I will wear when I am not in my walking clothes. From previous experience, I know that I have to keep the top of my pack detached if it is to be lightweight enough to put in the overhead bins (since we're not checking anything). In the plastic bag, which sadly I will ditch in Spain (contributing to more plastic bag pollution), I have my pouch which attaches to my pack waist band, my sandals, the battery recharger for the camera and some other heavy items.

My cat knows that I am up to something; hence, her sleeping not quite on top of but close enough to my clothes. I will take her fur with me.

The 0.7% button will go on the outside of my pack once we get settled and stop flying, that is, when we finally land in Pamplona next Monday.

Now it's time to start painting the soles and sides of my feet and my pinky toes with the awful-smelling tincture of benzoin. It's the only way to minimise the assault of blisters. It's not readily visible, but I have a lump smack in the middle of the arch of my left foot; the lump is part of the plantars fascia so it got a good swabbing tonight.

When one walks like this, fifteen miles a day with an extra 40 pounds (25 pounds for the pack, water and pouch, and 15 pounds overweight), one's world shrinks to worrying about one's feet and knees, which take the brunt of the walking.

Why this should be such a big deal for me, I don't know, since most of the world spends its days walking with more weight (I think of all the people I see in El Salvador carrying bundles of sticks on their heads or water jars) than I will. They don't have the luxury of smearing a preventative medicine on their feet, nor do they have the nice boots, wool socks and plasters that I will have to protect my feet (which are pretty roughed up because I like to go barefoot).

Walking as I will, as a pilgrim, will be luxurious compared to how my sisters and brothers walk. But, as I have written downstream, I walk because they walk and perhaps in my walking, I can remember them.

I have no idea how the fund raising is going but I hope folks are hitting that 'Donate to ERD' button :)

Hand-outs

2007-05-07T16:16:00.000-04:00

In most of the churches in France that the pilgrim visits, one finds a notebook in which the pilgrim can write prayers and read what people beforehand have written. I became the one who would write a small note, a prayer, or a thought, and then sign it with our names and home. Then I would read through the notes the people ahead of me had written. It became as much of a ritual as writing a candle (and a lot less expensive!).

So, for this year, I am printing out business cards that have on one side:

Peregrinas por los Objetivos de desarrollo del Milenio [Pilgrims for the MDGs]

[update: we're adding: Peregrinas Episcopales de los EEUU…]

and on the other side:

Objetivos de desarrollo del Milenio
1. Erradicar la pobreza extrema y el hambre
2. Lograr la enseñanza primaria
3. Promover la igualdad entre los géneros y la autonomía de la mujer
4. Reducir la mortalidad infantile
5. Mejorar la salud maternal
6. Combatir el VIH/SIDA, el paludismo y otras enfermedades
7. Garantizar la sostenibilidad del medio ambiente
8. Fometar una asociación mundial para el desarrollo

Fewer of the churches in Spain, as I recall, have these notebooks but I intend to leave these cards behind so that whoever follows might know why a few people are walking the Camino.

The accompanying photo here is of a little chapel that overlooks the wonderful village of Conques, France. It was a super hot and humid day when we climbed up out of the valley to this chapel and it was so nice and cool that we stopped and rested a little even though we'd only been walking 30 or 45 minutes. Someone had left a breviary on the altar and it was open to the day's readings which, though I don't remember what they were, seemed appropriate for the day.

Will it be like this? Hope not!

2007-05-07T15:47:00.000-04:00

This excerpt comes from Kerry Egan's Fumbling: A Journey of Love, Adventure, and Renewal on the Camino de Santiago (NY, NY: Broadway Books, 2006), 89-91. In order to keep the entry PG, I am altering the expletives, though they sort of add to the character of the passage and actually render it comical. You'll figure out what they are.

+++

The days always dawned cool and clear, but by ten the sun would really begin to heat up. By noon we were walking through wheat as far as the eye could see. From the top of any small rise you could spin in a circle and see only blocks of yellow or gold or pale green with faint zigzagging red lines running through them: fields of wheat planted at different times and the red-and-orange poppy flowers that floated above the grain, bobbing in the breeze like paper teacups. In the distance, on hills rising above the fields and with roads climbing out of the wheat to meet them, small towns huddled in on themselves. Always at least one church steeple rose from the town, sometimes high and graceful but usually short and worn down, the edges of the stone buffered to smooth curving shapes. The sky was the color of old blue glass bottles, with only whispy clouds low on the horizon. A giant blue platform for the sun.

The sun was everywhere. Everything seemed to have become sun — the wheat, the road, Alex, myself. I hated the sun. I hated the heat and the I hated the relentless way it just kept beating down on me, regardless of how I felt or what I did. I hated the heat rash it gave me and the headache it caused, I hated how hot it was, but mostly I hated how inescapable it was. There was no shade anywhere, no trees, no buildings, and no clouds to blot it out, even for a few seconds. It burned right through the top of my head, like a skewer that ran down my spine and stuck me to the ground.

I did not want this sun anymore. I was in fear of the sun. I thought about it constantly. I began praying, both as I walked and at night before I fell asleep that there would be clouds the next day to block it, or some trees to throw shadows across the road. Day after day I begged as I walked. "Please please please God let there be some clouds. Or trees. Just five minutes of shade and it would all be okay. Please, God. I'll do anything. Just some shade."

The sun kept shining that afternoon, as it had for the past week. I explained to God why I needed shade, or ever better, a cool rain shower. No response. Anger welled up in my throat. Was it so much to ask for a single cloud? All around the waist-high wheat continued to rustle gently. I hated that wheat which never offered shade. I stormed three feet into the field.

Wheat hurts. It scrapes and burns. This just further enraged me.

"Effing wheat. GD effing wheat."

A steady stream of expletives erupted from me. I don't really curse and it was a surprisingly liberating feeling. I kicked the wheat. It felt so good that I kicked again and again, circling around myself and kicking in every direction. With all my body weight behind me, I shifted onto one leg to let the other fly as hard and fast as I could. The backpack threw me off balance and I almost fell. "GD backpack!" and flung the thing off me. "Stupid sun! Couldn't there be any clouds! Nooooo! Of course not! All I effing ask for is some effing clouds, but never. I pray and pray for a cloud or a tree, but you just ignore me. You probably laugh at me. GD effing prayers are never answered. I am a good person, you know. Do you know that? Do you care? Do you effing listen? All I wanted was a effing tree!" I stood in a wheat field screaming at the clear blue sky and blazing sun. Silence. So I started kicking again and I didn't care that it hurt. It felt good.

"Why are you kicking the wheat?" Alex asked.

"Because it is not a effing tree," I screamed back.

"Really?"

"Yes. And you should, too. Don't you hate it?" I asked, turning on him.

He rubbed the back of his neck and looked at me. "Why should I hate it? It's just wheat. It just stands there."

This enraged me even more. I started howling. I wasn't even using words any more, but just sounds. I was shaking and screaming as loud as I could. I'd lost control of myself and I knew it. I couldn't stop. Was Alex such an idiot? Couldn't he see that the wheat just standing there was exactly the problem? That no matter what I did, I could do nothing to change the wheat into a tree? I was completely powerless. This was a betrayal of all I had ever been taught about hard work and responsibility and justice and fairness. I kept kicking.

I hear a click. Alex has taken a picture of me.

"What are you doing?"

"You'll want to remember this someday," he said, dropping the camera into his backpack.

I picked up my bag, stumbled out to the road, and started walking again. "I feel better," I said. Alex didn't answer.

We walked on in silence.

The agony of the feet

2007-05-06T22:58:00.000-04:00

Sixteen days away, I wonder why am I going to spend sixteen days walking about 15 miles a day when it can be so painful?

Granted, I will not have two newly broken toes as I did last year (hence the white tape on the side of my left foot in the accompanying photograph), but the blisters and heat rash from the wool socks are a given. No matter what, it seems that one's feet suffer.

It's time to start coating them with tincture of benzoin, this brown, sticky and smelly stuff that turns your skin into leather and prevents blisters.

Unlike other years, I am going to stop walking from here on so as to save my feet. It's alternative forms of exercise.

Why do we do this?

In part, to use the words that CROP walkers say: 'We walk because they walk.'

So much of the world has to walk to get its water. It doesn't nicely flow from the tap whenever you want. And for multitudes, it doesn't even flow from a tap; it flows from a well down the road.

Think of how much time the population of the world, mostly women, spends going to get water.

And think of how much time school children spend walking to get to school. There are some communities in El Salvador that the Anglican Episcopal Church of El Salvador accompanies that get separated from the main road during the rainy season. It's a 5km walk to and from the main road and the children walk that so they can get to school.

So we walk because they walk.

Three weeks from today...

2007-05-02T13:15:00.000-04:00

... we'll be walking from Estella to Los Arcos.

Mientras, three years ago, we were closing in on Santiago de Compostela, having started about the 20th of April from Roncesvalles.

This morning I went to a neat site that generates maps and elevations for the portion of the camino (or chemin) that one walks.

Here are the three maps for the portion of the camino we will be walking. [Click on them for enlargements.]

Map 1

map 2

map 3

The elevation gains aren't too wild — it's not like the spike one sees when one goes from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port to Roncevaux/Roncesvalles, nor is it the up and down one sees as one approaches Santiago.

The breakdown of stages between El Burgo Ranero and Astorga don't correspond exactly to where we'll be spending the night but they are close enough and one way or another, we will walk the 85 kms between the two places.

This is getting more real! I am beginning to collect all my walking clothes and accessories and dump them on the spare bed. Now, if only I had more energy....

Se acerca (it's getting close)

2007-04-30T22:55:00.000-04:00

Three weeks from today we will have breezed through Pamplona (where this medieval pilgrims' bridge is) on our way to Estella where we will start walking. I am not sure whether we will spend the night in Pamplona; we will certainly try to visit there because we didn't get into the cathedral three years ago when we walked through there.

I have started to put things out that will go into my pack. I don't have a lot of time and want to avoid the last-minute running-around preparations that have characterised other departures for the camino/chemin.

Unlike our two trips to France, this time we will have to take sleeping bags. In France, the gîtes (hostels) provide blankets, pillows and pillow cases. In Spain, you get a mattress at the refugios. I now have a lightweight, super-compressable sleeping bag (it would not do on a cold night in the New Hampshire Whites) that I can put at the bottom of my pack.

The trip is getting more real now. I even checked the weather and see that it is raining in both León and Burgos.

ERD testifies on Capitol Hill

2007-04-26T21:29:00.000-04:00

From Episcopal News Service

ERD Congressional Testimony highlights role of faith-based institutions in fighting malaria in Africa
By Staff April 26, 2007 [ENS, WASHINGTON, DC]

In a hearing to mark Africa Malaria Day April 25, Episcopal Relief and Development (ERD) testified before a key U.S. congressional subcommittee on the role of faith-based organizations in fighting the malaria pandemic in Africa.

"The Church and other faith communities … are the first point of contact for help," Susan Lassen, a consultant who coordinates ERD's NetsForLife program in malaria control, told the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health.

"Faith communities have long had the ability to build and mobilize a delivery system that will reach the most vulnerable populations who live 'at the end of the road,'" said ERD President Robert W. Radtke.

Unparalleled infrastructure, capacity

"As the global community develops new and innovative methods to control and prevent malaria, the challenge of distribution becomes absolutely critical," Lassen told committee members. "NetsforLife capitalizes on the infrastructure of the Anglican Church to reach vulnerable populations."

The full testimony can be read [below].

NetsforLife is a one-year-old initiative of ERD, carried out in partnership with the Anglican Churches of Africa, to distribute one million insecticide-treated malaria-prevention bed nets in 16 sub-Saharan African countries by the end of 2008. Thus far, the program has distributed 213,000 nets in Angola, Zambia, Kenya, Ghana, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Mozambique. It is funded by private individual donors, Churches, the Starr Foundation, the Coca-Cola Africa Foundation, the ExxonMobil Foundation, and Standard Chartered Bank. To learn more about NetsForLife, visit er-d.org/malaria

Also testifying at the hearing were Admiral Tim Ziemer, coordinator of the United States President's Malaria Initiative; Mark Grabowski, Malaria program manager for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria; Enid Wamani, secretariat coordinator for the Uganda Malaria and Childhood Illness organization; Dr. Nils Daulaire, president of the Global Health Council; and Adel Chaouch of Marathon Oil and the Corporate Alliance on Malaria in Africa.

Bed nets are large sheets of insecticide-treated meshing designed to be draped over the beds or sleeping areas of people living in regions where malaria is prevalent. The nets shield users from malaria-carrying mosquitoes, which spread the disease during night hours.

Health-care professionals consider net use fundamental to efforts to prevent the spread of the disease, which causes more than 300 million acute illnesses and at least one-million deaths each year in developing countries.

"A mother and her two children can be protected from malaria for five years for a total cost of approximately $12," ERD told the subcommittee, explaining that this cost reflects not only the price of the net but also training in proper use, education in other methods to prevent malaria, and ongoing monitoring and evaluation.

An emerging consensus

In addition to ERD's focus on mobilizing the infrastructures of African Churches, the Episcopal Church is supporting malaria-control efforts through its advocacy to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), said Alex Baumgarten, international policy analyst in the Church's Office of Government Relations in Washington, D.C. Goal 6 of the MDGs is "combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases."

"The advocacy of Episcopalians through the ONE Episcopalian campaign is playing an important role in building a new consensus in the U.S. Congress and Administration that fighting deadly poverty and disease throughout the world should stand at the forefront of our nation's foreign policy," said Baumgarten.

Since the beginning of 2007, Congress has approved more than $1.3 billion in increased funding for anti-poverty and disease initiatives, with the Senate voting to further increase funding over the coming year by an additional $2 billion.

"The understanding among U.S. policymakers of the relationship between poverty and disease and its affect on conflict and global stability is light years ahead of where it was two or three years ago," said Baumgarten.

President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush addressed the importance of malaria-control efforts in comments yesterday in the White House Rose Garden to commemorate Africa Malaria Day. Speaking about the eradication of malaria in the United States in the 1950s, President Bush said, "we've solved this problem before. And the fundamental question is: do we have the will to do the same thing on another continent? That's really the question that faces this country and other nations around the world. My commitment is: you bet we have the will. And we've got a strategy to do so."

"Defeating malaria is going to be a challenge, but it's not going to require a miracle," said the President. "That's what I'm here to tell you. It's going to require a smart and sustained campaign."

The Rose Garden ceremony highlighted the work of the President's Malaria Initiative (PMI), a five-year $1.2 billion initiative to spur government partnership with private organizations, including faith-based institutions, in the fight against malaria. Baumgarten said that the Episcopal Church is actively advocating for maximum congressional funding of PMI and related efforts.

Wholeness and wellbeing

In her testimony, Lassen also stressed the unique level of commitment and energy that faith communities draw from their theological background and experiences: "For the faithful of Africa…their core identity is shaped by the sense that God is using them to help draw their communities into the wholeness and wellbeing he intended for them when he created the world and proclaimed it good."

Lassen told subcommittee members of an Angolan woman named Malita who lost a child to malaria but has since been trained by NetsForLife as a community malaria leader. Describing people like Malita as the "hands and feet" of NetsForLife, Lassen concluded her testimony by telling lawmakers that "If she was here today, Malita would say: 'God is good all the time. All the time God is good.'"

+
Written Testimony to
House Committee on Foreign Affairs,
Subcommitte on Africa and Global Health

By Susan Lassen,
Consultant to Episcopal Relief and Development for NetsforLifeSM
and
Robert W. Radtke,
President, Episcopal Relief and Development

To be delivered by Ms. Lassen on Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Mr. Chairman, Congressman Smith, and distinguished members of the subcommittee:

Thank you for the opportunity to describe the role of the faith based community as partners in the fight against malaria in the developing world.

My name is Susan Lassen. I am a member of the Episcopal Church and consultant for Episcopal Relief and Development’s program in malaria prevention: NetsforLifeSM. I am pleased to be joined by Dr. Robert W. Radtke, President of Episcopal Relief and Development which is the international relief and development agency of the Episcopal Church in the United States. An independent 501(c)(3) organization, ERD saves lives and builds hope in communities around the world. We provide emergency assistance in times of crisis and rebuild after disasters. We enable people to climb out of poverty by offering long-term solutions in the areas of food security and health care, including HIV/AIDS and malaria.

As the global community develops new and innovative methods to control and prevent malaria the challenge of distribution becomes absolutely critical. Known as the ‘silent’ killer many of the one to three million deaths a year from malaria occur in hidden remote house holds out of sight and reach.

NetsforLifeSM is an inexpensive initiative to distribute one million long lasting insecticide treated nets in six-teen countries in sub-Saharan Africa by the end of 2008. The program specializes in reaching isolated populations, and was officially launched in Zambia exactly one year ago today. Our program is funded by private individual donors, Churches, the Starr Foundation, the Coca-Cola Africa Foundation, the ExxonMobil Foundation, and Standard Chartered Bank. The partnership’s ability to leverage the individual funders corporate expertise, in addition to funds, has been significantly instrumental in our effort to fight malaria.

Two hundred and thirteen thousand long lasting insecticide treated nets have been distributed in Angola, Zambia, Kenya, Ghana, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Mozambique. A mother and her two children can be protected from malaria for five years for a total cost of approximately $12.

However, NetsforLifeSM is not only about distributing nets. Within this cost, monitoring evaluation, education, vector management, advocacy for drug access and training around indoor residual spraying, are included. We have been able to build malaria prevention into our current work in integrated community health programs.

This year training and distribution are planned for Tanzania, Malawi, Liberia, Zimbabwe, and Madagascar.

The Church and other faith communities are increasingly important, as they are the first point of contact for help. Over 70% of the African continent population is rural. Mission hospitals and health posts preceded European colonization and as countries became independent the majority of them became nationalized. However, with increasingly constrained Government budgets and scarce resources for health services, many of these hospitals are once again being run by the church and are to-day providing primary health care.

The need to reach remote communities is understood and all faith communities, have long had the ability to build and mobilize a delivery system that will reach the most vulnerable populations who live “at the end of the road.” For over three hundred years, they have provided an unparalleled infrastructure and capacity to reach these populations.

Churches in Africa are attended regularly, and are the natural convening point and focus for much of society. Often local leaders, many of them women, are born, nurtured and raised through the church where care and concern for one’s neighbor is at the core.

A Gallup poll published in September 2006 of people living in nine-teen sub-Saharan countries found that 76% of those polled trusted the Church, and only 38% their national Government. Where poverty limits a government’s ability to care for the health of its citizens, the Church is a dependable and trusted source for solutions to many problems including malaria. The respected leadership of the Church becomes the focus for disseminating information and changing behavior. It’s an influential, impartial and a trusted advocate for health services and a mobilizer of volunteers. This is a resource that cannot be under estimated. We believe that the un-tapped human capacity of the Church, and its infrastructural proximity to vulnerable populations, provides an effective opportunity for strong partnership with religious communities in Africa, to fight malaria.

NetsforLifeSM capitalizes on the infrastructure of the Anglican Church to reach these vulnerable populations. There are more than 40 million Anglicans in sub-Saharan Africa. Participating parishes in the program have up to ten outstations and women and youth networks. With training and commitment these volunteers become powerful forces that penetrate entire communities.

May I give you an example of how we work on the ground and an example of what partnership against malaria really means, from the end of the road?

On February 22, I attended the fifth NetsforLifeSM launch which was in Angola. We were delighted to be joined by Admiral Ziemer, the coordinator of the President’s Malaria Initiative, the Vice Minister of Health Dr Jose van Dunem, United States Ambassador Cynthia Efird; the Anglican Bishop of Angola, Andres Soares, and Dr Steven Phillips, of ExxonMobil, and Mr Mohammad Yasu from Coca-Cola Angola.

The journey to St. Stephen’s church in Kiambiaxi, a suburb of Luanda, took two hours -- a distance of four miles. We were greeted by magnificent singing, celebration, rejoicing, and speeches. Nets were distributed.

The atmosphere was different at St Andrew’s Church, Ondjiva, in Cunene province, which is more than 500 miles from the capital. Last year there was singing, celebration, rejoicing, fewer speeches, no dignitaries. Nets were distributed.

In this Church, nearly invisible to the rest of the world, 118 nets were distributed to pregnant women, mothers with children under five, the elderly and those who were HIV positive. They had traveled on foot from their village compounds in Namakunde– about five miles on footpaths (not roads or bicycle paths) – and had waited all day for us to arrive, many of them with small children.

The distribution of these 118 nets was, as always, preceded by a training session. We sat on benches inside St. Andrew’s Church under a leaking corrugated iron roof. A sleeping mat was on the ground, a net was unpacked, hooks and wooden poles assembled, and the net was hung. Role playing, drama and stories were frequently interrupted for questions. This was a practical class but with constant reinforcement of the importance of using the net and encouraging malaria prevention as a priority. It was dark and I could see peering into the Church from the rain outside faces of people who were listening eagerly. I walked to the doorway, and I was startled to see that a huge crowd had gathered, all of whom wanted to learn about ‘the fever’. Although they would certainly leave with some knowledge, they would have to wait for the next shipment of nets, the demand and need was great.

The 118 nets we distributed will protect probably 230 people from malaria for the next five years, but the cumulative effect will be much greater. I’ll give you one example:

Malita a young mother, returned with her family to Angola from northern Namibia last year as peace and security seemed so hopeful. It was time to start cultivating the family farm. They had heard that vegetables were selling well in the market and the future was bright.

Malita had two small children and was pregnant. She knew that “fever” came but she had no idea what caused it. She was inclined to believe her mother-in-law that it was ‘bad sugar cane.’ When her eldest child – about three years old -- started feeling feverish the week before, she was utterly powerless to save him. She told me with tears how quickly he had died, in her arms, in less than a day.

I met Malita at about 7 o’clock in the evening; she had trekked all day with her mother-in-law and had waited for her net. Not only did she leave with the net, however, but she left with knowledge. She now knows about fever and what to do. She knows about the malaria mosquito, she knows that she and her child must sleep under the net, not just in the rainy season but every night. She knows about puddles, about keeping her compound clean, and about spraying. She knows about treatment with medicine and she knows where to go for help.

And, perhaps most important of all, she has become a community malaria volunteer. More nets are on their way to Ondjiva, and Malita will be ready, she has been trained in malaria prevention by the NetsforLifeSM team so that she can educate, support and teach her own village. She will make sure that mothers are protected, that the elderly and sick sleep every night under a net, and that those who need treatment will know where to go. She will make sure that all the medicine is swallowed.

Malita’s knowledge and experience will stay in Namakunde; it will steadily build the health, wellbeing, agricultural production and economic vitality of this small community, on the border between Angola and Namibia. Refugees like Malita’s family are returning to their old land to cultivate, plant and resettle and malaria is a sickness that they cannot afford.

People like Malita are the hands and feet of NetsforLifeSM across Africa and are demonstrating that with very small investment from countries like our own, the fight against malaria can be won.

Episcopal Relief and Development is thrilled to see the continuing expansion of the President’s Malaria Initiative and urges Congress to continue to fund it robustly. We thank this subcommittee for its leadership on this vital issue, and we thank the State Department, USAID, and multilateral partner, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. The Zambia Anglican Council that launched NetsforLifeSM last year is now in discussions with a Global Fund grantee the Christian Health Association of Zambia (CHAZ).

We began this testimony, Mr. Chairman, by describing the need and role of the faith-based community in the fight against malaria. The Church is now, and will continue to be a vital steadfast partner, committed to serving all those in need irregardless of faith. It is pragmatic and efficient and has unique access and capability to RollBackMalaria- that difficult, last mile.

We would also like to add that the faith communities in Africa draw on a unique level of commitment, inspiration, and energy from a faith – born partly out of theology and partly out of circumstance – that God is omnipotent and that His purpose is greater than any one individual or community.

As the Anglican Bishop of Lebombo, Mozambique, Denis Sengulane often says: God has no hands – and he has no feet, eyes, or ears – in the world except our own. For the faithful of Africa, their core identity is shaped by the sense that God is using them to help draw their communities into the wholeness and wellbeing He intended for them when He created the world and proclaimed it good. This involves healing the sick and feeding the hungry, and at a fundamental level, it involves working for the systemic change that will eradicate poverty permanently.

In closing and in answer to your question Mr. Chairman, the faith-based community is willing and eager to follow the leadership of this committee, to be partners in the fight against malaria and to save lives.

Malita offers us just one example of true partnership. If she was here to-day, she would say to this committee:
“God is good all the time
All the time God is good.”

Thank you.

Today is Africa Malaria Day

2007-04-25T19:21:00.000-04:00

Net gains in the fight against malaria
By Robert W. Radtke, April 25, 2007

[ERD] April 25 is Africa Malaria Day, and the first-ever Malaria Awareness Day in the U.S. Not long ago, Americans would have needed no special reminder -- malaria was not eradicated here until 1951.

Today, a $1.2 billion President's Initiative on Malaria and Congressional efforts to restore $2.2 billion to the Global Fund demonstrate America's renewed focus on fighting the disease. But recalling that the U.S. and many other countries eliminated malaria in the last century, why is it epidemic now?

300 to 500 million people contracted it last year, more than 90 percent of them live in Africa. In hotspots like Zambia, malaria incidence tripled in the last 30 years. Global infection rates are rising too -- some three billion living in malaria-affected areas worldwide. Malaria now kills between one and three million annually and is the worst killer of children. 3,000 under age five die daily in sub-Saharan Africa alone.

How in the 21st century could such a treatable, preventable, ancient disease survive and thrive? Described by Hippocrates in 600 BC and by Chinese sources in 2,700 BC, the Roman empire fought malaria by draining swamps. The British empire fought it by drinking gin and tonic. After hospitalizing 80 percent of the Panama canal workforce in 1905, concerted prevention and treatment brought malaria under control there by 1912.

Panama, Greece, Spain, Italy, and Jamaica all enjoyed surging economic growth after malaria eradication in the 20th century. Why do Angola, Burundi, DR Congo, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Uganda and Zambia languish in the downward spiral of malaria and poverty?

There are several explanations. Eradication programs in the last century never reached sub-Saharan Africa, and today those most at risk -- often displaced victims of disasters or conflict, living in Africa's poorest, most remote communities -- are still the most difficult to reach. Global warming expands the range of the malaria-carrying anopheles mosquito into new areas such as the Kenyan highlands, where residents lack immunity. Amid the AIDS crisis and other disasters, donor countries temporarily lost some focus on malaria in the last decade, during which it surged.

But despite all this, perhaps for the first time in its long history, we can defeat malaria in Africa and elsewhere -- not so much because of new, high-tech advances, but because we know what works.

High-tech research into vaccines and genetically altering mosquitoes is important. So is selective treatment with new-line drug combinations. But other highly effective measures are more basic: better sanitation, health care access, and education, plus interventions like insecticide spraying or sleeping under long-lasting insecticide-treated mosquito nets (LLITNs).

"Highly effective" need not mean "highly expensive." For example LLITNs work anywhere, even among transient populations, or in places where insecticide spraying wouldn't work or could contaminate water supplies. Used properly, nets prevent infection and can cut local mosquito populations by 80 percent. One LLITN lasts up to five years, protects several people, and costs just $15 including training for recipients.

In general, controlling malaria would cost a fraction of the $12.3 billion it costs Africa in lost GDP. Today, donor countries including the U.S. and large international agencies do spend billions fighting malaria. But even given sufficient funding and effective measures, intractable delivery problems remain.

For example, it's relatively straightforward to distribute LLITNs. But getting recipients to use them properly, or at all, requires educational workshops. Without training, caregivers can't recognize signs of malaria infection, which can kill children in hours. Nor can they slow its progress until they reach medical care. Among at-risk populations, literacy is low, villages are scattered, so training requires sustained, on-the-ground, face-to-face contact -- with hundreds of millions of people over perhaps a million square miles.

What organization has the capacity to do that? In Africa, where 40 percent of health care is church-based, it's the Anglican Church. Along an integral part of local African communities, it offers a ready-made, decentralized aid distribution network and commands trust needed to help influence behavior.

Through the NetsforLifeSM program, a new partnership with global corporate and individual sponsors, the Anglican Church is delivering a million LLITNs and accompanying training in 16 sub-Saharan countries over three years. Local clergy, church volunteers and lay groups get trained to conduct the distribution and education programs themselves. Working with the Church, community members become active participants in fighting the disease. NGOs call this "local capacity building," always preferable to importing one-time relief measures from outside.

Hurricane Katrina and the Indian Ocean tsunami proved that big relief efforts can work better when channeled through the deep community roots of churches and faith-based groups. So too in the case of malaria, where much depends on community-based networks for effective delivery and training. Connecting churches, FBOs and NGOs -- such as Roll Back Malaria -- with international sponsors may be a missing link that allows us finally to defeat this deadly disease.

-- Robert W. Radtke is president of Episcopal Relief and Development, implementing partner of NetsforLifeSM.

Prayers from Le Chemin

2007-04-25T12:01:00.000-04:00

Here are two prayers from Le Chemin du Puy-en-Velay to Saint-Pierre-Pied-du-Port:

Seigneur, que cette cièrge que je fais brûler soit lumière pour que tu m'éclaires dans mes difficultés et décisions, qu'il soit feu pour que tu brûles en moi tout égoïsme, orgeuil et impureté. Qu'il soit flamme pour que tu rechauffes mon cœur. Je ne peux pas rester longtemps dans ton église. En laissant brûler ce cièrge, c'est un peu de moi que je veux te donner. Aide-moi à prolonger une prière, dans mes activités du jour.

Lord, may this candle that I burn be light so that you will enlighten me in my difficulties and decisions; may it be fire that you may burn [from] me all egotism, pride and impurities. May it be a flamme so that you can rekindle my heart. I cannot stay for long in your church. By leaving this candle to burn, it's a little bit of me that I want to give you. Help me to prolongue a prayer in my day's activities. [from Eauze]

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Toi qui portes dans ton cœur un soucieux inquietude,
une peine,
une grande joie,
Toi qui as besoin de la force de Dieu,
de sa lumière,
de son aide.
Parles-en à Marie
et à son fils Jésus
et la flamme de ce cièrge
prolongera ta prière.

You who carry in your heart a bothering worry,
pain,
great joy,
you who need God's strength,
God's light,
God's help.
Talk about it to Mary,
her son, Jesus
and the flame of this candle
will prolong your prayer. [from Arzacq]

More on Nets for Life SM

2007-04-25T08:41:00.000-04:00

Episcopal News Service released this article today.

Episcopal Relief and Development celebrates Africa Malaria Day 2007

April 25, 2007 [ERD] Episcopal Relief and Development (ERD) commemorates Africa Malaria Day 2007, April 25. The theme for this year, created by the Roll Back Malaria Partnership, is "Leadership and Partnership for Results." It is also the first Malaria Awareness Day in the United States.

ERD is committed to combating this deadly disease through the NetsforLifeSM malaria prevention program, which aims to distribute one million long-lasting insecticide-treated nets and educate three to four million people in 16 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The program teaches people about the disease through community health education and awareness programs. NetsforLifeSM is a partnership of private donors, churches and corporations including Coca-Cola Africa Foundation, Standard Chartered Bank, the Exxon Mobil Foundation and the Starr Foundation.

To date, the program has trained more than 2,000 community malaria agents and distributed more than 210,000 long-lasting insecticide-treated nets in countries including Zambia, Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo. NetsforLifeSM addresses Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) #1, 4, 5, 6 and 8.

"The malaria problem in Africa goes beyond the walls of health facilities and the health sector to affect almost every aspect of society," said Stephen Dzisi, ERD's program officer for Africa. "The involvement of, and partnership with, the leadership at various levels of central and local government are therefore crucial for finding any meaningful solution towards reducing the devastation caused by the disease."

Africa has the highest malaria infection rate in the world. Each year, an estimated one million people die from malaria worldwide, with close to 90 percent of these deaths occurring in Africa. It is the leading cause of death in children under five years old and kills one in 20 children on the continent.

In Mozambique and Angola, more than five million people are infected with malaria each year. ERD is working with the Diocese of Lebombo (Anglican Church of Southern Africa) in Mozambique. So far, 16,500 insecticide-treated nets have been distributed. Close to 384 people in the communities of Maputo, Inhambane and Xai-Xai have been trained in malaria prevention and control techniques. The agents have sensitized more than 400,000 community members.

In Angola, ERD has partnered with the Anglican Diocese of Angola in the Uige and Cunene provinces. Since the program began in 2006, more than 16,000 insecticide-treated nets have been issued and more than 388 community malaria agents have been taught to educate communities about malaria.

Episcopal Relief and Development, in partnership with Roll Back Malaria, endorses the Global Health Council's Malaria Community Statement on Africa Malaria Day 2007. The statement is signed by ERD and other organizations fighting the spread of the disease and raising awareness about malaria prevention. Please click here to read the full statement.

Further information on NetsforLifeSM is available here.

Useful resource for this Sunday

2007-04-24T17:58:00.000-04:00

Episcopal News Service has created a bulletin insert for this Sunday that focuses on Nets for Life. I encourage you to go to the link, download the insert, get it printed up and distributed for your congregation.

Mary Frances Schonberg has written an article about the Anglican Church working with Nets for Life in Zambia. This initiative is what Episcopal Relief and Development's Inspiration Fund is supporting.

If you haven't made your donation to ERD in Saint Mary's Youth Group's name, you can do so now by going to the link on the top of this blog.

Slogging along

2007-04-16T09:49:00.000-04:00

As is so often the case, when reality hits one's dreams, it can be disappointing.

For months we researched backpacks, footwear (hiking boots), walking sticks, outerwear, water containers and exactly how much things would weigh so that we wouldn't be carrying too much. We looked through every guide on the Camino we could get our hands on, ordering them through the internet. We plotted our route, figuring out the stages we would walk. I revisited my medieval French texts, specifically La Chanson de Roland, since so much of the initial portion of the Camino consists of places named in these texts.

Finally, we flew from the US to Madrid to Pamplona and took a taxi ride up to Burguete where we would spend the night in the little hotel where Ernest Hemingway used to stay. We walked the 2+ kms from Burguete up to Roncesvalles so we could go to the pilgrims' mass, be blessed and sent on our way. The night we walked up there was clear and not too chilly. We could sort of make out the Pyrenees behind the little town.

The next day, our very first day of walking, it POURED rain. We got lost within the first 10 metres because we couldn't find how the Camino hooked into the little town so we walked 3 or 4 kms on the main road. And when we finally found the Camino, it was so muddy that walking was treacherous. The Camino was so badly eroded that one walked on granite slabs that had a downward tilt. The path was extremely narrow.

Needless to say, we did not see the mountains at all that day.

To make the day perfect, my water container split so all the water ran down my back, and caused my rain pants to dye my khaki pants under them various shades of blue. I was so wet from the rain that I didn't notice; we didn't figure it out until the evening when we completely emptied our packs, strung up parachute cord for clothes lines and even hung our airplane tickets and passports on them to dry out.

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As with any long-haul adventure, there is the initial flush of excitement, the expectation of the journey, and the dreams of how it will go. With any long-haul adventure, disappointments come along, one gets bogged down but usually one can walk one's way through it.

I hope our youth group doesn't get too bogged down in their attempts to raise $1500 for the Inspiration Fund. I hope they don't get disappointed. Likewise, in the larger picture, I hope people don't get discouraged. It is possible to make one's goal... it just takes some slogging through the mud.

Gotta keep on walkin'

2007-04-14T12:06:00.000-04:00

Thought for the day

"Above all, do not lose your desire to walk:
every day I walk myself into a state of well-being
and walk away from every illness;
I have walked myself into my best thoughts,
and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it....
the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill....
thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right."

— Soren Kierkegaard

[Alto de Pardon outside of Pamplona, April 2004 — note the wind turbine: the province of Navarra gets something like 30-40% of its electricity from wind farms]

Making progress

2007-04-12T17:20:00.000-04:00

Last night at youth group, the kids wrote up their powerpoint presentation on Episcopal Relief and Development's Inspiration Fund for the Millennium Development Goals and the Nets for Life program. We had gone to the public library back in February so they had lots of information about malaria, how it is spread and how it can be prevented. They had at hand the ERD Gifts for Life catalogue that also tells about buying insecticide-treated bednets.

So for 45 minutes the two boys and I worked on their presentation. There aren't any photos in it yet, but the hard part, the text is all set.

Our youth group this year has basically consisted of three adults and two kids but, hey, these two are committed and they really enjoy coming. One has repeatedly chosen youth group over social events and he doesn't even come on Sundays because his family is loosely connected with one of the other churches in town.

The two plus the adults are going to go on the road this spring to Episcopal churches in the area to talk about Nets for Life and to raise money for the Inspiration Fund. I pray that their offer will be well received and their presentation even more so.

[photo from 21 March]

The long haul

2007-04-10T16:26:00.000-04:00

The Cadogan Guide, Northern Spain (Dana Facaros and Michael Pauls), describes the Alteplano thusly:

If the medieval pilgrim survived the storms, cut-throats and wolves at Roncesvalles, the Navarrese who exposed themselves when excited, and the dupers and fleshpots of Burgos, then they faced the dustiest, flattest, hottest and most monotonous landscape in Europe. The idea is that with nothing to look at one becomes introspective and meditative, altogether in a proper state to receive enlightenment. On the other hand, nearly all the route between Burgos and León is off the highways, on paths and lonely backroads where 20th-century intrusions are rare: their straggling hamlets of humble adobe houses, church towers crowned with storks and huge dovecotes (pigeon was the only meat the country folk could afford) evoke the Middle Ages as powerfully as any cathedral (272-73).

That is what we are opting to walk this May. Last year, in late May, we stayed at the home of someone whose father was on the Alteplano. Apparently, it was literally freezing with a stiff wind blowing into his face and he was most cold. So, we don't really know what sort of weather we're going to get.

Everyone says this portion is terrible and we certainly had pity on the pilgrims we saw three years ago as we whizzed by in the train. This go-round, we'll be the poor people slogging away, either roasting or freezing or maybe if we're lucky comfortably.

Great Easter-tide resource

2007-04-09T14:54:00.000-04:00

A companion pilgrim and General Convention Deputy and her husband have produced a collection of essays to take people through Eastertide, called 50 Alleluias. Go mosey on over to their blogsite to sign up for a daily email reflection written by members of their congregation.

In an introduction, Sara writes:

The Alleluia Booklet includes 50 meditations or alleluias, one for each day of the Easter season. Each alleluia is a story, poem, image or other creative piece about resurrection. Some are grand resurrection stories and experiences, some more humble.

Each meditation is written or offered by a member of our community. Many are offered by members of The Garden, Gethsemane Church, our growing church in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota. Others are offered by members of our larger church community.

At the end of the Easter season, on the Sunday after Pentecost, a day set aside by General Convention for fasting and giving to the Millennium Development Goals we ask for an offering for the Millennium Development Goals and the growth of our mission as a church.

Morning coffee break

2007-04-09T14:15:00.000-04:00

Thought for the day

A grand latte can cost $3.65 — have one every morning and that's about $1000 a year. That would provide 200 bed nets that would save children from dying of malaria.

(from the Diocese of Utah's wrap newspaper, Diocesan Dialogue, April 2007, Vol. 18, Issue 4, D4)

'Love one another as I have loved you.'

2007-04-05T15:30:00.000-04:00

Grace Phiri, National Health Coordinator for ERD partner Zambian Anglican Council, conducting an evaluation with the community malaria control team in Fiwila, Zambia. (Copyright ERD 2005)

On this Maundy Thursday, consider well one way in which we can show our love for one another as Jesus commanded us to do.

This information comes from the Episcopal Relief and Development's web site.

Malaria: Prevention and Control

Malaria is a serious and often fatal disease caused by a parasite. It has far-reaching implications for both the health of individuals and for the development of nations.

The World Health Organization estimates that each year 300-500 million cases of malaria occur – 90% of them in Sub-Saharan Africa, where children under the age of five are dying from malaria at a rate of nearly 3,000 each day.

Malaria is a leading cause of death and disease worldwide, especially in developing countries, and kills 1 million people each year, with most deaths being vulnerable young children. In Africa, malaria causes approximately 20% of all child deaths.

Because malaria causes so much illness and death, the disease is a great drain on many national economies. It costs Africa US$10-12 billion every year in gross domestic product even though it could be controlled for a fraction of that sum. Since many countries with malaria are already among the poorer nations, the disease maintains a vicious cycle of disease and poverty.

ERD is working with partners in malaria-affected countries in Sub-Saharan Africa to:

* Educate communities about malaria.

* Provide long-lasting insecticide treated bed nets and effective drug therapies. Ninety thousand people have been positively impacted by these five-year malaria nets.

* Create sustainable systems of malaria prevention within communities through local clergy and community leaders

Of mountains, literal and figurative

2007-04-03T20:26:00.000-04:00

If one is lucky, one gets to see the Pyrenees the day that one crosses from France to Spain. We saw them for many days before walking over them — about ten days before we actually crossed over. We were walking along a ridge that led into Lectoure, and I looked to my left, south, and gasped. 'What is it?' 'It's the Pyrenees!' They were still so far off, it was hard to believe that eventually we'd get up close.

Two days before we hiked over them, we got a good glimpse of them from the Chapel of Soyarza. The mountains in that region of the Basque country are not super high but they still are impressive. Even the day that we walked into Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, we could see them and from our room at the bed and breakfast where we spent two nights they were there.

But not the next day.

That often is how it seems with long sought-after goals. They appear to be clear for a while and then they disappear into fog and confusion.

How long has it been that the world has been talking about HIV/AIDS? The US dragged its feet forever on it… Randy Shilt's book, And the Band Played On, tells that story in heart-breaking detail. And that book came out twenty years ago!!! (The pages of my copy are yellowed with age.) We're still muddling around with prevention of HIV/AIDS (MDG #6).

Google HIV/AIDS and you'll come up with 54.600.000 hits.

For starters, though, if you want more information, go to the UNAIDS website.

This pandemic is a true mountain to climb, the path is not always clear, and we still have a long, long way to go.

For what are we walking?

2007-04-02T22:03:00.000-04:00

Insecticide-treated mosquito nets (quoted from Roll Back Malaria.org) [ITNs]

ITNs are designed in various shapes, colours and sizes to appeal to local tastes and meet local needs.

Most malaria-carrying mosquitoes bite at night. Mosquito nets, if properly used and maintained, can provide a physical barrier to hungry mosquitoes. If treated with insecticide, the effectiveness of nets is greatly improved, generating a chemical halo that extends beyond the mosquito net itself. This tends to repel or deter mosquitoes from biting or shorten the mosquito's life span so that [it] cannot transmit malaria infection.

Trials of insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) in the 1980s and 1990s showed that ITNs reduced deaths in young children by an average of 20%. Unfortunately, ITNs can be expensive for families at risk of malaria, who are among the poorest in the world, and cost is not the only barrier to their effective use. Often people who are unfamiliar with ITNs, or who are not in the habit of using them, need to be convinced of their usefulness and persuaded to re-treat the nets with insecticide on a regular basis.

In some areas where mosquito nets are already widely used, it has been estimated that less than 5% are re-treated to achieve their expected impact. WHO has worked with mosquito net and insecticide manufacturers to make re-treatment as simple as possible. However, the best hope lies with newly developed, long-lasting treated nets which may retain their insecticidal properties for four to five years the life span of the net thus making retreatment unnecessary.

One of the targets set at the Abuja Summit in April 2000 was to have 60% of populations at risk sleeping under ITNs by 2005. This will require 32 million mosquito nets and a similar number of insecticide re-treatments each year. To achieve this, much work still needs to be done to make ITNs affordable, widely available, and most importantly, appealing to the consumer. A variety of different approaches are being taken to promote ITN use, reduce their cost and ensure their quality:

* Social marketing schemes, health education campaigns and the development of a 'net culture' through promotion and publicity will all play their part in creating the necessary demand.

* In the Abuja Declaration, African governments committed themselves to reduce or eliminate the tariffs and taxes imposed on mosquito nets, netting materials and insecticides, in order to help lower retail prices. Almost 20 countries have reduced or waived such taxes and tariffs since the summit.

* Countries are also working to encourage the development of local industries and competition among them by ensuring private sector investment in manufacturing and importing mosquito nets.

* Further government action in the form of targeted subsidies, or subsidy schemes, is needed to bring ITN prices down to a level affordable to the poorest families.

* Since many mosquito nets currently in use have been distributed by NGOs or other organizations, WHO has recently drawn up a set of standard specifications for netting materials to make the procurement and quality control of ITNs easier.

* The Strategic Framework for Coordinated National Action for Scaling-up Insecticide-treated Netting Programmes in Africa (WHO/CDS/RBM/2002.42) reviews some of the generic issues frequently encountered in Africa south of the Sahara, during the integration of public and private sector activities, including issues of financing and distribution, and how limited public sector resources can be best used to provide the maximum possible long-term health benefits.

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The money we will raise will go to Episcopal Relief and Development's Inspiration Fund. More on that in another note, but the short version of what the fund will do is work with Nets for Life to provide nets in Africa (an on-going program), Latin America, the Caribbean and possibly Asia.

Credentials

2007-04-01T13:29:00.000-04:00

It's springtime and life on the Camino is cranking up. I got an email this morning from a woman I have never met but whom I advised last year when she and her sister were preparing to walk the Camino. The writer loved it; the sister did not and so they ended only after a week or so. Now, the writer is returning to finish the Camino without her sister. She loved being in Spain during Holy Week and Easter and so she will spend those days walking. She wrote to those whom she knows who have walked the Camino asking for our prayers. She has them, of course.

Those who undertake the camino as a spiritual exercise or pilgrimage, however they define it, usually get a Credencial at the starting point in Roncesvalles, tucked away in the Pyrenees. Many people actually start walking on the other side of the Pyrenees, in France at Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, so they can say they have crossed the mountains. We finished up last year in Spain in Roncesvalles, ending where we had begun walking in 2004. Unfortunately for us, the day we crossed the Pyrenees, it was pea soup so we didn't get to see the vista. Instead, all we saw were sheep in the fog, hearing them before we came upon them.

In any event, the Credencial is the pilgrim's passport to lodging at refugios and aubergues (hostels) along the way. There's a hierarchy of need on the Camino: those who walk get first crack at lodging, then those who bicycle, then those who walk without transporting their belongings on their back and, if there's any room left, those who drive the Camino. In France, one can make reservations; in Spain, usually one can't so that leads to a race to get to the hostels early enough to get a bed and, preferably, not in the middle of a large room. The three of us tend to opt for one-star hotels because it makes doing nightly laundry oh so much more easy.

The pilgrim gets the Credencial stamped with the locales of where one stays. It seems ridiculous to see a bunch of adults asking inn-keepers to stamp their Credencial but there's logic to the madness because one has to have proof of walking the last 100 kms (66 miles) in order to get the coveted Compostela, the certificate that states that the pilgrim has completed the pilgrimage... for spiritual reasons.

We will take the Credencial we started and finished in 2004 and work on the middle chunk. We're doing this all out of order but it doesn't matter; we will have covered every inch of the Camino (and then some).

Beginning to walk

2007-03-31T18:05:00.000-04:00

The whole idea of pilgrimage for me goes back a long, long time from the summer I spent with my cousins, living in the Netherlands. I bugged them all summer to go into Amsterdam so I could see Anne Frank's house, at the time in 1971, just made into a human rights museum. At age 14, I wasn't too clear about what 'human rights' meant, but I was clear that Anne had been a light for the world. I didn't get to spend nearly enough time in her house, going through the secret bookcase (something that pilgrims nowadays apparently can no longer do), and walking around in the rooms her family, friends and she inhabited.

Walking the Camino de Santiago is another form of pilgrimage, one that dates back to the 800s when a farmer looked up in the night sky to see a bright star that shone on the spot where the bones of Saint James were resting. Compostela, as in campus, field, stellae, of stars, became the destination for medieval pilgrims desirous of expiating their sins. (It was referred to as the Milky Way at one point in its history.) The Camino's popularity took off during in the 11th century but fell out of popularity until the 1990s when the United Nations made it a world monument. Now, thousands of pilgrims from around the world, make the journey from one end of northern Spain to the other, starting in the Pyrenee mountains where the medieval epic hero, Roland, Charlemagne's son, was killed in an ambush, and ending in Santiago, some 700+ miles later.

Three years ago, we three pilgrims, each for different reasons set off on the Camino. We only had time to do the first 100 kms and the last 250 or so, thereby skipping the middle section of the Alteplano, the long, flat, open and hot segment that we watched miserable pilgrims (or so it seemed) from our comfortable seats in a speedy train. Subsequently, we walked the Chemin de Saint Jacques, the Via Podensis, starting in Le Puy, France and ending in the Pyrenees in the French town of Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port.

So, now, this spring, we will walk the last 272 miles. And this time, it will be dedicated to Episcopal Relief and Development's Inspiration Fund. Every other walk we have literally carried people's prayers, handwritten on little pieces of paper. We will do that this time, too, but we will also leave in our path information about the Millennium Development Goals.

I am grateful to a colleague who also is walking the Camino (albeit in a different spot), who is raising money for an organisation that works with the MDGs. Thanks to her idea which got this one going.

That is a little bit of the big picture.

[As for the photo that accompanies this posting, it is taken from the top of the mountain ridge that separates Pamplona from the open terrain, with nearby Eunate, a Romanesque funerary chapel for fallen pilgrims of the middle ages. One hikes up the the Mont Pardon to find oneself alongside wind turbines — the province of Navarra prides itself on a large percentage of its energy being generated by wind — and a modern statue of a pilgrim and mule. It's quite dramatic.]

The Inspiration Pilgrimage

2007-03-30T13:50:00.001-04:00

Over the course of the next six or seven weeks, I will be posting information both about the Inspiration Fund that Episcopal Relief and Development is creating to raise money for the Millennium Development Goals, particularly Goal #6, the eradication of HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and other diseases and the Camino de Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain.

The idea of combining this medieval pilgrimage walk with raising money for the eradication of age-old diseases seems most fitting as we close out our 1500+ kilometre walk that began in April 2004. We walk about six-eight hours a day, averaging about 15 miles. Our walk this spring will take 16 days to go from Estella-Rabanal del Camino, Spain (the portion in red on the adjacent map).

Bienvenidos/as a este camino. Welcome to this journey.