February 20-22. Women’s Shelter, Mozart, Quaker meeting.

The women’s shelter is a nice place. It is hidden away because the abusive men have a tendency to get back to their victims. We see a nice plot of land with a fence around it and some converted sea containers serving as housing. A German NGO has constructed a nice bricked and plastered house but a lack of funds postponed its inauguration.

What we want to support, as always, is sustainable development. Sheldon takes us to a jewelry workshop where a small group of women make pretty jewelry from paper mash. They have developed techniques of making jewelry with low material cost, using paper mash and dried seeds. The women show us some of their jewelry and tell us how they intend to expand their activities. We decide to donate some money for materials like paint, assisting them on the path to sustainability.

We attend a quaker meeting, where we just sit in a circle and exercise silence. It’s great. The openness of quakers strikes me as very fascinating. If only they would leave out the words they spell with a capital letter.

Living around the house of Gudrun and Sheldon is great. We adore picking and peeling the pomegranates, we see a beautiful Fellini movie that made us realize how influencial he was on cinematographic history, I play Mozart duets with Gudrun, who is a violin teacher. I borrow her “peanut”, a one-piece violin created by a missionary in Papua New Guinee. It feels good playing the peanut, and it feels good grabbing a violin’s neck after so many months without a singing string.

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