Through rain and snow and sleet and hail- Got Bannock will not fail!

On Sunday 29 June I preached a sermon at Hope Mennonite, Winnipeg. I struggled with this sermon. I wanted to tell stories from Iraqi Kurdistan and  I wanted to teach a lesson from Jesus. But it was not coming together. I kept feeling like something was missing. I found a scripture text that I wanted to talk about- Matthew 10: 40-42. The main words were:" This is a large work I’ve called you into, but don’t be overwhelmed by it. It’s best to start small. Give a cool cup of water to someone who is thirsty, for instance. The smallest act of giving or receiving makes you a true apprentice. You won’t lose out on a thing.”

I included stories of cold cups of water given to me by Kurdish people, of meeting a woman asking for bus money on the streets of Winnipeg, and a Syrian Kurdish woman at the gate to the bazaar in Sulaimani. 

Then I thought of Althea Guiboche aka The Bannock Lady here in Winnipeg. She does not have much financial resources to feed the people around her but she sure does have the energy to encourage others to give. And then she has made  it happen every week for the last 18 months. So I decided to ask my church family to bring food to help her for that Sunday- the Got Bannock Burger Day. And they came through like I knew they would. I carried two laundry baskets full as well as bags of flour to Althea's house after church.

As I entered her back door I heard the laughter and voices of quite a few people. They were her friends and neighbours who had come to help make the bannock buns, and fry the burgers and cut the vegetables. I was invited to come in to help too. As we worked we looked outside the windows to see the rain begin to fall. "It's OK, there are still two hours left. It may slow down or stop". But it continued and even came down harder with gusts of wind.

                                     The group of people in Althea's kitchen (Althea Guiboche)

                              [Click on the photo to see all the pictures in larger size]

                           Great bannock burgers (Todd Matthew Dechateauvert)

The amazing thing is that this did did not discourage anyone. When 3 pm came and it was time to load up the coolers and boxes of fruit and burgers everyone was ready to ride (or walk) the two blocks to Dufferin and Main Street. As Althea's black van pulled onto Dufferin Ave. there were already people waiting. They knew that good food was coming.

Then other people began to show up- even more volunteers. One woman brought two large cartons full of hot Tim Horton's coffee with cups and cream and sugar to go into it. Another carried two large packages of cheese to go onto the burgers. A man brought his small daughter and an umbrella. He held the umbrella over people who needed protection from the rain as they gave out food or stood in line. And we discovered a cooler full of egg salad sandwiches from a woman who is celebrating Ramadan. People from all walks of life provided and served the food.

There was really no way to avoid getting wet. The water was coming down in buckets. So we kept the coolers closed except to reach for a wrapped burger and gave access to things to put on the burgers under the cover of the end gate of Athea's van.

Later that day Althea reflected on the day. "If there is one thing I learned to have, it's a healthy respect for the weather, my mantra is "hot or cold, rain or shine, if they're out there, then so is the bannock lady" any element they're in, then that's how I serve lunch, until I have a space to shelter them, then this is how it is, sometimes it gets messy or really cold, but the food is packaged and stored and given fresh, it's made with love and contains no judgements. 
I serve in the pouring rain or the coldest cold, I even make the media suffer with us lol just so they realize the extreme elements We face, I do it to let them know I stand with them, count myself with them, and will fight for change for them .

We really did not need to give out  cups of cold water on 29 June: all we had to do was point our mouths up to the sky! But the giving went beyond that. People from different religions, cultures, ideas,and lives came together to give and receive. Althea writes, " I welcome all cultures, all faiths, all religions, to come together and feed our city's poorest, we need to become a village that sees no differences, that comes from one race, the human race!!"

On celebration: a healthy, cancer-free baby, oven art and pizza

About a year ago baby Johanna was having her diaper changed when her parent felt a hard lump in her belly.The doctors soon found that both of her kidneys had tumors in them and one was the size of a grapefruit This led to days and months of tests and CAT scans and xrays and chemotherapies and operations.

Just over a month ago she had her last operation when the surgeons removed the last 3 tiny tumors. She still has quite adequate kidney function in both kidneys and scans show no signs of  tumors. She is cancer-free. So her family decided it was time for a party to celebrate.

 Strong and healthy Johanna

 

The party was held last Sunday afternoon and they invited around 90 people which included everyone who attends Hope Mennonite Church as well as relatives and other friends. The weather forecast threatened rain so a big tent was set up in the front yard. This was because a big part of the celebration was pizza made in the wonderful woodburning mobile oven made by Karen Schlichting. A couple of years ago she received a grant to go towards the creation of the wonderful, very useful, very beautiful art piece. An article about it is here.

 

Karen has done some very interesting actions with her oven. She has attached it to her van and pulled it to the parking lot of a big huge grocery store called Costco. This store is a place where families come to buy huge grocery carts full of food. Most of this food is imported from other parts of the world. In the parking lot she  baked homemade bread and gave free pieces away to customers who  came to shop there. Her message was that good bread made with wheat that is grown locally and created by hand is the way food should be made.  An article about that action is here



The fire is built in the oven 3 hours before it is needed to cook the pizza or the bread. 

 

This is the beautiful artwork on the outside of the oven. It is made with tiny squares of glass all glued into the shape of the picture. 

 

 Many people rode their bikes to the party.

 

 This was the pizza making station.

 Jeff Thiessen who is a member of my CPT support community helped with the baking. My husband Vic is waiting for the pizza to be cooked.

 The oven is ready to bake the pizza.

 

 Then Karen cut the pizza into squares and served it to the guests. The man in the glasses is Jason, Johanna's father.

 A young guest watches Karen take out another pizza.

 He puts his hand onto the outside of the oven to check to see how hot it is. The oven is so well insulated that you can not tell that a fire has heated the bricks on the inside.

 Another mosaic- a picture of Gretel who the oven is named after.

Thoughts on Morning Coffee

Our small church here in Winnipeg, Hope Mennonite, kind of dissipates a little during the wonderful hot, sunny summer months. So in June a list goes around asking for people to sign up to lead our time together on Sunday mornings. With some persuasion (and co-ercion and nice smiles) I convinced Vic to sign up with me for this Sunday, 19 August.

However, then we had to think about some interesting theme to present. Normal sermons etc usually do not happen on these summer Sundays.

The topic came to me as we were watching a play three weeks ago. Winnipeg has North America's second largest Fringe Festival. This is 10 days of around 150 plays (mostly an hour or less in length). We saw  15 plays during those days. One of our earlier plays was one called "Morning Coffee". We decided to see it because there were some Mennonite actors in it and we do like to support Vic's cultural comrades!!

 The two actors portrayed a young couple who had been together for 5 years. Obviously things have been going downhill for awhile but during the hour of the play things start off bad and get progressively worse. We are voyeurs into their fight which uses every bad trick that communication manuals tell you absolutely not to do.  It begins with her entering the bathroom that he has just left and running out holding her nose and telling him just how rotten he smells and how he has always smelt that bad. The blame and miscommunication escalated until I cringed at the dirt they brought up on each other. But just as I thought that this might end in violence they took a minute to pause. In the last line of the play they showed a tiny bit of vulnerability and one said,” I am afraid”  and the other replied ,”I am afraid too”. At that moment their true feeling was expressed and you are left with the idea that maybe they would be able to really talk to each other.

It reminded me of the Nonviolent Communication that I had learned while doing the month long CPT training in 2010. Surely this would be a good topic to bring up in a church service. Surely there are some verses in the Bible that might lead to thinking about how we communicate. Sure enough, there are and one example is Proverbs 12:18-" Rash words are like sword thrusts, but the tongue of the wise brings forth healing".  Vic and I used the book,  Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life (Marshall B. Rosenberg, Ph.D.) as a resource and it was sure good to go through it again. This way of speaking is hard work and takes a lot of practise. It sure is so much easier in the heat of the moment and in frustration to say,"You are a bunch of slobs.  Why don't you ever clean up after yourselves"!!! But those kind of accusations just seem to rouse up anger and do not really accomplish much.

Interestingly enough we had to use this kind of communication on our way to church. We don't argue very often but one point of problem for us is that Vic was trained by his bus driver Dad to talk loudly at other drivers, traffic lights and other things during the whole drive. I am a person who takes what the road throws at me as part of the experience of being in a car. So, I was talking about some point of the presentation we were going to make when he had to exclaim about something a traffic light had just done (turned red). I got mad!! But, it did help to slow down to think about how to speak together about this in a non judging way. We did discover that we seem to have conflicting needs that will have to be figured out. He needs to exclaim at the drivers and lights in order to make the ride more exciting and to ease some of the tension of driving. I need to have a calm ride without loud exclamation!!. It sure was a lot easier when we lived in London, UK without a car.!!!

For those of you who do not know much about nonviolent communication,  there is a formula to help you learn how to speak and communicate differently. Then, hopefully, with practise, it will become an easy thing to remember.

So, the formula is "When I (see, hear, smell).... I feel..... because I need...... . Would you be willing to......

This provides an opportunity to work on ways to meet both person's needs, not a way of forcing the other person to change.

So, our time together as a church this morning was fun. Many people came up to us and thanked us for what we had done. And, the process of preparing it had reminded me that I need to think about this way of communicating a whole lot more.

“Compassion is not religious business, it is

human business, it is not luxury, it is essential

for our own peace and mental stability,

it is essential for human survival.”

- The Dalai Lama -