Shower Madness and other things

On Saturday morning, as I was taking a shower, I thought about my friends on the YAV team in Peru. Some of them have complained on their blogs about problems with their electric shower heads. Here, I also have an electric shower. (Which is what got me thinking about them in the first place.) And I thought to myself, “maybe someday I’ll have an electric-shower story to share with them, too.” Less than five minutes later, while I was still in the shower, there was this huge POP! and the lights all went out. I finished my shower – which hadn’t been affected – and got dressed in the dark, and then went in search of what had made the lights go off. Turns out, as we discovered later, the fuse for all the lights in the flat had died. It was a quick repair, replacing the fuse with a new one conveniently left for us. So, Katie and Leslie, there is my shower story. Last night was the first cross-community interaction for the Fusion youth programme. Three leaders from St Colman’s Catholic church down the road came to visit us. They mostly came to check things out, see what we were doing, because they want to start a corresponding group in their own church. Hopefully our two youth groups will be able to meet up at some point in the future. We played some getting-to-know-you games with the Catholic leaders. Everyone was very receptive to what others had to say and not at all resistant to their presence. (When they showed up part-way through our session, one of the youth ran over to me and whispered, “Are those the Catholics?” and when I said “yes,” smiled this huge grin and started whispering excitedly to her friends.) It was a good, casual first contact, and I’m very hopeful for future interactions with them. Word of the Week: Rubbish. It means “trash,” and the two are really used interchangeably. It can also refer to something that’s no good (as in, “that was really rubbish”), or be used to express that you can’t do something (“I’m rubbish at playing football”). The Fusion youth programme looked at different views of the community this week. The two most common images, interestingly, were “absolutely rubbish” and “happy” – both ends of the spectrum.