<
https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-magnitude-of-their-love-was-extraordinary-how-an-elderly-couple-showed-alice-pung-the-power-of-a-good-story-257633>
"Every year on our birthdays, Uncle Martin and Auntie Stella would drive to our
concrete house behind the carpet factory and gift me and my brother a book.
They brought me
Haffertee Hamster and
Haffertee’s First Easter. They
brought Alex
Betsy Glowworm Shines Her Light and
Friska, My Friend. There
was a biography of the African American surgeon Ben Carson. My first
Children’s Illustrated Dictionary.
Even when our parents forgot our birthdays, this elderly couple always
remembered.
When my parents first arrived in Australia, they thought the government had put
them in a five-star hotel. The Midway Migrant Hostel was just a group of sturdy
brick buildings that looked like brown slab cakes – but compared to the
cardboard and plastic tents in the camp at the Thai–Cambodian border where
they’d been staying only a month before, these buildings were evidence of a
life after death: the death of half of our family in the Killing Fields.
In this glorious afterlife, the residents of the Midway Migrant Hostel even had
visitors, souls so pure and kind that they could only be sent from God. And
indeed they were.
Uncle Martin and Auntie Stella visited the hostel with food for the adults,
toys for the children, and they brought secondhand furniture for the families
who’d moved into their own houses. They invited us to their church, but their
love was not conditional on conversion. They called themselves our godparents,
and neither they nor my family thought anything unusual about this
arrangement."
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
