A new continent for him, and a new job for her.

Dharavi slum

Ga arrived safely in Mumbai, India and soon got settled in his new accommodation. If you look at the photograph above, the multi-story tin house he shared with a family of 10 other people is roughly in the centre. The house was used as their workshop by day, and at night thin, reed mats were placed on the floor side by side and it transformed into sleeping quarters. Although Ga was used to living in African slum environments, he was surprised at how different this Indian slum was. With over 1 million people living inside one square mile, space was at a premium, and when more space is needed, one builds upwards, on top of existing housing. Ga struggled with claustrophbia; walking on the ground through narrow alleys between houses, with little sun getting through, with an overpowering smell of chilli and curry powder, and the incessant noise of numerous Singer sewing machines ‘bbzzzzzzz bbzzzzzz bbzzzzzing ‘ away. Used to his own European sense of personal space, he would try and move his reed mat to the farthest corner of the room at night, but this was interpreted by his caring Indian host family as lonliness, and resulted in individuals placing their mats closer to him and hugging him!

We were able to speak every other day via mobile phone or facebook, and by the end of the first week Ga was getting frustrated. He hadn’t gotten far with getting to know the area and he’d had his mobile phone stolen after taking his eyes off it as he joined in with a local ad hoc cricket match him and his guide had come across. He also wasn’t feeling great, with stomach aches and feeling continually nauseous and hence was no where near ready to begin taking photos. His wasn’t eating much, especially the spicy food served at every meal. And when he’d tried to kill a rat that scuttled past his feet at dinner he was reprimanded by his host (The family believed God was inside every animal, therefore to kill a rat was to kill God). When we spoke on the phone I could hear the tiredness in his voice, and for the first time ever, his homesickness. Part of me would have been very happy to get him on the next plane home and safe in my arms, but I knew he’d be devastated if he didn’t get the photos he’d set out to take.

So he had a respite night outside the slum with the British owners of ‘Reality Tours’ and happily rang me when his belly was full of pizza and he’d had a few hours decent sleep! He went back to the slum, but the nausea and diarrhea continued up until the point a few days later he finally admitted defeat and moved permanently to a hotel just outside the slum, and ate out in a different restaurant each evening. Amazingly I had a friend who knew someone in India who was able to arrange for their sister to meet Ga and give him some timely TLC and encouragement which helped enormously.

Time was ticking away though and Ga now had just over two weeks to regain his strength and complete two university projects. He stopped feeling sick, and his energy returned, but it took every ounce of his strength and determination to not give in to his homesickness and come home early. Many  a pep talk was had between us on the phone (NB Disclaimer – I did not actively encourage him to stay out there against his will! He wanted to but just found it a much harder experience than any of his other trips, and also, was away for almost double the time he’d been away to Africa, so it was the longest time we’d ever been apart).

And whilst that was all going on in India, I was busy preparing for a job interview, as my two-year secondment within Clinical Engineering was coming to an end. I was spending hours researching and preparing for my 15 minute presentation in the hope I could join the Acute Pain Service as a Clinical Nurse Specialist. On the day of the interview I got ready by myself, and gave it my best shot…and was ecstatic when that afternoon I got the call to be offered the job! I rang so many people that day in my excitement, and celebrated with dinner with friends. And ironically, the one person I wanted to tell most was inaccessible until the next day and hence was the last one to find out!

And finally, the 24 days were over and Ga was flying home in late December. He was in 40 degree heat, and was coming home to 2 feet of snow. He was planning on buying a new digital camera when he came home, so gave his old one to a young man who’d been assigned to help him. He’d given this man some lessons in photography and hoped he could go on and take photos to help earn a living for himself. He also left the copyright of the photos he took with Dharavi Reality Slum tours, hoping they could be sold to tourists, and the money used to benefit the local community. He imagined they could rasie a few hundred pounds to help Dharavi residents once he’d left India.

It had been a mentally and physically draining time for me as well as Gareth and I was on my last reserves as I waited nervously to hear Ga had landed safely in Birmingham Airport, where my mum was waiting to meet him. I was one of the last to finish work for the day, and was excitedly anticipating doing the big Christmas food shop for us when as I opened it my key snapped in my car door. Despite some assistance from the few engineers left on-site my key wasn’t budging and hence as it got dark, I rang for Breakdown assistance, and wasn’t suprised to be told that due to the severity of the snow that week they had a backlog of calls and it would be a while until they got to me. Alone, cold, emotionally fragile and so physically drained I did what any sane woman would do… I promptly burst into tears.

Through the tears I rang a dear friend who, get this; arranged with her husband to come and meet me in my empty, snow covered car park with a thermos of coffee, cake and a hot water bottle. Upon arrival he took up my cold position in the driver’s seat and settled down with the aforementioned hot water bottle, stating he alone would wait for the recovery vehicle, whilst she drove me to Tesco Extra so I could do my festive food shop. As I pushed my trolley down the aisles with tear stained cheeks and that beautiful excitement building that it was only a matter of hours until Ga would be back home with me, my mum rang to let me know Ga was now safely in Birmingham (on a side note, we often flew into Birmingham from our travels together and Ga always said the most depressing sign he ever saw was ‘Welcome to Birmingham!‘).

My friends and I all got home safely that night, and my car was fixed before Christmas Day. Ga slept the night at my parents and despite his exhaustion managed to drive the two hours back to Cardiff the next day. I was out walking our dog Ben, when I saw the most beautiful sight… our Blue Ford Fiesta driving past me with Ga smiling and waving from the driver’s seat.

It was pure unadulterated joy to have him back home with me and Ben, and we both agreed 3 and half weeks was far too long to be apart again. 2010’s Christmas was an incredibly low key, non-energetic one, but it was perfect for us. We spent Christmas Day morning in our pjs, cwtched up together on the sofa watching Christmas movies and eating a platter of fine meats, cheese, crackers and home made pickle. It sounds soppy but we didn’t need presents, as all that mattered there and then was we had each other.

NB; Below are some of the photos Ga took in Dharavi slum, but those and the fashion photos he took are best viewed via his website at http://www.garethkingdonphotography.com

A re-enactment from Slumdog Millionaire

This scene may look familiar to you, as it is a shot from the opening scenes of the film ‘Slumdog Millionaire.’ In it you can see a small child squatting to have a poo, and on the opposite side an entrepreneurial family selling Christmas crackers.

Community Chai tea breaks

Dispersed throughout the thousands of small businesses in Dharavi are community Chai Tea and food shops, where the men meet up and rest on their breaks. I’m not sure what the little girl made of Ga standing in the middle of the shop, taking this 360 degree photo.

The affluent area of Dharavi slum…where pottery is a family business

These ladies belong to a long tradition of family clay pot makers, and make a relatively higher wage than many other families in Dharavi. Their living accommodation is significantly more spacious, and one lady proudly showed off her kitchen to Ga, with hanging, gleaming cooking pots, as well as the TV the family owned.

Man at work, in the recycling capital of India.

The vast majority of people are employed in Dharavi, and I think it’s over 80% of all waste is recycled there. This man is bashing the dents out of metal oil drums, and stripping them of their paint, so they can be sold and reused. The fumes this gives off would deem this unsafe in the U.K.

Ladies at work

Both men and women work in Dharavi, and here are women crushing chillies into powder. Ga accidently breathed in deeply and had a less than pleasurable few minutes!

A community festival

The Dharavi residents have lots of cultural and religious festivals. This festival was in mid-December, and Ga noted how the entire community took responsibility in preparing for, conducting, and then clearing away after the celebration. There was much singing and dancing, and little children were given presents of little baby chicks, somehow fluorescent yellow, green and pink in colour!

Normality comes to visit, and Gareth just about makes it to India!

“You may remember me writing back in February about ‘Making and Meeting Internet friends’ ( https://undertheinfluenceofsix.wordpress.com/2014/02/09/making-and-meeting-internet-friends/ ). Well, my friendship with Mary had continued to grow, and it wasn’t unusual for us to spend over an hour on the phone to each other, with our other halves intermittently overhearing and adding in their own snippets of conversation via us down the receiver. In the autumn of 2010 Mary came to stay with me and Ga for the weekend. Where was Dan you may be asking? Wasn’t it a bit rude to meet up without him? Well, due to the infection risk, of either of them passing on potentially life-threatening bugs to the other, so began the set up of a four-way friendship where only three were ever present (the next summer I would visit them and leave Ga at home).

On this occasion, we cooked nice food for Mary, and took her round a local community arts festival, drinking coffee at a poetry recital. We introduced her to the delights of Cardiff, but more poignantly, we introduced her to our normality, and it was intoxicating to realise that she came into our house and did not look in at our CF-shaped lives as an outsider does, but as one who feels right at home, as our normal was her normal.

For me, it was invigorating, and as we chit-chatted, and conversation was so naturally peppered with staccato CF talk, I felt as if inwardly I’d been holding my breathe, but now was able to let out the biggest, relaxing sigh. Spending time with Mary turned our unusual existence on it’s head, for here we all were, in a bubble where all things CF were the norm. Where it was natural to compare the pros and cons of different nebulisers, and she wasn’t any more aware of Ga’s cough than I was. Where Ga didn’t feel the need to hide his Creon tablets before eating, and some of those ‘CF husband-wife’ interactions we normally kept behind closed doors were comfortably acted out in the presence of this precious friend, who had just come 4 hours by Megabus, from doing those same things herself.

Gareth never showed the slightest interest in getting to know anyone else with CF. As far as he was concerned, the less thoughts given to the illness the better. But it was sweet seeing how his ears did prick up as Mary and I were chatting on the phone, or in person, and he’d begin to get inquisitive about this other man, who had many things in common with him despite their shared genetic mutation. Even though they didn’t ever get to properly meet up, I think there was a mutual admiration and interest in the other, because of the friendship Mary and I had. And after our weekend together, Mary and Gareth’s friendship in it’s own right was cemented too.

Once the weekend was over, Ga began gearing up for his next trip abroad, this time to the Indian city of Mumbai. He was liaising with a local charity called Reality Tours ( http://www.realitytoursandtravel.com ) that run tours in the large Dharavi slum, raising income to run a local community centre and Youth Empowerment programme amongst other things. Gareth connected with them, as they too were seeking to counteract the negative stereotypes outsiders associate with slum living.

Ga was a competitive soul, and no more so than with himself. This trip was gearing up to be his biggest yet, as he was planning on actually covering two university assignments in it, and hence was adamant he needed to go for an entire month (I did get him down to 3 and a half weeks)! He’d never been to India before but was keen to experience slum living in a different continent. And as always, he wanted to live where the action was, so Reality Tours arranged for him to stay with a local family in Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum, with over 1 million residents.

Now as you may well be able to imagine, from my point of view, this was a little stressful and worrying. However, the stress actually began before he’d even set off, as somehow Ga had got his information wrong, and even though he’d assured me (after I questioned this several times) he would get his Indian visa as soon as he arrived in Mumbai, what transpired was that roughly a week before he was due to fly out he realised India was different to Africa and a visa was indeed needed BEFORE he arrived there. I can’t remember exactly when he realised this, but I do remember that what was supposed to be a romantic date night eating out at Chapter Arts Centre turning into a damage-control situation, and instead of enjoying a relaxing glass of wine I was standing outside in the dark (the only place to get signal), liaising with the airline company to get Ga’s flight delayed by 48 hours so there was some chance of him actually getting the required visa, dispatched from London, before he took off. Why me and not Ga I hear you ask? Good question! Because as awesome as Ga was at many things, finances and boring organisational stuff was not his forte so our credit card was in my name).

With CF, whatever plans you make, there’s always uncertainty that you’ll be able to do what you’ve planned, as developing a chest infection often means that plans have to be cancelled or rearranged. I did not appreciated the added uncertainty of Indian visas arriving within a 5 day window… which definitely increased our stress levels and potentially could have scuppered Ga’s university deadlines, as well as our bank account. In the end it was close, very close. The morning of Ga’s rearranged flight arrived with no visa. I went off to work, leaving him packed and ready to go (if the postman brought a certain package). He had to leave by 2pm at the latest to get to Birmingham to make his flight. At 10am he rings me elatedly, as he has his Indian visa in his hand! And then he’s out the door and off! I breathe a sigh of relief, inwardly say ‘Never again!’ and get on with my day.

There would be time enough when I got home to mentally deal with being apart for the longest time so far, and to check his live flight information to know he’d arrived in Mumbai safely.

My now three-in-one wedding anniversary

 

5th July is a date that will always be significant for me.

On 5th July 2008 I reached the crescendo of 15 months worth of preparations and married my best friend, Gareth David Kingdon. It was a spectacularly fantastical day, with each aspect of it, from the songs sung (children’s songs with actions all adults had to participate in), our first bounce on a bouncy castle,  to the delicious, handpicked, homemade French feast we ate, it oozed our personalities and sense of fun. It really was a day of celebration, that we were embarking upon the mystery of married life together and all the adventures that lay ahead for us (including the hospital ones!) From that day on, somehow, God viewed us as one unit. Two became one, even in the absence of any physical children. It was the most awesome thing I’ve ever done, committing to another person and promising to love them, honour them, support them and cherish them for the rest of our earthly life together. And to have the man I loved promise those same things publicly to me, and to see his delight in calling me his wife. Priceless. And looking forward to what was coming after the wedding day, our honeymoon in Bordeaux and then moving in and setting up home together, as well as all the relatively sleepless nights we were about to have!

We always made a deal out of our wedding anniversary in the years that followed. I always watched our 3 hour wedding video in full, reliving it and remembering the promises we’d made to each other (Ga would get bored and go off and do something else!) Year one saw us embark on a leisurely camping trip around Wales, spending our actual anniversary being kids in Folly Farm. I can’t actually remember the specifics of years 2 and 3. Year 4 was spent lazily looking around the historic Tredegar House and gardens (and discovering a Dr Who Darlek in the stables)! We only stayed an hour or so until we found a craft shop there and Ga excitedly bought many remnants of material to have a go at his first patchwork project (a bag for me). He’d passed his creative bug onto me by then so we spent a happy afternoon in our beautiful living room, him on his sewing machine and me knitting my first cable-stitch bag, whilst listening to jazz music and chatting amicably. We finished the evening with an M & S ‘Two dine for £10’ meal, and a glass of wine.

It was a nice last anniversary together, even though neither of us knew it at the time.

July 5th 2013 was the first wedding anniversary I spent without my husband. We would have been married 5 years. We’d had plans for that milestone, planned since Year 3. We should have gone back to the hotel we’d spent our wedding night in, adding in the luxury and relaxation of spending the day using the spa and swimming pool. We’d saved it specially for Year 5. That milestone of half a decade. Instead? I endured acknowledging that hugely significant day as only a half of what was once ‘one.’ The build up to it was immense, the hill of what I needed to overcome so high I couldn’t see past it to the 6th July. In the end I spent some of it looking though our wedding photos, shedding happy and now new, sad tears. A dear friend very patiently gave up 3 hours of her life to watch our wedding video with me. I made a picnic which me and Ga’s Best Man ate at his graveside, swapping stories about him (mostly lots of laughing and smiling here). It sounds bizarre, but it was a beautiful time, as Ga is buried in a Natural burial ground, we were essentially sitting in his ‘field.’ The effect of the sun shining, birds singing, the sky being bright blue and buttercups and dandelions bursting out of the ground gave such a sense of aliveness, despite the very reason we were there. And then I headed home and spent time alone with Ga’s sewing maching, practicing my own novice attempts at patchwork, making pretty bunting out of Ga’s favourite shirts, with Wimbledon and Andy Murray on in the background. It was a good year to get interested in tennis!

July 5th 2013 was also the date I chose to remove my wedding ring. Having discussed this issue with many widows, there is no right or wrong time to do this, as everyone’s grief journey is different. Many people never taken them off, others wear them for much longer than I did, but no-one can tell anyone else when they should do this is (and if you do, expect a four word expletive said silently to you!) For me, although it was less than four months since Ga died, I was feeling increasingly uncomfortable about wearing mine. It felt like a heavy chain around my neck, a mocking reminder that our marriage was over (’till death do us part’ we promised).  Don’t get me wrong, it was comforting and lovely to see it on my finger and remember what it stood for, but it now stood for something in my past, not my present. And for me personally, I needed to physically remove that symbol of commitment to him, to help me more fully accept and embrace what had happened, and begin to rediscover who I now was without him. I like things to have meaning. But I didn’t know when I would take my wedding ring off. I just knew I wanted to do it at some point soon. And in the end, as with many decisions a widow makes, on a certain day (my wedding anniversary it turned out) I woke up and knew that this was the time to take it off. I wore it all day, but as I got into bed, alone that night, I slipped it off my left hand, and moved my beautifully designed diamand and topaz engaement ring to my right hand instead (that will stay there until my dying day). It felt significant. Five years previously that wedding ring had been placed on my finger, and I began my adventure as Mrs Kingdon, Gareth’s wife. Five years on, as I remembered that life-changing day and the ring came off, I thought of myself on a new adventure. This time without my courageous, funny, smiling man (whose currently having a much better adventure in Jesus’ presence in heaven). I had the honour and privilege of wearing it for 5 whole years. It was the right time to take it off.

And now, it’s almost July 5th 2014. Six years since I got married. The second wedding anniversary marked without my husband to celebrate it with. A year since I wore the universal symbol of marriage. My 6:2:1 anniversary. It’s funny how I now have new associations with this date, starting with the run up to Wimbledon. I’ll always think fondly of Andy Murray and how he unknowingly helped me get through last year! I haven’t watched any Wimbledon this year mind. To be honest, in many ways there hasn’t been a build up to the day. Sometimes it feels like a non-event, as how do you celebrate something when one of the people directly involved in the achievement isn’t there to celebrate with you? I think I will remember and honour the fact we WERE married, and it was a GOOD marriage for it’s 4 and 3/4 years. I will always remember and be grateful for it. For Ga. But I don’t really feel like celebrating. I may visit Ga’s field on Saturday. I may get the sewing machine out and work on our patchwork quilt. I may watch our wedding video, but I may not. I’m toying with the idea of with a friend, getting my wedding dress out of the attic and trying it on again… and thinking about whether or not to give it away. The association with it is now bittersweet. I’m definately going to a good friend’s birthday party and celebrating life with them though.