To Chalmers

Note how the style and colours of this porcine picture jars and juxtaposes with the visuals of my otherwise serene blog.

Last night I went to a packed theatre to watch a music concert. I shouldn't blog about this, normally I wouldn't mention it, but I have never been very successful at disciplining my thought to mouth ratio and now it seems my thoughts are struggling for supremacy over my fingertips.

It wasn't Pink Floyd. It was a World Vision concert. The singer was on fine form (if you enjoy beach boy medleys and the Lonely Goat song from The Sound of Music in the same half hour - I can't remember what else she sang, I've blocked it!) suffused with a couple hundred tired yet overconfident kids, and half way through stopped - (for breath one assumes but not for good) to say why she was singing. Yes, there was a reason - other than the obvious! She wanted to charm us. No. She wanted to raise awareness of the plight of the children of Honduras.

She began by saying that, probably, none of us in the audience would have had any experience of living in a third world country (to which all the British health workers groaned and muttered something to the effects that they thought NZ was a third world country) and that she had been to Honduras to experience it first hand. A video clip followed.

She had taken a film crew. Shots worthy of news night were inter cut with shots of the lovely host - the contrast was staggering - and one could not help but be moved by the images we were being presented with: men, women and children struggling to carry clean water from miles away on a daily basis to tend to their large and hungry families. Their homes were as basic as a home can get and be called a home. Their children were as well behaved as hunger permits. Sometimes, our host said, the elder siblings go without for the younger ones to feed. Meals consist mainly of dry pitta bread, apparently. But all was not desperation.

The next shot was our lady in the home of a family who were busy with jars and fruit. The peoples of Honduras were capitalising on the usually discarded fruit of the cashew nut - I didn't know it grew on the end of a fruit either - they offered our host some to taste.

Mmmmmm, went our host - juices dribbling from her dewy moisturised chin - it would go wonderfully with fine cheeses and a glass of good port.

Seeing is not experiencing.

At the end they thanked the fourteen people who had donated. Wish you were here?