More precious than money or happiness?

AMDG

I am reading a thrilling book at the moment on one man’s quest for silence in the modern world. George Prochnik argues that more than money, power and even happiness, silence has become the most precious commodity of the modern world. Fascinatingly he traces the etymology of the English word silence – to a Gothic verb anasilan, which is a verb that describes the experience of the wind dying down. This is a very evocative verb, you can almost imagine the Gothic tribes standing outside their wind battered huts in Germany or around the Black Sea, savouring the respite in the biting wind.  The noise of the wind for them has almost become a relentless buffeting of wind for us in the age of TV, IPod, and urban life.  But paradoxically it is in the cessation of noise that we come to appreciate noise. Neuroscientists at Stanford University have demonstrated that when we listen to music it is the silent intervals in what we are listening to that triggers the most intense and pleasurable brain activity.

Prochnik  argues that a lack of silence is actually harming us.  Spending time with a police officer in New York on night shift, he discovers that the majority of domestic disputes that the cop is called out to are actually noise complaints.  When the cop arrives he goes into rooms where the television is blaring, with a radio on top of that and maybe a game station going on too.  The first thing the cop does is tells them to turn everything down and get them to sit down for a minute and listen.  The stress decreases, the tension abates, muscles relax, the heart beats more slowly and the cop says ‘that feels different doesn’t it! – maybe the reason you were fighting is how loud it is inside of the apartment’ According to the cop  most of the cases end there and then. I have only just starting reading  his book,  ’A pursuit of Silence‘ embarks on a fascinating quest and I’m looking forward to accompanying him on it!

—

The Spiritual Sleuth

AMDG

Cover via Amazon

Went to a fascinating talk yesterday with William Brodrick at the Edinburgh Book Festival.  Brodrick was an Augustinian friar for five years, before leaving to work with the homeless and eventually retraining as a barrister.  His first novel, ‘The Sixth Lamentation‘, became an international bestseller, and launched a new detective,  Father Anselm onto the world.  The sales went through the roof when Richard and Judy (a popular married couple who host a daytime TV show) chose it for their book club.  This endorsement has a similar effect in the UK as Oprah does in the US.  It has left me considering the enduring fascination of the spiritual sleuth, because what really makes a story a classic is not that it is ‘Who done it’  but it is because it becomes a ‘Why done it’.  The spiritual sleuth allows ruminations on the human condition that lift us above the cliché of the burnt out detective struggling with his own demons.  This maybe the reason that Father Anselm has led to Broderick being awarded the Golden Dagger – an illustrious annual award by the Crime Writers Association.

 

Brother Cadfael

Father Anselm is the latest in a long line of religious detectives in British Literature, Chesterton’s Father Brown and Ellis Peter’s Brother Cadfael being recent examples.  Broderick had some very interesting things to say about the Spiritual Figure in the crime genre, about how their interest will be greater than the immediate evidence to hand, with a special interest in the alluring dark corners of a person’s conscience.  Priests are used to ‘excavating silence’ and have become weather-beaten spectators to the dramas and tragedies of humanity, with the seal of the confessional providing a safe space for the soul to be bared.  A good crime novel is an engaging meditation on the problem of evil, exploring the motivations behind horrendous acts, the consequences of them and often the lack  of remorse.   At its best crime literature may even offer a meditation of the problem of good…. why under terrible conditions do some people live heroic lives and act in such a self sacrificing way? It was interesting to hear Broderick say that his editors keep on urging him not to keep redeeming his evil characters, it seems as though the compassionate pastoral side of him did not leave him when he left the Augustinians!  But therein lies a serious point – radical evil is a mystery. Its dark heart so repulsive that very few intrepid explorers can take it on, and within all of is is the temptation is just to deflect it, rationalise it or demonise it.

Oh by the way – Broderick’s new and fourth book – The Day of the Lie – has a written dedication in the first pages to our own Gerry J Hughes SJ, who taught him philosophy at Heythrop.

Visit of a Nobel Nominee

AMDG

How do you get nominated for a Nobel Prize? ….. It’s not often you have the opportunity to ask that question – but I was able to do that here in the Edinburgh community to one of our visitors.  Fr John Dear SJ, is talking tonight at the Festival of Spirituality and Peace, part of the Edinburgh Festival.  He is a peace activist and writer.  He was not only nominated for a Nobel Prize, but for the big one – the Nobel Peace Prize, by none other than a former recipient – Desmond Tutu from South Africa.  Such a nomination is good for your publicity of course, and Festival organisers like to use it to get the crowds in, but what impresses me about John is that he doesn’t just do the big gigs, he also goes into schools and churches to promote his work.  In fact looking at his schedule he is going to be at Greenbelt, Birmingham,  Wigan, York, Sunderland, Garforth and London over the next ten days.

According to his resume he has been arrested over 85 times, including spending months in jail.  This seems to be part of the CV of a serious peace activist  following the tradition of non-violent action.  One of the most haunting experiences of his life was working as a Red Cross chaplain in response to the Sep 11 attacks, and then afterwards as one of the coordinators of the network of chaplains who followed up on a medium-long term basis by visiting the families of the victims.  He has just written a new book – ‘ Lazarus -Come Forth’ (his 28th book!) which is a reflection on working as a peace activist in the ‘Culture of Death’.  John Paul II coined the phrase ‘Culture of Life’ when he visited the US for World Youth Day in 1993, the Culture of Death is everything that opposes the sanctity of life including unjust war capital punishment and also abortion, euthanasia.  There has been a lot written about this in Catholic circles, especially in America where it is often used in the  rhetoric of the Culture Wars.  What I am very interested in is the development of analysis which looks at the growth of  narcissism, excessive selfishness and sometimes even sadistic humiliation that could be seen as underpinning a culture of death.  I don’t know whether this is addressed in John’s new book – I’ll have to read it and find out!

If you are interested in listening to Fr John Dear during his tour of the UK – here is a link to his web page which has details of venues, times and contacts.   Click Here 

Digital Vertigo

AMDG

The Internet needs ‘saving’ from its current direction or we are heading into a digital nightmare of radical transparency and exhibitionism.  This was the basic theme presented at a fascinating discussion at the Edinburgh Book Festival yesterday evening as Andrew Keen was promoting and discussing his new(ish) book ‘Digital Vertigo’ .  Keen, now in his early fifties, is one of the pioneering generation of digital entrepreneurs who is expressing alarm at the direction the internet is taking, with particular criticism for Facebook, he warns us that we are entering an age of unprecedented exhibitionism, which will be damaging for many. Most of us in the audience were Digital Immigrants (i.e. we remember life before the internet!) unlike the younger generation of Digital Natives who will feel the full force of the agenda to socialise the internet.  According to Keen, Silicon Valley  has written off privacy as being something archaic.  My experience in recent years of working as a chaplain and a teacher was how important it is to encourage my students to use Facebook / Twitter / You Tube prudently.   They need to realise that by putting, drunken, half-naked photos onto social network sites they are making themselves hostages to fortune.  The world is assessing our identity by what we leave online and the internet doesn’t forget!  Future employers will be very interested in finding out as much as they can about who they are about to invest in.

 

Andrew Keen – a weary wisdom

Reflecting on the stimulating evening, I couldn’t help thinking about the idea of ‘structural sin’.  Facebook / Google claim that they are providing a public good, they are trying to change the world and there is a lot of powerful evidence that there is some truth in that (Arab Spring, Charity Fundraising, Linking Isolated communities).  However there is a lie at  the heart of the agenda,  Facebook is making huge amounts of money at selling our private data to companies, it is a profit driven organisation not a public good.  It seems to me that this exploits the worst vulnerabilities of adolescents as they attempt to build a circle of friends,.  As we all know, as we are growing up we make mistakes, we experiment with who we are we, what we stand for.  My generation of Digital Natives are fortunate because those mistakes, the embarrassing things we did or said were done in private and are forgotten about.  The internet does not forget and therefore (as the point was made excellently yesterday) can’t forgive.  If the internet doesn’t learn to forgive it will be a dystopia – rather than the utopia that the first wave of internet entrepeneurs envisaged and hoped for.

Yes you can live without Facebook!

The final thing I have found myself reflecting on is what was said about ‘confessional’ culture.  Little did Andrew Keen know that sitting in the audience was a Catholic Priest who had spent nearly 2 hours in the confessional this weekend. It seems that as we are a city-centre church people come from all over Edinburgh to use the confessional here, I have found it a vibrant and very consoling ministry.  But that private confession, one to one, with the inviolability of the seal, has a profoundly healthy and healing dynamic. The confessional, ‘all out there’ culture, cheered (and jeered) on by reality TV, Jerry Springer, Jeremy Kyle, is damaging and exploitative, and as more of us live ‘on’ line there is a danger that we become more self-revelatory.  This pressure towards inappropriate self-disclosure must be resisted, otherwise we are ultimately being made fools of (like Scotty in Hitchcock’s Vertigo hence the title of the book). So thank you Andrew Keen –  I found him full of a weary wisdom, but feel his analysis is important, pragmatic, and he probably wouldn’t like this but redolent with a disguised and reluctant compassion.  I am going to buy his book!

 

 

One of the Greatest Men

AMDG

Today is a special day for Jesuits and friends all over the world. It is the feast day of St Ignatius of Loyola.  It will be celebrated in thousands of schools, universities, parishes, retreat houses, refugee camps, radio stations, tv studios, publishing houses, blogs …… Ignatius of course was the founder of the Society of Jesus.  He wrote more letters than anyone in the sixteenth century, we still have over 7000 of them, so we know a lot about him. In an age when hagiographys were written about saints, often distancing us from a frank history of religious figures by the desire to create pious and edifying stories, Ignatius’ autobiography, reluctantly dictated as his life was ebbing away, is refreshing for its simplicity, honesty and desire to show how had grown through mistakes and failures. Last year, whilst I was in Manila on ‘tertianship’ which is like a renewal year for us Jesuits – I took the opportunity to read what I consider to be the best book about him  I have read.  Written by a Basque Historian, Jose Ignacio Tellechea Idigoras and called ‘The Pilgrim Saint‘. Idigoras, not a Jesuit but an award winning Historian, has an incredible amount of detail to hand and weaves it in with the background information to create a warm and compelling portrait of this great man.

If I was to be asked to sum up what Ignatius could teach us normal folk, struggling with faith or even outside the church, it would be by looking at the contrast between his early life and his later life. Ignatius as a young man was very unpleasant – arrogant, vain, promiscuous and violent,  being brought up in the spiritually toxic climate of the ambitious courtier desiring power, influence and conquests (political and sexual).  A little bit like our cult of celebrity today.  When his life was shattered along with his leg at the Battle of Pamplona, the lengthy convalescence forced a period of extensive introspection.  He didn’t like what he saw and opened his heart to God.  So as Idigoras masterfully put it – as well as reconstructing his disjointed leg, he began to reconstruct his disjointed soul.  In order to reconstruct we need something to build on.  From the chaos of Ignatius’s life of excess and disorder there were three things he could cling on to. 1)When he looked at his hands he could take comfort that he never engaged in pillaging as a soldier when the opportunity arose, a fact that was well known and respected. 2) When he considered his mouth,  he never once blasphemed even in the extreme pain after Pamplona. 3) Although he had enemies who had pursued him through the courts and sought his arrest after some of his outrageous actions, he didn’t carry any hatred in his heart. Perhaps this was the most important thing he could cling on to, as it is the heart where God slowly and silently can change us. And so began the long. slow journey back into God’s grace which bore has born so much fruit down the centuries.  By the end of his life God had achieved much through him, at the time of his death there were 1036 Jesuits, 11 provinces, 92 houses, 33 colleges at his death.  Idigoras leaves us with this beautiful portrait of the elderly Ignatius.

He wore a simple austere cassock and fought off the cold with a large cloak.  When he left the house he wore a voluminous cape and a broad brimmed hat with attached chords that he tied to his chin. It was impressive to see him walking in the street. He was always going, because of some business, to some specific place or to see some particular person. At this period in his life his fair hair had disappeared, he was bald and wore a short beard from which loomed an aquiline nose and high cheekbones.  His complexion had become darker, weather-beaten, perhaps even yellowish because of his liver ailment? His countenance, serious and peaceful, was the image of circumspection and a life lived interiorly. Some found it particularly luminous and expressive. His eyes which at one time had been sparkling and bright were now blurred by work, old age and copious tears. They had lost their gaiety but not their penetrating force. He seldom looked at people straight on.  When he did, however, people said he took in the person from head to toe. His gaze seemed to have the power of seeing straight through a person right into his heart. 

Olympic Ceremony or Liturgy?

AMDG

I was blown away by Friday Nights Opening Ceremony.  It was beautiful, absorbing and emotional at times.  More than once it struck me as transcending mere ceremony to having a liturgical quality to it.  Whether it was the children’s choir hymn singing at the start, or the moving memorial to the victims of terrorism in the middle with its reflective change of pace, beautiful rendition of ‘Abide with Me’, or the powerful and symbolic lighting of the Olympic Flame at the end – ‘Easter Vigilesque’ – followed by the angel/bird like cyclist rising towards heaven.  These spiritual elements would have pleased Baron De Coubertin, the Jesuit educated founder of the modern Olympics who once said ‘  I tried from the beginning to awaken religious feelings by the renewal of Olympic movement … The sport-religious thought has entered only slowly into the awareness of the sports men and women … But little by little it will be taken quite seriously by them‘  (click here for reference).  I think that invoking of the power of the transcendent is when the ceremony moved into liturgical territory.

A previous Boyle / Boyce production

The religious elements may be no surprise when we take into account that the  author of the storyline to the opening ceremony was Liverpudlian Catholic writer Frank Cottrell Boyce.  I have been told that Cottrell Boyce is a regular visitor and guest at the Jesuit community here in Edinburgh.  His contribution was less hailed than that of Danny Boyle, the Oscar-winning director of the opening ceremony. Danny Boyle was listed in a recent article of the Tablet on Britain’s most 100 influential Catholics.  Famously Boyle said in an interview, ‘I was meant to be a priest until I was 14, I was going to transfer to a seminary near Wigan. But this priest, Father Conway, took me aside and said, ‘I don’t think you should go’. Whether he was saving me from the priesthood or the priesthood from me, I don’t know. But quite soon after, I started doing drama. And there’s a real connection, I think. All these directors — Martin Scorsese, John Woo, M. Night Shyamalan — they were all meant to be priests.’  One of my favourite films of recent years was Boyle’s production of Cottrell Boyce’s book Millions, about a young a 7-year-old English boy who talks to saints and comes upon a lot of money which he wants to distribute to the poor.  Boyle has since admitted to being a ‘spiritual atheist’, but in many of his works it is clear that there is a deep spiritual imagination and creativity at work.

It was nice that Boyle said that he agreed to take on the difficult task of following on from Beijing’s incredible opening ceremony because he was inspired by his dad who has since died.  I still remember him taking his Oscar in a carrier bag to show his dad after sunday mass at his parish social club of St Mary’s Radcliffe.   Much has been written about the influence of ‘Catholic Imagination’ – the idea that God lurks everywhere in creation, and so the move to the transcendent or spiritual from the mundane everyday is natural and smooth and almost imperceptible.  This is in contrast with another view of God being hidden or in conflict with the world, and so the spiritual is introduced in an explicit way, often jarring , like God is being ‘shoehorned’ in, often experienced in evangelical Christianity. I propose that Friday Nights fantastic ceremony was a product of the Catholic imagination of Frank Cottrell Boyce and Danny Boyle.

A Throw-away Culture

AMDG

About a year ago I bought a rucksack (backpack)  from one of the excellent chain of stores called Go-Camping that are popping up all over the UK.  It has been a  great bag to have, although three of the zip-handles snapped when I was in the mountains of Northern Philippines.  I took the bag along to the Edinburgh branch to be fixed this morning and was amazed when they just replaced it with a new bag on the spot, simply and quickly.  I was very impressed with their service but slightly puzzled. The best I was hoping for was that they would be able to fix them in-house and I would pick it up in a few days, or give me new zip handles to fix myself.  I asked the guy who was serving me what are you going to do with the old bag? ‘We’ll send it back to the suppliers’ he said, without batting an eyelid.  Of course the rucksack had been made in China, but excluding the zips, I think it is of very reasonable quality. Consumers in the West have experienced the drop in prices of many mass-produced goods from China. Made in China once meant cheap and bad quality, but I think the quality is getting better.  Modern China may not be a great innovator, may not respect intellectual property rights or encourage creativity and entrepreneurship but they are good copiers and getting better.

Something has been nagging at me though.  On reflection, I would have preferred to have my old bag fixed.  I remember in India having a problem with a small speaker I had bought to amplify music and one of the members of the community was competent enough and skilled enough to fix it with some screwdrivers and a bit of glue. I confessed that I wouldn’t have had the confidence to have opened it up (even though it was only cheap) and he said to me ‘Well if anything breaks in Europe you throw it away and just by a new one!’.  How right he is! I also remember being amazed in Manila when I went to a market full of guys who could fix electrical equipment and watching the skill of the guy who fixed my phone for me.  So I have come to the conclusion that our hyper-consumerism is not just wasteful but it is also de-skilling. Marx talked about the ‘alienation’ of producers (often factory workers) from what they produced because they didn’t own the means of production, a theme also picked up in the Papal Encyclical Rerum Novarum. Could there be a new form of alienation of consumers in late-capitalism.  You get a great sense of satisfaction from repairing something rather than just chucking it away, however often in order to repair something you need to be provided with the tools/parts to do the job  and sometimes the training to. Nowadays domestic appliances come with forbidding labels such as ‘Disassembly voids warranty’ .  This sense of consumer alienation can be experienced by an impotent fury when confronted tamper proof seals. Now we are presented with shiny new replacement products in all their packaging whilst the old object, with its history, scuffs and stains, each one  which tells its own story is discarded.  There is something about the human soul that delights in being creative, there is something in the human vocation to be a co-creator …. however a throw-away culture stifles that.

The God Particle?

AMDG

Seeing the light: this portrait of Peter Higgs by Ken Currie hangs in the Edinburgh University physics department

So we have been told this morning of a historic announcement at CERN in Switzerland that a sub-atomic particle that behaves like the Higgs Boson has been observed with ’5 sigma certainty’. Formally, it’s known as the Higgs Boson, informally its called the ‘God Particle’. The proper name comes from an Edinburgh based physicist, Peter Higgs, who conceived of it while walking in Scotland’s Cairngorm Mountains in 1964. When I was a theology undergraduate here in Edinburgh 15 years ago, one of my professors, Dr James Mackey, was personal friends with Peter Higgs. He used to go on about it in theology lectures,, none of us had heard of it then, but its certainly become famous since. It became the God particle due to editorial anxiety – originally called the “Goddamn Particle” by Leon Lederman since it was seemingly impossible to isolate. Lederman, a leading researcher in the field, wanted to title his book “The Goddamn Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question?” But his editor decided that the title was too controversial and convinced Lederman to change the title to “The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question?”

Over the last few months there have been numerous articles, programmes anticipating this discovery.  However as much attention has been given to its name, as to what it means in Physics (which is beyond most of us).  Many scientist have expressed irritation that it being called the ‘God Particle’ by a lazy media.  To give you a flavour of this - Pauline Gagnon, a Canadian member of CERN’s team, told Reuters: “I hate that ‘God particle’ term…. The Higgs is not endowed with any religious meaning. It is ridiculous to call it that.”  James Gillies, spokesman for CERN, said “Of course it has nothing to do with God whatsoever… But I can understand why people go that way because the Higgs is so important to our understanding of nature.” Oliver Buchmueller, another Higgs hunter, said: “Calling it the ‘God particle’ is completely inappropriate… It’s not doing justice to the Higgs and what we think its role in the universe is. It has nothing to do with God.”  Whilst I can understand their frustration about snappy soundbites that are often misleading, I think this also shows a certain shortsightedness.  From a religious perspective  and schooled in a Spiritual Tradition that endeavours to see God in all things, only an atheist can say with any conviction that a building block of the universe has nothing to do with God. Especially when we are told that without (the Higgs Boson), or something like it, particles would just have remained whizzing around the universe at the speed of light… no galaxies or planets would have been formed. When we look at the wonderful things we now know thanks to science, it seems incredible that life has emerged. Some scientists are happy to call it a fluke, but that seems a bit lame to me, when you spend your life trying to understand the universe, making connections, spotting patterns, developing and testing hypotheses, fluke or sheer chance does not seem to be an adequate answer.  The fact that the universe is intelligible would suggest that there is reason behind it.

The concept of a ‘finely tuned universe‘ has been argued most convincingly by English physicist Paul Davies who is chair of the SETI  programme (Search for Extra-Terrestial Intelligence). The finely tuned thesis points to certain fundamentals of the universe, called fundamental physical constants , which are necessary for the evolution of galaxies and solar systems that can support life.  These constants include the speed of light, gravitational force, even the charge of electrons – and shows that if their values were slightly different the universe could not support life.  Basically the odds on life emerging at all are incredibly thin.  Faced with this, surely the least you expect is that one should keep an open mind about a higher power existing . Unfortunately some popular scientists now talk about all religious belief as stupid, they claim that it can’t be defended rationally. The underlying question is how can we know anything?  The danger is, at least in popular culture,  that we create a binary system where the only two types of knowing are empirical science or fundamentalist religion.  This is not true – there is a middle way where empirical science recognises its limits and that we keep our minds open to the awe and wonder of the universe and the possibility of a way of knowing that is balanced by faith and reason.

Thinking Faith published an interesting article on this last year – click here to read it.

Using Time Wisely

AMDG

We are making the most of the beautiful long mid-summer evening light here in Edinburgh. Yesterday at the end of our days duties I went for a spot of evening fishing with one of the other priests – we were fishing till 11pm and pulled in 13 mackerel.  It was a wonderful evening and will live long in the memory. With so many of us leading busy lives it is important to use free time well.  The psychologist Claudia Hammond has written a fascinating book, ‘Time Warped’,  about how we perceive time .  What I was struck about was her observations about the ‘Holiday Paradox’.  The phenomenon seems to be that you go on holiday for two weeks, packed full of new experiences, new places,  the days rush by.  However when you get back it feels as though you have been away for ages. This has an interesting impact on how we use our spare time wisely.  If you want your weekend to go slowly, pack it with new events and different activities but you will sacrifice rest.  If you use the weekend to rest then paradoxically it will feel as though it has gone fast. How we spend our weekend is important for many of us – particularly if we feel stretched by our jobs….

We often forget that time is man made, what Kant referred to as ‘Epistemological Spectacles’.  Time is the way we measure change, but instead of managing time, we often let time rule us. Reading Claudia Hammonds book is helped me to reflect on time perception. There is a very interesting passage about whether or not anxiety makes time pass more slowly or an incredible experiment by a young French man who chose to maroon himself in total darkness in an ice cave for two months.  Telescoping is another interesting phenomenon in her book, referring to the curious way that we often think that  significant historical events happened more recently that they did. For example  - if I ask when did Princess Diana die? Most of us would give the wrong answer – because we would say a more recent year………. (it was 1997).  This phenomenon is because of the illusion that the more clear a memory is then we think that it happened more recently.

As a result of this I hope to use my free time more wisely!

The most patient of teachers

AMDG

“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.” ― Charles William Eliot

A month ago I was in Bangalore looking for a couple of books. I stumbled across a second hand bookshop called ‘ Goobes Book Republic‘ on Church St Inn. It is a wonderful place – an Aladdin’s Den of books in a basement shop.  I was mooching and trying to restrain myself from buying too many books when I overheard the wise owner (pictured) trying to persuade a boy with his mum to start reading an Enid Blyton book.  The boy was doubtful – so the owner cut a deal – he could have the first book as a free loan and if he enjoyed it he had to come back within a week and tell the owner why.  The boy left the shop skipping with enthusiasm.  I was smitten with this book shop and the mission the owner had to get the children reading.

This year - because of my tertianship (like a renewal year) I have had the space and time to read more.  It has been a great joy rediscovering novels and books.  I now feel at least half an hour quietly reading in some corner or other has become indispensable.  It struck me that reading is an important contrast to the immediacy of the digital age.  Films, TV, The Internet seem to have become faster – hyperstimulating – a succession of rapidly changing images – and the danger is that there is no ‘breathing space’  or more importantly space left for your imagination to engage with what you are consuming.  With a book I find myself putting it to one side, thinking about something, mulling something else over.  It is refreshing and can increase your sense of well being tremendously. Along with this rediscovered passion I have found wonderful resources on the internet such as Goodreads, The Browser and BookCrossing.  In fact you can see my goodreads widgets to the left of this blog.

Literacy Rates around the world (wikipedia)

Here in Manvi – literacy rates are very low in the villages.  So as well as attempting to convince a first-generation how important schooling is, we are also trying to do so in the English Language.   For the poorest children from the remotest villages, they stay on site in hostels.   That means we get an extra few hours in the evening with them. At the moment that is ‘dead time’ i.e. after a day in class the children sit with their books open but not really doing any productive work.  So I am suggesting that we buy sets of comic books to improve their English. Good learning can also be fun and entertaining. So now, during the holiday, whilst the hostel is relatively empty,  we are trialing a few different types of comics to see which type are the most engaging and hold the attention of both girls and boys. Fingers crossed this could get the children into the habit of reading for enjoyment, thus expanding their worlds. A true gift if you come from a family who have been illiterate for generations.