Back to Geneva again

Yesterday, we were out of the house and off to the station in a taxi by five past seven this morning. By nine we were through security checks at Bristol Airport with just hand luggage for a weekend trip to Geneva. Our plane, with its eyecatching devout registration code left and arrived early.

We walked out into the Arrival area, to be greeted within seconds by Yvette, our host for the weekend. Amazingly she'd parked so recently that we left without having to pay a fee, as she was still inside the ten minute free 'drop-off' allowance. A true rarity of timing.

Yvette lives in Chambesy, not far from the Orthodox Oecumenical Patriarchate centre. Her husband is Orthodox, so they have close family connexions there and I have fond memories of perticipating in the Divine Liturgy in French in the basement chapel there, and in Greek in the main upstairs church, mostly on holidays after we'd moved away.

Our dear friend Gill invited us to supper that evening, where we were re-united with more old friends, and one new one - Gill's godson Tim Challen who works for the United Nations own Credit Union, which was founded back in 1946 to serve the financial needs of U.N. employees in its main centres. It now has tens of thousands of members world-wide in places where U.N. staff teams are deployed, and must serve as a role model for co-operative banking and all continents. 

Due to time spent working in Africa, Tim has set up an N.G.O. organising young people's formative expeditions to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, with special focus on youngsters from East Africa's urban slumland, and poor rural youngsters living within sight of the mountain, who'd never dream that climbing it would make any difference to their lives. What clearly had made a difference to Tim's take on life, he put lots of energy into making happen for others. An unusual conversation to start our weekend. Tim's account of his climb experience is here. The N.G.O. website is here.