Engineering empowerment

This morning we drove over to the Mall shopping centre on Cribbs Causeway to meet Amanda, our first face to face catch-up in two years. In recent months her life as a disabled person has been transformed by the acquisition of a bed which incorporates new assistive technologies which enable her to get in and out of bed without needing help from a carer.  She's also acquired an electric wheelchair, enabling her to go out unaccompanied, to go shopping and travel on buses. 

The Mall is a couple of miles from where she lives, and there's a bus that will take her there. We met there as her way of showing off her independence, reclaimed after years of being housebound and reliant on carers. She was in great form, so much enjoying all the possibilities available to her again. She's already thinking about a trip to Cardiff to see us. What a triumph of determination and courage enhanced by really useful modern technology! She attends St Gregory's Parish Church in Horfield and is looked to as their advocate on disability and access issues, something which her early life as a nursing assistant and a shop manager has equipped her for. She has a sharp analytical eye when it comes to noticing what empowers or disempowers people, and that's a real asset.

In the evening I wrote a sermon assessment for Ross the St German's ordinand, who preached two weeks ago. Then I watched a documentary about the events of 9/11 as experienced by the teams of both the President and Vice-President, with interviews, news footage and photographs taken in situ by the official photographers in attendance. It was superbly constructed, and took me back to the few days in Monaco when I followed the news around the clock and opened the church for passers by to pray in.

Twenty years on, just before the anniversary of the attacks the American military finally conclude their twenty years of intervention in Afghanistan, long after their primary objective of neutralising the threat from Al-qaeda was achieved. The modernisation of Afghan society which was their secondary aim, has only partly been achieved, and its main effect has been in urban society. The gulf between rich and poor in the country still remains, as does endemic corruption, not surprisingly given the three trillion dollars invested in the American invasion and occupation of the country. The world now wait to see how the Taliban takeover will change the country, and its relationship to the rest of the world.