Jo Swinney is a writer, speaker and editor. She joined A Rocha International as Head of Communications on June 1st, 2020.
This is the first in a new series of blog posts from around the A Rocha family exploring how someone first found a home with A Rocha, their memories of […]
“Well, I had to see a counsellor. I’ve never seen a counsellor. As a scientist, you’re not trained to deal with emotion, it’s just driven out of you.” This is […]
Miranda’s faithful habit of letter writing was part of her gift for bringing others into her life. So was the Harris’s family table. In the early days of the couple’s ministry, Miranda famously spent their first earnings on a large dining room table.
She wasn’t dressed for the outing! A beautiful young Zulu lady got into my pickup truck: her form fitting ankle length dress and high heels were hardly the appropriate attire for exploring the Ferncliffe Forest where A Rocha South Africa has, for the last decade, run a forest rehabilitation project.
It was going to be a good week. But it wasn’t. We were beginning to enjoy our new house and also had our younger son and his family visiting. Then midday Tuesday, the warm Provençal sun spilling over us, we received the appalling news that a terrible car accident in South Africa had taken the lives of our old A Rocha friends Chris and Susanna Naylor and with them Miranda Harris, leaving her husband Peter recovering in hospital.
I attended Au Sable in 1993 and started dreaming about opening a Canadian Christian environmental school. It was why I became involved in A Rocha. In 2015 several of us had the idea to open a fish hatchery and nature centre and the community got excited.
I was woken by a bright flash and a deafening bang, despite my earplugs and eye-mask. Was it a bomb? No, this was Typhoon Mangkhut (locally called Ompong), the biggest storm recorded in the world so far this year.
This summer, after 10 years as an international trustee, I retired from the board of A Rocha. How is it that the son of an immigrant fisherman from Japan came to be involved with creation care?
Our family has been living abroad for the past 21 years and relocated to Florida – the week before Hurricane Irma hit. In a way, bad timing. However, it was good to go through this experience living with family.
A week or two on Bardsey may teach me some important things, but the challenge is how I live out what I learn in my everyday life.
