It is difficult to predict what might happen on a Saturday and Sunday outside of boring household routines such as washing schedules and house cleaning. After an often stressful five-day work where you stretch the limits of your brains to cope with your deadlines, you do look forward to a relaxing weekend. What is a perfect weekend?
Last weekend was First Advent. It should have been work- free Saturday except that a colleague begged me to replace her. So I worked and when I got home after three in the afternoon, I saw that most houses in my neighborhood already had advent lights on the windows. I had problem digging through my storage to find my advent lights, but I found three among several I bought the past Christmases. Then I went into a cleaning frenzy, hoping that my Sunday would be pleasurable. I was going to hang out with my granddaughter Ariana while her parents got a special Sunday health treat at Hasselludden.
But this weekend, like most recent weekends felt more burdensome. I read both Swedish dailies, including the past issues I missed and the contents are heavier on the environmental problems. With the world conference on climactic changes opening this week in Bali, Jakarta, there has been a heavy dosage of articles on the subject since about a month now. The world is getting warmer, the glaciers are melting, the days are thirstier for water. Is this good news for countries in Northern Europe that have winter for six months? Many think it is an act of benevolence as living in fierce winter can be bone-breaking. But what about in developing countries in Asia and Africa? It will mean food scarcity due to long draught and lack of rain. More hunger. More sickness. And poverty continues.
Ariana and I had a nice lunch of grilled salmon in Vällinghus centrum. She was very eager to tell me about her latest school project at Kungsholmen gymnasium. She did a comparative study of Portugal and Mozambique and thought she did a good work. Yes, it was a study of the colonizer and the colonized. I said that Portugal was a bad colonizer in comparison to Great Britain because it did nothing for its colonies such as Mozambique ( where I lived for almost five years) Angola and Guinea Bissau. They were just Portuguese overseas provinces. I told Ariana that Spain did exactly the same in the Philippines. It was the Catholic church and its missionaries that introduced the administrative system - population census incl. births, marriages and deaths. It was more for taxation than anything else.
We went thought her school album, there she showed me her classmates, best friends, favorite teachers with explanations why "she loved her Swedish teacher" and thought weired of her young Math teacher. Then we went through the different school clubs, and I was very impressed that she had chosen several worthy cause-oriented clubs such as environment and Amnesty. Looking at those faces on her school book made me think that in some ten years, these young people will be running the country. Ariana said that she was going to do a social science study about the growing violence among young people. An excellent choice of a current social problem eating away at the moral fabric of society.
When I drove Ariana home to Bagarmossen we passed by Skogskyrkogården to light candles in Bo's grave. The forest cemetery was beautiful in its stillness and many graves were lighted. This will be the first Christmas without Bo, who loved everything about Christmas like a child lost in fairyland. It will also be different for Ariana not seeing her grandfather in his Santa Claus attire, long after she discovered Santa's true identity after seeing and concluding that both Grandpa and Santa wore the same wristwatch.#
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