"People of the parish..."

I still get the weekly church "bulletin" - or "pew sheet". It comes via email early on Sunday mornings. 

It gives me an idea of what is going on. There are notices about funerals, weddings and the occasional baptism. The usual notice about the weekly barbecue held outside the big hardware and gardening centre is there. There are messages about other events like a film morning or an afternoon tea. Requests for donations for the homeless, for the Christmas hampers and so on appear too.

This week there was also a request for people to write about "people of the parish". It is one of those things that has apparently been decided on for their 175 year celebrations. The request was for two hundred and fifty word contributions about people and their contribution to the life of the church. I knew, I just knew, what was going to happen.

"Cat..." and then, "You can write things..." and "Do you think you could write something..." and "I have to write something but I don't know what to say..." and.... 

Writing just two hundred and fifty words about someone's contribution to a complex place like that is not easy. I will do it because I will write about my own parents and someone who went to teacher-training college with my mother. 

Looking up that other person's details to remind myself was an odd experience. It was a jolt to be reminded of just how different the world is now.  M.... was born at the end of WWI. She grew up in a tiny rural community and travelled the seven kilometres to school in a horse drawn cart. She did a year as a "junior teacher" (an untrained teacher) before going to teacher training college. Her early career was tiny one teacher schools in remote places where the children taught her as much as she taught them.  Farm life and those experiences made her into a very practical and able person. M... ended her career as the head of a big junior school. She had worked for the same employer, the state's education department, all her working life. 

It is nothing like that now. There are no junior teachers or teacher training colleges. The tiny schools have been closed and children go longer distances to "area" schools. There is no continuity of employment. You go from one "contract" to another. The work of the head of any school is vastly different.  

I am not sure we are better off, indeed certain we are not. M... contributed a lot to the education system. And, she contributed a lot to her church. She was the sort of person who was there and involved, a person to be found in the kitchen or behind the fundraising stall. That stall would contain something she had baked or made and it would be baked or made well.

She eventually moved back to her rural roots so as to be closer to her extended family. I kept up contact with her after my mother died.  When she could no longer correspond due to a stroke her niece wrote to me and asked if I would go on writing to her. She wanted to know what was going on at "her" church, about the people who had been her "family". I did it because I thought she needed to know.

I doubt that sort of thing happens much now. I will help people write things and perhaps one day one of their grandchildren or great grandchildren will read about it and wonder at how different things were "back then".