Scaffolding, Seagulls and Support – by Sheila

Stew and I had an early wake up call at 5am recently.  I was sound asleep and dreaming that I could hear a baby crying somewhere in the distance.  The sound was coming closer as I woke up and it gradually morphed into miaowing.  I heard Stew say, “Alright I’ll let you out”, to the black cat standing beside our bed, as he got to his feet – a scenario which I am sure takes place in millions of homes each morning – save that we don’t have a cat!  Stew says the cat led the way downstairs and through the hall to the kitchen and stood back for him to open the back door, whereupon it politely made its exit.  We went over the whole house to try to work out how the cat had got in, and have come to the conclusion that its only way in must have been through the small window over the back door – by way of the scaffolding currently in place for our painter.

I have since sat quietly at the window watching, and see that the cat is quite adept at using the scaffolding, clearly enjoying this new dimension in space!  We are very pleased that the cat had enough sense to work its way through our house looking for someone to let it out, and didn’t decide to hide up a chimney or in a cupboard, as has happened to others we know.

We had another bit of excitement a couple of days earlier, when Marcus, our painter, came across a recently born baby bird in our guttering.  It had fallen from its nest, which has been cleverly made in a space where half a tile on our roof has slipped.  The bird looked very weak and Marcus and I agreed that it was probably doomed.  However, I saw him later in the day, and he said he had looked at the bird again later and it seemed to have perked up a bit.  He managed to get it balanced on the end of a clean paint brush and lifted it upwards into the eaves, from where it seems to have managed to hop back into its nest.  A happy result!

Paula, with whom I cook at Catching Lives, has also had baby bird stories to tell recently.  Seagulls are nesting on the roof of her house, and one of the sisters in their community has taken on the job of being guardian to the baby birds.  As regular blog readers will know, I am not a big seagull fan – but who could resist a baby seagull which had enough sense to go round the house to the front door to be let in again, when it fell from its nest?  It was of course carried carefully indoors and placed back in its nest again via the window.

It would be very satisfying if it was as simple to help human beings in crisis, as it has been in the case of these little creatures.  Unfortunately it rarely is.  Catching Lives exists specifically to try to give people that helping hand either back into the community they have fallen out of, or to try to help them get established in a new community.  Paula and I have been co-mentors for more than a year now, working with a couple of guys who have been rehoused, with the aim of helping them get re-established and to give them the confidence to take control of their own lives again.  We have taken real pleasure in seeing these guys gradually take up the reins of life, to look physically better and to see smiles on their faces on occasion.   Despite extensive efforts, neither of them have yet been able to find work, but one of them has done a substantial amount of voluntary work near his home, and has endeared himself to the locals in the process.  He has a purpose in life again.  The other guy, with our support, has been able to meet up with his young children and re-establish his relationship with them after a long absence.  I met him in the park recently walking proudly along, one small child’s hand held in each of his big ones – and all three of them looking as if they didn’t have a care in the world.  The nests of these guys are no longer looking quite so bare as they were a few months ago, thanks to Catching Lives.

I am amazed to note that 3G Kiliclimb has now raised over £4000.  When we first discussed raising money for charity, we had no idea how much we could raise. We didn’t know whether to go for a few hundred – but hit on the idea of trying to raise £1 for every meter of height we would climb on Kilimanjaro.  It seemed very optimistic – but it now seems that we might indeed reach our target of £5,895 by the middle of August!  With the promise from our kind donor of matched funding, we are pretty much certain to be raising a five figure sum – half of which will go to Catching Lives.  That will potentially make such a big difference to the lives of many homeless people.  Thank you so much to the dozens of you who have contributed.  Some people have donated quite small sums, but I know that their donations represent quite a big proportion of their income.  To them particularly, I say a big thank you for their empathy and generosity.