You know you're home when...

Spring has arrived in Malta and I am into barefoot mode. The sun in the mornings has moved round enough to shine on my front windows for a few hours and the warmth wakes me up like a hibernating tortoise. But it also means that I can't read the screen on my laptop where it is set up by the window. I have to put a sun hat on to stop my glasses going too dark!

To really be at home somewhere, you have to spend several seasons there and learn to deal with the different conditions. Last week was windy and I just had my back courtyard windows open. On Wednesday afternoon when I got back from my lace class in Marsaxlokk, I called round to my neighbour to give her some old magazines from the newspaper. We chatted about her grandsons. The wind blew the door shut. We both stared in complete silence as we contemplated the implications of being outside the door in my socks (it was still cool then) without a key. This eventuality had crossed my mind before and I thought I must do something in preparation but of course I hadn't taken any action. We dismissed some of the wilder solutions like abseiling down from the roof. Solutions from another world such as phoning a locksmith were dismissed by my neighbour. It seems that in Malta, locksmiths don't sit on the phone in the afternoons waiting for distress calls from old ladies. In the end, my neighbour woke up her husband who was having his afternoon nap and he spent an hour and a half forcing my lock. My door now looks bedraggled but I can still lock it by turning the bolt into the top and bottom of the door rather than into the side which is stuffed. I have learnt always to have a key with me if I poke my head out of the door and I will make arrangements for a spare key to be left somewhere.

The photo is of a front door in Birkirkara that is completely covered in squashed Heineken beer cans. I may have to find a similar solution for my front door.

Last night the International Fireworks festival started on Grand Harbour. I watched from the roof. Like band clubs, fireworks in Malta are competitive. The fireworks are made at local village factories by volunteers and every year someone is killed in an explosion somewhere. At the festival, the displays are set up on barges moored off Kalkara. There were five of them last night with at least one overseas guest display. Everyone gathered along the bastions or came in boats to watch. I have never seen fireworks so close up and it was stunning. I took up a glass of wine and felt my brain exploding with the noise, the bursting patterns of light and the smoke. After the second barge finished, I noticed flame starting in the stern and sure enough, there was a long pause in proceedings as small boats investigated and a tug was dispatched to pump water onto the blaze.

Today the lift is out of action again. Last night, my neighbour's daughter got stuck in it. Awful thought that I will have to deal with!

In Cuba

The small boats are gathering in the harbour to escort the pope across Grand Harbour from Kalkara creek. He is scheduled to meet Malta's young people at the Valletta waterfront during the next hour. I will go up onto my roof to see what I can. All of Malta it seems has turned out to catch a glimpse of the pontiff as he rides in his popemobile through the streets, or appears in balconies or on specially constructed stages.

I just wanted to get this post started - I have been promising it for months! Malta's weekend fete for the pope has got me thinking about it. When Fidel Castro ousted the dictator Batista to move his country towards post-colonial independence, he recognised the importance of the catholic religion for Cuban people and he did not try to use force to eradicate the church. It makes Cuba into a fascinating island of contrasts where church and state are separate and warily tolerated. In Havana, we even stayed in a hotel run by nuns in their convent. The photo is a street scene in Havana.

Thursday. I've just got back from the lunchtime concert at St Catherine of Italy. This evening I'll go down to Valletta Waterfront for the University Wind Ensemble playing at Sagrestia Vault. Sometimes my life becomes too crowded to fit in my writing.

But Cuba has become part of my life now. I am reading a fat book called "In conversation with Fidel" by Ignacio Ramonet. Ramonet suggests that Cuba cannot be dismissed as a quaint anomaly, an outdated and fading remnant of a communist era. Today, old man Castro remains an inspiring leader of radical resistance to globalisation. In this scenario, identification with a unique local culture is enriched and empowered by an awareness of the interconnection of all local contexts in a global network. I would like to think that old people in general may be part of the radical resistance to globalisation. Malta is my new base, my beloved and respected "local", yet I remain connected to and concerned about the global forces that shape our lives. In a small way, perhaps I can use the freedom of privileged old age to make life a little better for some of the other people who share this globe at this point in time.

One of the ways we tried to do this when the Brisbane Combined Unions choir started planning our trip with the Australian Union Singers to the International Choral Festival in Santiago in Cuba was to invite everyone to carry with them small gifts like toiletries, educational and medical supplies. We were advised that giving individual gifts was frowned upon but that we could donate to organisations who would distribute among their networks. In fact it wasn't as easy as this. When we arrived, we gathered all the gifts together, made a list of everything and tried to locate the appropriate bodies to receive the considerable piles of items. We would have liked to sing in a hospital and a school as a marker of our gifts, but it just became too complicated to coordinate such a process. After a lot of democratic debate on our part about what we should do, we just ended up giving everything to the organisers of the festival, together with the list of items in the hope that they would be able to distribute appropriately. I realised then how real is the issue of re-distribution of resources. We were trying to act in an immediate context transferring a tiny amount of resources from one local to another and we couldn't really negotiate a satisfying way to do it. That experience must be magnified enormously by the huge amounts of aid being shuttled around the globe between governments and NGOs.

So many levels to discover in Cuba! Perhaps that is why I have put off writing this blog. At the tourist level, Havana is fascinating and deserves weeks of wandering the streets and visiting the galleries and monuments; Santiago's history as a birthplace of the revolution merits more time than we were able to give and the countryside, the sea and mountains call me back; the old cars and buses and motorbikes are iconic; there really is music all the time in the streets and bars. Mohitos, the national drink with rum and mint, became a daily ritual and that reminds me that the mint I am growing in a pot on my kitchen windowsill is now prolific and if I get some rum and look up the mohito recipe, I could resurrect that ritual from time to time!

The focus for us, of course, was the music. For eight days in Santiago we fitted in the tourist visits to the beach and to the sights around our daily rehearsals and performances. Our hotel was right in the centre and overlooked the busy central square. From the rooftop terrace where we had breakfast, we looked across at the bell tower of the cathedral and beyond that to the river. The hotel management found us a room to use as our base and here we met every day to rehearse and plan our schedule. Sometimes it was very hot but everyone managed to keep their shirts on both literally and metaphorically. Our performances were well received although they were very different to the Cuban presentations. In Cuba, the choirs are professional with choristers selected at a young age to make music their lives. The choirs sang beautiful, polyphonic music and presented themselves in formal costumes. Our choir are all volunteers who sing rousing tales about social justice. We are used to singing with gusto outdoors at rallies and on picket lines. So it was not a surprise when the founder director of the festival, a man in his 80s who taught us a song and conducted us when we sang at the music school, said to our base section that we would sing more beautifully if we sang more softly!

On a personal level, Cuba will always be spending three days with my sister and my nephew. My sister travelled from California and my nephew from New York to meet us in Santiago. It was difficult for them to get there because of the USA embargo on its citizens visiting Cuba so they came via Mexico. They had never met my choir before yet they agreed not only to come to Cuba but also to act as interpreter/MC and official photographer for the choir. My sister has been learning Spanish for a few years and my nephew would like to be a full-time photographer. Cuba has become a memorable node in my global network and I will treasure the memory of my sister standing on stage in front of a huge Spanish-speaking audience and daring to address them in their own language, of my nephew flashing his camera with great joy as we nervously undertook our first sound check. Today my nephew has his first exhibition in a NY gallery and I am so glad to have a link with his achievement in another part of the globe. I hope he continues to flash his camera all over the world!

"Communicating Poverty"

The conference, "Communicating Poverty", was held in the plush surroundings of the Excelsior Hotel in Floriana, looking out on the maxi yachts moored at Manoel Island. The project, Media Engagement in Development Issues and Promotion (MEDIP), was a collaborative project between Malta, Hungary, Cyprus, Estonia, Slovenia and Romania, all recent members of EU. It was about media coverage of issues of poverty. As one delegate put it, "How do you make poverty sexy?"

I went along on Saturday because I had been to a previous conference last year in St George's bay where I heard for the first time of the EU millennium goals addressing issues of poverty. I was interested in what appeared to be one project's outcome in the lead-up to the target year of 2015. The objective of the MEDIP project is to enhance the contribution of the participating six new EU member states towards the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. The strategy is to sensitise journalists and the media to these goals. I haven't yet seen today's papers but I found nothing about the conference in Sunday's papers although I had previously found out that it was happening from an advertisement in the print media. I discovered that part of the project included a training workshop for mainstream media held in Malta in March last year. With hindsight, I think I may have noticed a change in the language used by the media to report on issues of poverty. For example, most articles use the term "irregular" rather than "illegal" to report on the people who are currently in Malta without standard documentation.

The conference was organised in two similar sessions each starting with a lecture presentation. This was followed by the screening of one of the 30 minute documentaries made by contributing countries after a trip to Uganda, and the session finished up with a panel discussion. Each of the six participating states has made a video focussing on different millennium goals. Malta's contribution looked at maternal health in Uganda and the other video screened was made by Hungary and examined issues of gender equality. Discussion centred on positive versus negative coverage. Poverty is grey, grinding and long-term rather than dramatic, sudden and emotional. It is difficult to portray the factual information in a way that creates hope and dignity for the people involved as well as maintaining interest by a Western audience already distanced by geography and experience.

One of the ways forward is for the media to help bridge this distance between audience and the people involved. The MEDIP project sought to achieve this geographically by taking the media to the issue in Uganda to make the videos. Another bridge is to enable a Western audience in examining their own experience to reveal how it impacts on global poverty. A good example cited at the conference was the British TV series where young fashion-conscious people were transported to one of the sites in India where their garments were made. They were required to live the life of a worker in that situation and the subsequent excellent documentary was about that experience.

Poverty as a global issue was discussed at the conference but in terms of avoiding the trap of competitive poverty where people seek to claim greater poverty than their neighbour. There wasn't time, although it was hinted at, to discuss how Western behaviour contributes to global poverty.

Another way to bridge the experience gap is to tap in to the stories of people who have come to Malta from other lands seeking to escape poverty. Academic, Teresa Hanley, emphasised this bridging point in her talk but again there wasn't time to discuss further. It was also touched upon in the introductory lecture by Mr Bouratsis, a director of EuropeAid, when he pointed out that EU sends a lot of aid outside of Europe because their policy is not to close off to the rest of the world. The EU is not a fortress protected in times of internal hardship from seeing how that hardship is linked to the wider world.

The photo that heads up this post was taken yesterday when I went on the Malta Council for Culture and the Arts tour of Birkirkara. It is one of the carriages from the train that ran briefly from Mdina to Valletta at the turn of C20 until 1930s. It went bankrupt reportedly because they collected the fares at the end of the trip when the train arrived in Valletta so people used to get off at the stop before and walk in! Ironically, the conference finished with a sumptuous buffet lunch with multiple courses and wine. I felt guilty about enjoying such a free lunch at a conference on poverty so this article is my contribution!

Living in Valletta

My current life takes over from my past. Yesterday I went to a conference called 'The historic city: a reference model for urban sustainable development policies' hosted by the International committee on Historic Towns and Villages. It was held in the Auberge de Provence which is now the archaeology museum in Republic street. The photo shows the PM, the chair of Heritage Malta and the president of CIVVIH (from right to left) dwarfed by the magnificent painting in the hall that we were in.

I stayed for the whole day sitting through rather dull presentations where people put up big chunks of text (sometimes from their own publications) and proceeded to read the words out loud. But I thought a lot about where I have come from and where I am now. Most of the participants were architects and town planners who have now started to talk about the fourth pillar of sustainability - culture (alongside heritage, economic and social). Community cultural development in Australia adopted this idea as a cornerstone of praxis many years ago yet there were no representatives of this area or of community arts at the conference. In fact, there were very few Maltese people in general even though the president of CIVVIH is Maltese.

The significance of the social in sustaining the vibrancy of cities was also discussed. The general trend of people moving out of the historic parts of cities and the subsequent gentrification was raised. In Valletta the population has dropped from something like 25,000 at the time of the knights to a mere 6,500 now. I felt privileged to be one of that small band of people tal belt (from Valletta). I started to think about how I might link my past work in community cultural development with my current life in this historic city. It is curious that my last two posts on this site have been about my growing love for my adopted home.

The other idea that came up often and resonated with me was the proposition that conservation is about the past and sustainability is about thinking of the future whilst living now. This is the continuing theme of my life today as I learn how to live well in old age. I'm off now for coffee with a friend!

Home again and writing

Easter has been solitary and reflective. The mood was set on Maundy Thursday when I went to the lunchtime concert at St Catherine of Italy - beautiful songs accompanied by piano for the stations of the cross. But the readings in between each piece gave the performance meaning for me. The performers had carefully chosen poems and writing about some of the horrors that we have perpetrated on each other during the past century. In the past week, I have picked up from two different sources the proposition that Malta's history has been about service. In the past it has been the service of other people's power struggles. Malta's independent future now lies in the service of peace. It is a seductive idea for an old woman who has chosen this small central turning point of the Mediterranean as my home.

The Good Friday procession was interrupted by an island-wide power cut. The final station had just passed me in my position at the top of the hill in St Paul's street. The rhythmic creaking of the carrying poles was stopped as the penitents in their light brown robes reached the top and put down their heavy load on the resting stays. When the power went off, there was literally an electric pause as everyone tried to work out what had suddenly happened to plunge us all into darkness. I walked down along the side of the procession to head to my flat to make dinner, but when I realised the power was off I decided I couldn't face the many flights of steps with lift and lights out of action. I wandered through the Valletta streets where people had started to light candles and put on car headlamps to help the procession get moving again. At the restaurants I passed anxious workers standing in the doorways trying to get an idea of how long the cut might last. Of course, they could not cook food. I ended up in upper Valletta in the cafe at St James Cavalier. They were the only place in Valletta to have power, probably because they have their back to Castille where the PM's office is. I went in for seafood risotto washed down with half a bottle of Maltese wine and finished off with hot chocolate.

At 9.30, the power was still off but I was sufficiently fortified to face the climb up to my flat using the tiny torch on my key ring to light the way.

The rest of Easter I have spent getting back into my writing, unpacking the last of my boxes from Australia and setting up my office space with all my reference books around me. On Sunday, I also went to the Adoloratto cemetery to see if I could find the two plots where my grandparents were buried. I had been given two plot numbers by a very helpful government employee suggested by a friend (thanks, Reno) but it was quite difficult to work out where they were. The cemetery is beautiful, set on a hillside with lots of established trees and the amazing baroque tombs and chapels in the private sections. I wandered vaguely, using the sun to head in a Westerly direction which was where the government plots were located as indicated by the numbers that I was carrying scribbled on a piece of paper. After a while I realised that some of the terrace walls had letters on them and then at the back of the cemetery I noticed that the grave sites had multiple marble plaques on each and these seemed to be temporary. The plots had numbers on them and I eventually found my grandparents in the same row, but not side by side. As in most rocky lands with limited space, Malta routinely clears government graves every ten years and places the remains in a charnel. I couldn't identify the charnel house but I will return during office hours and try to find out more about what I can do to commemorate the place where my ancestors are buried.

The photo that heads the post is of an ancient apiary carved into the garigue at Xemxija that I visited with Ramblers Malta in January. The smaller holes are for the bees to store their honey. The larger hole is where the beekeeper went in to collect it. It seems that the more I write, the more I have to write. Now I have lined up for my next posts the venture in Cuba last year, my trips to UK and Liguria in Italy last month and the visit by my brother last week. Until my next post...

From my window

The twin breakwaters of Grand Harbour embrace me like the arms of a final lover.

I feel the pulse of Valletta snuggled at my back, breathing softly in my ear.

He speaks to me, this city built by gentlemen for gentlemen,

this city of straight masculine lines and defensive bastions,

this city of baroque excess.

I am the soft, rounded shapes of the goddess temples,

more ancient than the knights' city,

trampled by the knights' religion,

reborn in Valletta chapels as virgin mother and martyred saint.

Yet his soft breathing enchants me and his encircling arms merge with my own arms.

Red and green candles flicker in my hands,

guiding ships to the safe harbour that has become my own haven.