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Getting to the 3rd cup of tea

British bloke climbed second highest mountain in world, in Afghanistan. Slipped. Almost died. Recovered health with help of locals.

Enforced convalescence in remote area led to helping, by invitation, from local elders, educate local children. Built school. Built more schools.

Taliban have been targeting schools. Hundreds destroyed. None of this bloke’s schools has been touched.

He’s written a book “3 Cups of Tea”. Manual of how to tackle global virus with vaccine produced by locals, for locals – location, as the real estate man says, is everything.

By the way, 3! cups of tea? After one cup you’re a stranger. After 2 you’re a friend. After 3 you’re family.

February 7 is the anniversary of the devastating fires in Victoria.

National, regional and local attention has focussed on these troubled areas. Even international.

Those interests are predicting ten years before restoration of the trappings of community. In Haiti they’re talking decades.

My voice will be silenced soon because my bleatings come from the 3 cups of tea experience.

We’re just starting to regain a sense of “family” around South and Port Melbourne. We went through the hell of dungeon, fire and sword (lots of locals in prison, lots dead through unnatural causes).

West Gate Bridge fell in the 60’s. That affected locals, as I heard in a eulogy last week. “Bobby’s mates were killed. Bobby had left the job the week before.” No post trauma stress disorder help in those days. Just one cup of tea. Bureaucracy and locals were strangers.

Social engineers cleared vast swathes of South Melbourne in a “well intentioned” effort to tackle inner urban social disadvantage. It looked like a “slumdog” dwellings precinct. But, only 1 cup of tea had been consumed.

South Melbourne catholics sat down with the locals for the next forty years and had the next 2 cups of tea with both intersecting demographics – the aspirational class and the socially challenged class.

Today, I preside at the private burial of one such socially challenged 45 year old male, Steven. His family needs privacy. His story is as bleak as Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”. His fellow travellers, not family, not friends, just ships passing in the night enshrouded in that enigmatic aussie cry from the heart “mate”, will assemble here in our church, become local matrix.

We’re still on our first cup of tea, waiting for the second, dying for the third.

We’re working on the vaccine for the global, regional, local virus of chaos which feeds off inherited/acquired loneliness, lack of occupation and meaning, chronic social disadvantage.

We’ve been shocked and humiliated by a couple of intrusions by well meaning outside experts. They insisted on our pulling the plug providing energy for several undeserving “clients” of our intensive and futile care programme.

I think Steven and we, represented by long serving and poorly resourced Henri Ser, were on our third cup of tea. We were getting there.

Parish and neighbourhood need to commit to the same road map – strangers, friends, family.

RJM