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Care4calais

29/12/2017

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and the princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flocks,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the heart.

Howard Thurman

I am going to be volunteering with the charity Care4Calais for a month from 15th January 2018. Care4Calais is a very small charity working with refugees in Northern France. They collect and distribute much needed clothing, equipment and food to thousands of rough-sleepers in Calais, Dunkirk and Paris.

I’ll be driving to Calais and will be taking as many donations as my little car can hold.
If you’d like to make a donation then please visit http://care4calais.org/donate/
There you can find information on what is needed and where you can take it.
Anything I can’t fit in my car will be donated to Homeless Action in Barnet.

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Walking the camino de santiago

15/12/2017

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‘How was it?’ I’ve been asked this question a lot since returning from Santiago de Compostela in Northern Spain, but there’s no simple answer. I walked the Camino Frances – 800 kilometres (that’s 500 miles) beginning in the south of France, following in the footsteps of medieval pilgrims to reach Santiago and the shrine of St James – it took me 30 days (plus another 4 days and 90k to reach the coast from Santiago). At times it was terrible. Blisters, burning sun, tired legs, noisy roads, crowded dormitories in the pilgrim albergues (90 beds in one room!). But these things were always eventually outweighed by something beautiful or incredible – the hospitality of singing nuns, picking grapes from the vine and figs from the tree, sunrise, and the smell of eucalyptus trees. Not forgetting huge sandwiches and bottles of wine for €1! And of course the people. People of all ages and backgrounds walk the camino and everyone walks it their own way. I met people who had hotels booked and their luggage delivered and others who could take as long as they wanted, stopping whenever they
pleased. I met religious people and those of no faith at all and I met people who had walked from Italy and even Germany! We were all there for our own reasons and doing it our own way. Reaching Santiago Cathedral and receiving a blessing under the botafumeiro (enormous, swinging incense burner) and eventually walking on the beach at Finesterre, the ‘end of the earth’, were special but the lessons I learnt on the journey will stay with me forever – lessons of simplicity, patience and kindness.

See more at www.facebook.com/hannahthetraveller www.instagram.com/hannah_the_traveller

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Care4calais

Walking the camino de santiago

Hannah the traveller

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