The Amblings and Ramblings of the Ingalls Family

The travels and thoughts of Heidi, Micah, and Frances...

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Community Projects, Master's Courses, and the Move to Southall

As we said, in October Micah began work with A Rocha Living Waterways, whilst Heidi continued her degree at LSHTM.
Heidi’s studies moved along at breakneck speed, having courses at LSHTM and the London School of Economics. Micah’s work with A Rocha took off running. Much of this work involved local business and religious leaders, involved in what we formed as the Southall Sustainability Forum, which was a regular meeting of mullahs, vicars, priests, Council members, and business leaders to promote sustainability within the Southall community. Micah also managed ARLW’s some 130 volunteers, in addition fund raising for the project, and publishing community environmental news magazines (SHARE- Southall and Hayes Action to Renew the Environment).
For the both of us, this first part was a trying time. Living in east London, we began to find that the rent and council tax, together with travel expenses, were far beyond our economic ability. Micah did not get a paycheque from A Rocha until December, and even this minimal pay (£15,000 per annum) was further drained by the UK system of penalising foreigners by charging an emergency rate of income tax- 300% higher than for nationals with a national insurance number—this was later reimbursed, but in the meanwhile it left us with a monthly deficit of a few hundred dollars). Together with this, we were finding that Micah’s community work was often taking place on weekends and evenings which, coupled with a two hour train commute each way, meant that we seldom saw one another.

Finally, in December we decided we needed to move to Southall. There was an added dimension to this. We both felt that we needed to be a part of the community we lived in. We felt very scattered at that time. Heidi would travel to central London each day, Micah to west London, and never did we feel that we had a community of people with whom we could share, apart from whatever contact we had with Christ Church Spitalfields.

So in December, on the evening following a very lovely presentation of Handel’s Messiah by candlelight at Queen Elizabeth Hall, we moved once more, this time to Southall, to a tool shed that we would eventually call the Garden Villa.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home