Plum Tree in the Desert by Reed Naomi;

Author:Reed, Naomi;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Authentic Media

7

THE LIGHT SHINES

Spring

The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.

John 1:5

In September 2013 Darren and I were back in Australia, with our boys back at high school, and my brief was to meet Spring at 5.25 p.m. on a Thursday evening at the arrivals gate at Sydney Airport. I knew that Spring had served in nine different provinces in ­Afghanistan, worked in five other countries, and learnt eleven different languages, but I didn’t have a photo of her. So I stood at gate 53 and I held up my piece of paper, with ‘Spring’ written all over it in black ink for everyone to see. Then I studied each person as they appeared at the gate. No, I decided, Spring would not be wearing high heels. She would probably not have dark hair, given that she was in her sixties. And she would not be wearing that much ­jewellery. Halfway through my study of passengers, an announcement was made that her flight from Melbourne was delayed by fifty-eight minutes … which would give me a lot more time to study people at the gate and make personal judgements and assumptions, based purely on appearances.

Finally, Spring arrived. She was wearing runners, a coat and no ­jewellery. Her hair had mostly gone grey. She hugged me and laughed and then asked me how we were getting home. I explained that the next train from Central Station to the Blue Mountains left in about fifteen minutes, and if we missed it, we would have to wait for another hour.

‘Right then,’ she said, ‘Let’s run!’

We ran. I could hardly keep up with her runners. We raced through the airport gates, past the baggage collection, down the stairs to the connecting train, travelled three stops, jumped off at Central Station, ran down some more stairs, through the crowd, up the escalators and onto the Blue Mountains train with exactly ten seconds to spare. That’s when she told me about her right knee, which had recently collapsed and required surgery.

‘Oh dear,’ I said, feeling guilty for a moment, and then I cheered her up by telling her that my husband was, fortunately, a ­physiotherapist.

She laughed some more and that’s when I realised I hadn’t expected Spring to be so cheerful. Was there something about serving in nine different provinces in Afghanistan that would make Interserve partners permanently serious, or even sad?

And then Spring explained, ‘I’m not your orthodox Christian. It’s my background, you see.’ Then she told me about her father, who was from China. There was a famine in the North of China when he was small, so he was carried by his father to the South of China, in a basket, and sold. Later, he boarded a junk and ran away to Malaysia, where he tried to find work and was abused. Spring’s mother was also sold as a child in Malaysia and became a street child, left to fend for herself. Years later, Spring’s parents met and married and had ten children.

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