“Home, Theodora.” “Yes, Ma’am.”

Theodora, the ACN-Mobile

Meet Theodora, my new Head of Transport. Here at the NW Office we plan on ferrying a fair number of distinguished visiting clerics around and about the place, so last weekend my husband and I decided that we needed to acquire an ACN-mobile for this purpose. We found Theodora at a dealership in Preston; you should have seen the look on the salesman’s face when I asked my husband how many priests he thought I could fit in the back… Now, I’m not really what I would call a ‘car person.’ When I was a teenager, I drove the car, but my lovely father cleaned and maintained it; when I moved to this country and got married, I stopped driving until joining ACN, as being able to drive is a requirement of my role. You’ll already know about my recent UK driving trials and triumphs (if not, check out my previous blog entries for some pretty exciting stuff!), so I remain still somewhat surprised at the sight of the trim, fit Theodora in my drive; Sharon, our elderly 7-seater that has served us faithfully for the past decade, now resides around the corner on a side street (Sorry, Sharon!). I am looking forward to working with Theodora; I could already tell, when driving her home from Preston, that she has a bit of a swagger, a bit of attitude maybe—just what I look for in my staff here at the NW Office. She will be reliable, friendly and welcoming—she just needs some stuffed, fuzzy ACN logos to hang from her mirror and we are ready to go!

This week wondrous things have happened here at the NW Office! Aside from the arrival of Theodora, we also stood by (perhaps shedding just a few tears of joy…) while the designers came to take away PRAYERS FROM OUR HEARTS to put the final touches on all of our hard work from the past few months. Scottish Lorraine and I, along with Patricia and Portia and the other staff from HQ who have helped, have put so much care and effort into this initiative, and I’m sure that I can speak for both of us (though not in a Scottish accent) when I say that it is so exciting watching on as everything comes together. I have an offer from a school already and I have also had an interesting offer from a secondary school near Preston—they would like to train some of their pupils to work with local Catholic primaries to run the day! More on this as it develops!

I also attended a very useful meeting this week where we discussed my new initiative for secondary schools. This involves the work of a Syrian Orthodox painter from Homs. I shall be talking more about this soon…so you’ll just have to hang in there and wait for the details!

I’m also focussed once again on ACN Parish Representatives for the NW region. It took me a day and a half, but I have produced the first ever NW ACN Parish Representative Newsletter. I am rather fond of it, to be honest; it is packed with information about the upcoming Prayer Vigils for Religious Freedom (more below!), suggestions about ways to raise the profile of suffering Christians and ACN in a parish setting and even a feature on the amazing work of the new Parish Rep for Holy Family in Blackpool. I’ve asked for feedback, so we’ll see what the reps have to say about my efforts….

And now for the Prayer Vigils for Religious Freedom: (sit down, because this will shock you) I have managed to confirm all of the dates and start times and venues that I had originally planned. Hurray! Huzzah! Yippee! I am still a bit shocked actually; it was never difficult to get Parish Priests to agree to host a vigil—they were all very supportive—but what with summer holidays and pilgrimages to Lourdes and clergy being transferred to new parishes, it has been extremely difficult to nail down all of the details. In several cases I had to take a deep breath and call someone just ONE MORE TIME, knowing that this might be that one call too many that means I am no longer the ‘friendly, enthusiastic ACN NW Manager,’ but now have become that ‘pesty, bothersome woman who rings and emails constantly’! Thankfully, this wasn’t the case and I must thank each and every parish priest, cathedral dean and parish secretary who proved so helpful to me! Thank you! The final list will come out as part of my next blog, so you simply will be making the biggest mistake of your life if you don’t check in this time next week to see what happens!

Thanks for reading!  Caroline

See this picture? Get used to it!

Where does the time go? There was a time not so long ago when I was able easily to book two ‘blog slots’ in my diary each week. These days I need to try and sneak them in where and when I can. I don’t want to let this slide because a) I love, love, love writing these entries (especially now that the blog is live and people can actually read them!) and b) my new colleague in the Scottish Office (a warm welcome to Michael Robinson!) is busy blogging his head off up in Motherwell so now the pressure is really on! You can read Scottish Michael’s blog at http://acnscotland.blogspot.co.uk/ (what I won’t do for the Scottish Office!); it is witty, entertaining and very informative, so really you should head right there each week  (but only after you've read the entries from the NW Office…obviously.)

Right, back to the matter at hand. The image featured in this entry will, I hope, soon appear in Catholic churches and ACN literature all over North West England and North Wales; you will see it on all of the publicity for the upcoming NW Prayer Vigils for Religious Freedom. Please embrace this image and learn to love it! This picture—which I took last May at the ACN Conference in Malta—depicts the central dome at St Paul’s Cathedral in Mdina and, NO, I did not lie on my back to take it. I chose it because I have always associated domes with freedom and heaven; there is something about a good dome that is slightly miraculous, yet entirely attainable—a big heavy structure that seems to float high above us and but can be created by human hands out of the humblest of materials. (This, by the way, is not easy for an historian of Gothic art and architecture to admit; we are rather fond of our pointed vaults and soaring spires, you know!). Domes such as this one make me feel that out there somewhere there is peace and light and universal harmony. Just because we must all view a dome from our place far below on the ground doesn't mean that we can’t lift our eyes and set our sights on the bright blue oculus in the dome’s centre. (An oculus, for those of you who aren't up on your Roman architectural terms—shame on you!—means ‘eye’ in Latin and refers to the hole in the very centre of a classical dome—the oculus was generally uncovered, so you can usually find it just above the bucket to catch the rain on the floor of a Roman temple!)

This particular dome has an extra significance for me. It is in Malta and it was there last May where I met so many inspiring people who work hard and pray every day to nurture religious freedom in some of the most troubled areas of the world. It reminds me of Sister Hanan in Lebanon and her work with Iraqi and Syrian refugees and Bishop Cyrillos of Assiut in Egypt and H.B. Patriarch Gregorius of Damascus. Malta is also where I met Archbishop Kaigama from Jos in Nigeria; I am really looking forward to seeing him again when he comes to the NW early in November to kick off all of our Religious Freedom events here.

So there you have it, the complicated, slightly wacky thinking behind my choice for the publicity image for the Religious Freedom Events throughout the North West region. Maybe by now you are glad that you get only the occasional glimpse inside the inner workings of the NW Office—full-time it is pretty exhausting, let me tell you! Still, now you will never look at a dome the same way again. My job here is done.

Thanks for reading!  Caroline

ACNUK NW Office Prayer Vigils for Religious Freedom

NW Manager and Archbishop Kaigama

I have devoted most of my time this week to confirming the details of the Prayer Vigils that I have planned for the coming months. I’m nearly there now—I just need to hang on for a couple of lucky priests who worked all summer and are now enjoying holidays in September while the rest of us are slogging away. Clever people—fewer crowds and cooler weather! This is all a bit frustrating, but I am nearly there so I shall keep smiling and I’ll get there in the end. All of the prayer vigils that have been finalised have been entered as events of the Aid to the Church in Need – North West Region Facebook page ( https://www.facebook.com/acnuk.northwest ), so feel free to have a look there, but remember to keep checking as more vigils and events will be posted shortly!

The big news this week is that Archbishop Kaigama of Jos will be visiting the NW in early November to help spread the news about the ACN Religious Freedom Report. The report will be launched formally in the House of Lords on Tuesday 4 November (I shall need to buy a new outfit for this…). The Archbishop will speak there and then head to Scotland for an event on Wednesday 5 November at the Gillis Centre in Edinburgh (6:30pm). Scottish Lorraine will put the Archbishop (presumably exhausted by this point!) on a train for Lancaster on Thursday morning. He will spend the next two days in the North West. I am just now firming up the details of an event in Manchester. Full details will be provided as soon as I have them (and you will be the first to know!); please try and come if you can—Archbishop Kaigama is a great man and a wonderful speaker. I met him in Malta in May and he spoke about his hard work in his native Nigeria and his firm belief that dialogue between various religious communities is the way forward.

I have had 1.5 days off this week (shocking, I know!), so this entry is short (and ‘sweet’ enough, I hope!), because I’ve got a lot to get through before I finish up my week’s work. Believe it or not, I have managed to complete (more or less) the tasks I set for myself in my entry for this past Monday—I am still waiting for the designer for Prayers from our Hearts to return from a week’s holiday and I have begun, but not completed, my plans for my appeal in Penrith. Otherwise, I am on target; I am feeling quite proud of myself actually. Next week I have a full working week planned, so I intend to rest up over the weekend!

One final thought/request for you: there is so much going on in the new NW Office that I am thinking about expanding my ‘staff.’ I am thinking of ‘interviewing’ a new puppy for the position; I am particularly interested in a border collie as this breed is well-known for its keen intelligence and, let’s face it, with Jassy, my head of security, regularly falling asleep on the job and Rosie, the would-be cleaner, lounging in her litter box, I could use an assistant with a bit of nous around here. The only problem is that the current favourite in the name sweepstakes is….Wanda. Now I have nothing against the name Wanda (I’m sure that there are lots of Wandas out there who are living happy and fulfilling lives), but I was hoping to convince everyone here to go for something rather more ACN-friendly, a saint’s name at the very least. Any suggestions? Please feel free to let me know!

Thanks for reading!  Caroline

I mustn’t let this all go to my head.

I thought that I was handling all of this new media coverage very well until I found myself sending a very good friend of mine an email with “I am famous!” entered in the subject line. Admittedly, this was on the same day that a feature on me and the NW Office appeared in the Catholic Times, I spent the afternoon answering questions as I was interviewed for the Lancaster Voice and I received a number of emails from colleagues congratulating me on the Catholic Times feature. I suppose one could charitably say that it was natural for me to have got a bit carried away by all of this; my much-lamented late grandmother, however, would instead have pointed her long, bony finger at me and reminded me—very firmly—that this is not about ME. And, as always, she would be right. It is a new, humbler ‘me’ that begins another exciting week as the NW Manager for ACNUK. Who knows what the coming days will bring!

This is not about me...

For this very brief period of time—maybe for the first hour or so of a Monday morning—I can feel as if I have some semblance of control over the week ahead. I have a plan for what I need to accomplish and a rough idea of how I shall allocate my time. From about 10am or so, that generally pretty much goes to pieces. Round about then the phone will ring or an unexpected email arrive or, and this is completely my own fault, I will have one of my ‘ideas.’ Any of these scenarios is likely to knock at least Monday’s schedule for six, and sometimes even the shape of the whole week can change. I’m sure that you know what I mean—this is something that we all experience in our lives (except possibly  for the ‘wacky idea’ scenario; I am starting to notice that other people might not be entirely taken over by strange ‘ideas’ quite so regularly as I am…). Anyway, I am thinking that the key to a really effective working strategy is to find the balance between what you NEED to do and what COMES UP during the course of the day. I suppose that there are various ways that people do this. Some will naturally lean so far to one side or the other (that is, the ‘NEED to do’-ers vs the ‘let’s see what COMES UP’ types), that the desire for balance doesn’t really exist. For most of us, I suspect, a balance is necessary just to get a job done. So, we rigidly stick to the timetables we create in our diaries (and the fear of losing said diary thus haunts our dreams because our working life would shut down irretrievably) or we handle tasks each day in a pre-determined order or we purposely turn off our mobiles and stop checking emails in order to concentrate on a single task for an hour or two. I try to do all of these things (really I do!), but to be honest I just can’t manage without the element of the unexpected. I live for it…in my world every new email or phone call or tweet or knock on the door offers the potential for a new beginning, that tiny spark that sets an exciting fledgling project on its course.

So, my week as it looks right now (at 9:54am on Monday morning):

·        Finalise details for the Joint NW Area Secretaries Meeting on 13 October

·        Source and supply the information requested by the Lancaster Voice as a follow-up to the interview last Friday

·        Finalise details of NW Prayer Vigils for Religious Freedom with the various venues, send these to HQ and create an ‘event notification’ for each one on the new Facebook page

·        Speak to all remaining referees for the five new NW Parish Reps who are ready to be entered on to our system

·        Plan the format and content of the appeal talk that I will be giving at St Catherine’s at Penrith in early October

·        Hammer out the last few remaining glitches in my new media platforms (does one ‘hammer’ glitches…? I’m not sure)

·        Meet with the designer to get design specs sorted for PRAYERS FROM OUR HEARTS; this is the final hurdle and then we are ready to go with this initiative

·        Schedule a few meetings for later this month—with Farid Georges’ team, with Simon Caldwell about the NW press campaign for Religious Freedom and the Prayer Vigils and with a long-time benefactor in the Fylde to whom I promised tea and cake back in July.

Ok: What is written is written. Let’s see just how well my actual working week matches up with the above. There goes the phone…

Thanks for reading!  Caroline

The North West Office Goes Live!

What I look like on the internet...

 Hurray! Yippee! This blog is now live. This means, I hope, that shortly my readers will include a great many more of you ACN benefactors out there; up until now I could only number among my readers a small (but devoted) following at ACNUK HQ and the occasional teenager staring over my shoulder as I typed. But no longer! From today this blog is available to all sorts of interested, and no doubt interesting, people. Everyone can now keep up with the current situations regarding the persecution of Christians in Iraq, Gaza and elsewhere as I highlight them in my posts; you can learn about the various events and initiatives that I am putting in place for the Catholic community in the North West and North Wales; there is even lots of insider information about the day to day activities that go on in the NW Office with my volunteer ‘staff’ of my family and household pets. What’s not to love?

What I actually look like...

AND it isn’t just about my blog going live—oh, no—you can now follow the NW Office on Facebook and Twitter. We are bang on trend here in my dining room. Please consider ‘liking’ the NW Office on Facebook and following us on Twitter. This will help to encourage me through those first dark weeks when I shall only have 2 ½ followers and I’ll begin to believe that even my immediate family members haven’t signed up to be my friends on Facebook (oh, yes—I have been here before). If I can get through this lonely initial patch, I will be just fine because I DO have friends and people WILL be interested to find out about what is going on, and new friends and followers ARE out there; they just don’t know it yet. (I’ll be repeating that last sentence over and over in my head for the next few weeks.) Details for accessing my blog, Facebook and Twitter for the NW Office appear at the end of this entry (but you must promise not to skip this next bit in your rush to follow me…).

 

September will be an extremely busy month here in the NW Office—though this is nothing compared to what I hear is going on at HQ! All of ACNUK is gearing up for the annual Westminster Event (11 October), which once again will feature an array of well-informed speakers giving personal witness to the discrimination and intimidation of the Christian community in their various countries. (Tickets are £10 and can be ordered from the NW Office or HQ). I know that this is a long way for us, but it will be worth all of the travel—I’ll be helping out on the day, so I may see some of you there! Early in November we’ll be launching our Religious Freedom Report in the House of Lords, with follow-on events in Scotland and throughout the North West (which is why you need to be following the NW Office on Facebook and Twitter!). PRAYERS FROM OUR HEARTS (yes, still in caps!) is nearly ready to go, so shortly I’ll be asking you to make sure that your parish’s primary school knows about this initiative—remember, Sister Hanan and the Good Shepherd Sisters are based in Lebanon, but they are dealing every day with floods of in-coming refugees from Iraq and Syria. They really need our help!

Just in case you might be thinking that all of that doesn’t sound challenging enough and I am likely sitting here all day with plenty of time on my hands, I would like to remind you, gentle readers, that I am also working on my project with Farid Georges, a Syrian painter from Homs—more on him shortly—which I plan to turn into an offering for secondary schools—and, over the first weekend in October, I shall be making my very first appeal for ACN (at St Catherine’s in Penrith). Am I scared? No; nervous maybe, but not scared. I can’t waste my time being scared—that is selfish when so many people need so much help and I have a chance to facilitate this (even in a small way). September… to some it summons up lazy days as summer wanes and things slowly start to speed up again; to me it means JUST ONE MORE MONTH until things really blast off!

I’d like to close this blog by thanking all of those ACN benefactors, old and new, who have answered our bishops’ call for prayers and donations for displaced and suffering Iraqis. This week  I have been notified of two more unsolicited donations from parishes in the North West: a big thank you to the priests and parishioners of Our Lady of Grace in Prestwich and the Cathedral Parish of St Peter & St Thomas More in Lancaster!

Link to the ACN NW Office Blog: www.acnnorthwest.blogspot.co.uk

Link to us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/acnuk.northwest

Follow me on Twitter: @ACNUK_NW   twitter.com/ACNUK_NW

Thanks for reading!  Caroline

 

The Official NW Office Phone Chair

The NW Office Phone Chair (complete with the NW Manager)

A picture--perhaps slightly out of focus—taken yesterday evening by my son has inspired the title of today’s entry. It is a picture of me talking on my work phone in my sitting room (or perhaps I should say the NW Office ‘Reception Area’.) This is, in fact, where I spend most of the time that I am on the phone despite the fact the NW Office, if you will, is located, as you know, in my dining room.  “Why?” you ask; and this is indeed a fair question. We have already established that I am just a tiny bit eccentric (although I prefer ‘individual’ or ‘unique’ to ‘eccentric’ to be honest), but this actually has nothing to do with endearing personality traits. Instead it has everything to do with signal and connectivity. Hold on a minute while I take off my Office Manager hat and put on my NW Office Head of IT hat.

Let me explain. My house was built in 1840; it is a tall thin town house and the external walls are nearly 2 feet thick (I’m not sure why this was quite necessary, but I can say that in the 14 years that we have lived here it has never fallen down—not even once!—so the original plan is working). My teenagers complain constantly about the internet connection and particularly about the mobile phone signal which appears to vary not just from floor to floor, but also from room to room. Maybe the whole rest of the world has to deal with this sort of thing as well. If so, they certainly do keep quiet about it; someone on the ACN resident ‘team’ is complaining about it pretty much all the time, I must say.

Anyway, what this means is that I have to make and receive calls on my work phone in the Reception Area where, naturally, I prefer to sit in my favourite seat—which I feel is more ‘managerial’ than the rest of the seating. It has the added bonus of being ever so slightly uncomfortable so that, at times of peak usage of the reception area, it is the seat least likely to be occupied by a sprawling teenager playing a video game or a sprawling cat or dog doing absolutely nothing at all. It is from this chair that I conduct two of my favourite ACN tasks: phoning up new potential parish representatives and receiving donations from benefactors. Both of these activities allow me to make personal connections with new people. Generally these are ACN supporters who live in the North West or North Wales, so I may get the chance to speak to them again or even to meet them at a future event. This week I have spoken to six ACN benefactors and contacted seven new parish reps (all of the reps courtesy of Chris Robson, Area Secretary for the Diocese of Lancaster and truly excellent recruiter of ACN Parish Representatives). I have also spoken at some length to a current parish rep who is looking for new ways to help us within her parish. Each conversation was interesting, informative and even inspiring in its own way. I love this part of my job.

So, the next time you ring the NW Office on the mobile number, if you open this blog entry and stare at the picture, you can experience a virtual visit to the NW Office Reception Area…just don’t expect things to be too tidy—remember, I am still looking for a volunteer cleaner!

Thanks for reading!  Caroline