Ballyclare-Dorsten-Visit

Well ok, let me put some thoughts into my blog then. (I ought to work on the photos of that silver wedding which I photographed the weekend before last but to be having this blog is so much more thrilling, heehee).

Last weekend - and for most of last week - I was not at home. Though in a way I WAS at home, that is: I was in my home-town. Where I no longer live. But I go there occasionally, since all my family are there. Who today are my father, sister, brother and his family.

And my family, and a good many other families in my home-town, which is Dorsten on the northern edge of the Ruhr Area, have maintained friendships with people in Northern-Ireland for many, many years. What first started as a launched reconciliation programme by the BAOR shortly after the war, with the intention to bring the former enemies back together by trying to engage the YOUNG at the time, soon developed into the person-to-person friendship between a pastor of one of the Lutheran congregations in Dorsten and a young Northern-Irish man who switched jobs and became a minister of Ballyclare Presbyterian Church in 1956 (if I get the year right, which I hope I do!). Their friendship already started in 1950, mind you!

And it was in 1952 that a first group of young Dorsten people travelled all the way over to Northern-Ireland (at the time they were Belfast-based, since that Harold Allen, who was to become minister of Ballyclare Presbyterian Church four years later, still was not that), and a second group went in 1959, this time right into Ballyclare, upon invitation of the new new minister Harold Allen. They were hosted with families who belong to the congregation so that they met new friends on a daily-life basis, which sure helped to build good and long-lasting friendships.

In 1960 at last, a first group of young people lead by Reverend Harold Allen came over to Germany, precisely: to Dorsten. And my parents, still young and fairly newly married, with two young daughters, a toddler of 2 and a bit and a baby of some seven months (me :D), decided they would want to be hosts for one of the arriving guests.

That is when they first met James.
He was a tall and lanky youth of 19 years at the time, and from what I heard later, was none too happy with the German food and would only take tea (and thus drive my poor mother up the wall, who felt responsible for his well-being and yet did no longer know what to offer him that he would LIKE! :D)

Right. I don't remember a thing of that visit and we later had other people from Ballyclare stay with us who we became friends with so that when groups from Dorsten travelled to Ballyclare, members of my family would always go stay with our friends, which either were James and later also his wife Mary, or the Davidsons - who had three daughters around our age, so that fitted quite well.

My family would not always only wait for groups from the church congregation to travel over, they also went to go visit and stay with our new friends privately, outside any group trips. And those friends also came over here on their own, just because they felt like travelling over and visiting with us.

Somehow, over the course of time, though, we seemed to be losing touch with James and his new family, and it were mostly the Davidsons we were in touch with, until I travelled to meet my Dublin pen-friend Marie back in 1977. It was from there that I planned to "go North", and everyone was appalled, since "the North" was quite a bit "troubled" at the time. But I was young, determined - and never really experienced any of "the troubles" first-hand at the time (thankfully!), though with my eyes, of course, I did see what was going on and what the border and also Belfast looked like at the time.

It was then that my father said to me on one of my phone-calls home to ask about James and his whereabouts, and since at the time everyone knew everyone else in that church congregation, it was easy to find out where he was, so I could phone him and tell him that I was the baby he once almost let drop from her pram back in 1960 when he had first come to Germany.

He was overjoyed and invited me to his home at once, presented me to his wife and young son of 3 at the time and we have all been back to being the fastest of friends since. Whenever any member of my family now travel to Northern-Ireland, or whenever James and Mary come over to Dorsten, they will invariably stay with us, and it is always a great joy to meet.

And a group of Ballyclare guests is staying in Dorsten right now, as I am writing this, and they arrived last week on Wednesday. And when the itinerary for this visit was being planned, it occurred to our father that maybe it is about time to bring together all the history of this parish partnership which started as early as 1950 and is still going. And he went to collect all the photos he could get hold of, newspaper clippings from all the times in the past, travel journals, letters written which tell about visits etc ... and he sorted it all, scanned -i.e. digitalised- it all, and started to think about how to put it all into a presentation. And that presentation then become one major item on the agenda for the visit for Thursday, 16 August, 7 p.m..

His three children soon came to his help, and in the end my sister decided on what would go into the presentation and what would need to stay out, we devised some of the texts to be spoken while the picture material would be shown in a PowerPoint presentation together, and she devised many of them in German herself, I translated them all into English, for that presentation needed to be bilingual, and our brother put together an as entertaining, albeit long presentation with the help of PowerPoint.

When it was all ready and done, our dad was still apprehensive it might bore people because of its length, but he would not have needed to worry at all. It was a big success. Everyone gave us a big hand, actually we received "standing ovations" in the end, after my sister had read out the German parts and I the English ones, and everyone called it "excellent". Whoa. What a relief, and I believe that who was most relieved was our dad.

In further posts I might put up some photos I took while I was with Mary and James (I went to Dorsten last Tuesday since we had to have a bit of a dress rehearsal then and went back home on Sunday night), which might show some of the other activities, too, such as the guided tour round the centre of town etc. We shall see.