Sunday’s off: A great day with amazing people!
"Does the bus to Paphos start
here?"
I did not expect that asking this question was going to lead me to a
heart-touching experience with such wonderful people.
So here I was at 6pm after a day of walking around the northern part of
Nicosia with a halumi and a falafel from an Armenian take-away in my hands waiting
for the bus to take me back to Paphos.
I ask the woman next to me if this
is the station for the bus to Paphos and because we had different timetables,
which we thought was funny we started talking. Somehow, this lead to a very
deep conversation about our lives and aspirations. This is how my friendship
with Perlita started.
Perlita was working that day in
Nicosia, taking care of a baby, and had to come back to Paphos to work at her other
employer’s house on Monday. But on Sunday she was going to church and she
invited me to join as well. What a great way to spend a Sunday: learning about
other cultures, other worlds while singing, laughing and making amazing
friends!
So on Sunday at 10:40 (we were a
bit late), Stevie and me entered the church. We joined the circle and then from
the first row which was reserved for us, we sang along.
During the service between laughs
and cries, we all remained cheerful and looking ahead. We talked about why we
felt blessed and what we had to overcome. This was the moment of the week to
reflect on what we have and what is given to us in our lives. On the way back
from Nicosia, Perlita told me how tired she felt, and during the service more
people explained how tired they felt. That did not make any shadow with the
positivity and view forward, the majority of the songs were about how blessed
we all were and about how thankful we ought to be, something that I found inspiring
considering the huge amount of work my new friends put in their lives to help
their families go to university and have a better life.
After the service ended, we had a
delicious Filipino meal ranging from soups to many other dishes with all kinds
of different ingredients.
At around 5 we had some delicious
Filipino Halo-Halo (a refreshing Filipino dessert).
I rarely felt so welcomed by a community
and I could not believe how much we got to know each other during one day.
A day before, I would have thought that my life and the life of a Filipino
woman in Cyprus would be tremendously different, now it is easier to point at
the similarities than at the differences. At moments we were all sharing our amazement
that we only met that same Sunday, when it felt like we knew each other for
many years.
We shared so much in common that it
was unbelievable that we seemed from a societal perspective so distant. I think
that what makes us look so different is a result of the effect of where our
passports are printed. My new friends were highly educated and we shared a
curiosity to learn more about the world, from politics, language, religion,
personal boundaries, family, and openness to others in a way I had not experienced
in a long time. Yet the fact that my passport was printed in Europe and my friend’s
passport was printed in the Philippine’s were influencing their freedom and
opportunities to a large extent in ways that I could not have imagined. One
engineer told me that she had read the Koran and practiced the Muslim prayers to
better understand the differences between the two religions. As she told me,
they are actually very similar! That serious commitment to understanding the ‘other’
was another big inspiration to me.
On Friday Dr. Yiannis Papadakis had
given us a tour around Nicosia where he explained to us that the Cypriot ignored other societal issues, one of them being the working rights
of maids. Papadakis explained that Sundays is the only time maids meet on their
employer’s roofs for a chat. Although the Filipino Independence Day is on the
12th of June, in Nicosia it is celebrated on Sunday the 18th, because the other
days the vast majority of Filipinos from all over Cyprus have to work.
Perlita said she was tired. Many
people at church said they were tired. This Sunday motivated me to rethink how
I want to use my time, do I want to have a lot of free time for my leisure or
do I want to work on things that can contribute to a fairer and more open
society for all of us?
For now, I will come to enjoy
Perlita’s wedding soon.
Video of part of the service (by Perlita): https://www.facebook.com/100008653029359/videos/1749438995354518/
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