From our 23rd May edition
I’VE been down in the big city this week for the Church of Scotland General Assembly.
Wandering the streets of Edinburgh with traffic coming at you from every angle and even a tram (!), you’re reminded of the peace and quiet of the north.
People load the pavements and the noise is all around you. Sirens. Traffic lights telling you that you can cross the road. Shops of all sorts open all hours and cafés, restaurants and bars with all sorts of food on every street corner.
My sister lives at the bottom of Leith and walking up from there to the centre of the town involves a journey up the appropriately named Leith Walk.
You pass Asian shops, Polish shops, even Portuguese. All of which are fascinating. At the top of the Walk there’s a particularly famous Italian shop, but before you get there, on the opposite side of the road there is a little café open early every morning that sells good coffee and anything you might like for breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea and any snacks in between.
I am not normally given to recommending one establishment over another, but if you happen to be in Edinburgh you really do need to go to this particular little place on the said Walk.
Why? Because it’s a reminder of home.
The café is called Embo.
Yep.
I had to do a double take.
Then I thought I’d go in. I needed to know why they’d chosen the name. There was the possibility that it was owned by Emily and Bob and they’d chosen to take the first two syllables from each of their names…
Or maybe they’d simply seen the name somewhere and fancied it.
Using the need for coffee as an excuse, I asked. There were two young women behind the counter – one from Eastern Europe, the other more local. The local said it was her first day.
The other delightful young lady said she thought it was connected with somewhere up north and that one of the staff had been employed because she came from there.
I was just happy to find a connection with home in a noisy, busy city.
The experience made me realise that it’s connections that hit the spot for us. We can hear on the news about the earthquake in Nepal or the conflict in Palestine or the hard time the people in Syria are having and, hearing their stories, we don’t really register.
Once, however, we are introduced to the people, the connections build and the story begins to hit home.
Listening to a minister in Nepal talking about how, when the earthquake started, no one in the church was able to keep their feet and hearing from a Palestinian family having to bear Israeli soldiers taking a shortcut through their home every day (yes, through their home) suddenly brings the news alive.
Putting faces to names, helps.
It might seem sad, but whenever we feel a personal connection with things, they begin to count. These things though, should prompt us with or without that connection. That’s our challenge.
Susan Brown
