Tale of the Traveling Tea Cups
Where Did It Begin?
Let’s start where they end!
One agenda item for our UMM (Uganda Medical Mission) 2019 was to host a “Special Tea Party” for all the ladies who had started to work on the sewing projects which was being spearheaded by Wings for Women, an NGO dedicated to helping empower women and girls through education, business training and healthcare initiatives. We had invited close to 100 ladies from 5 surrounding villages in the district of Mukono to join us for start-up business training, breaking bread (no gathering of gals is complete without food) and bonding. We wanted to hear their stories and I do know they like hearing about ours too.
In all my worldly travels one thing is certain when it comes to women, we all experience the same struggles, subjection and joy in so many aspects of our lives. The remote villages of Uganda are no different, feeding the kids who are not always yours, finding a way to support yourself, keeping safe from harm, these are major concerns for the women in Uganda. Also, finding good health care is almost impossible given their remote locations and the cost associated with obtaining it.
The ladies from the sewing clubs are at various stages of training and production of their “creations”. They have been provided manual sewing machines, material and tools for the trade, and those with a motivation to learn, grow and pursue excellence in a new profession. We can see a financial success after only 2-years of funding these projects.
Now let’s get back to the tea cups. For the special tea party, I packed 14 cups and saucers of Fine English China that were mostly Royal Albert, plus a few random, very old, extravagant examples of “tea time” decadence. Lot’s of bubble wrap and snuggled amongst socks, soft cuddle toys from my nephews kids, and some silk flowers to accent the tea cups as table decorations. After all, I knew we would need at least 10 tables for the tea party. That meant 10 displays for the ladies to visually enjoy. Our well-laid plans were all put in “go with the flow” mode as soon as we arrived at the church hosting the event, First Presbyterian Church of Ntenjeru. It did not matter that we arrived early because none of the tables were in the sanctuary, the invited ladies had already started to arrive 2- hours early, and understanding when you are doing anything in this sort of capacity in a third-world country, you have to give it up to God and not get stuck in the details (lesson learned Lisa)!
While we waited for the tables to arrive I had to encourage the ladies to get up out of the plastic lawn chairs they were sitting in and enjoy the small table and wall displays of a couple of the sewing clubs, showing off their creations. Shirts, dresses, children school uniforms, and the big commodity was the AfriPads! Once they got moving, it was refreshing to see the barriers dropping and the chatting amongst villages and different tribes. Women just doing what we are so good at – talking! This also gave the Wings For Women team time to unpack and decorate the tea cup centerpieces.
The tea cups were housed for so many years in my mothe’s beautiful Danish-teak china cabinet. It was a classic piece of furniture that housed so many of my mom’s treasures. Ester Sorensen taught me so much about entertaining and making a beautiful presentation for your guests. She had very little to work with, but saved money religiously to purchase beautiful silverware and had a pretty large collection of crystal glasses and Danish serving platters. When we had family gatherings in the Scandinavian tradition I was raised, your table and presentation spoke a lot about the person you were and how you cared for your guests. The food of course was always prepared like masterpieces of gastronomic perfection.
I believe she started collecting the tea cups when I was a little girl growing up in Keswick, Ontario. My fathers various adventures and occupations, although always organically moving, afforded us a comfortable and loving household. I never went hungry unless as punishment for misbehaving! It was often well deserved for me to have to go to my room and miss dinner. That’s just the sorta gal I was!
The memories of helping my mother prepare the grand Danish buffet meals and dressing the table with all the meals necessary paraphernalia will forever make me smile. I recall also that the finishing touches of a beautiful coffee/tea cup and some amazing dessert was the ultimate end of a multi-course meal. Even when family or friends of my Mom’s would just pop-in for a visit, a cup of tea in the fine china was always part of the routine. There was no saving them for the special occasions. Everyone deserved to drink in the special tea cups.Â
I would have to speculate these tea cups first traveled from their inception in England to the retail stores in Ontario that my Mom found them during the 1950s to 1970s. Then fast-forward from Canada to Florida in 2017 when my Mom, Ester Christina Sorensen, had to give up living alone at 96 years of age. That’s not to say the teacups did not travel many different places within Canada during the course of their tenure there. My Mom and Dad moved many times that I can remember. At one point when I was 15 years old and we were immigrating to USA, I was making my 8th move with my parents. Considering the fact that I spent the first seven years of my life in one home, there was a lot of transition over the next several years. Needless to say, I am a very good packer today. After minimal discussion of what to do with these dishes, I knew I just couldn’t send them to Goodwill or Salvation Army right away. So, over a course of several trips back and forth from Florida, Ontario, Florida, the set of tea cups traveled to America during 2017-2018.
Those and numerous other treasures sat in boxes and suitcases for several months in our guest room in Florida. It was becoming one of those burden’s after watching Marie Kondo’s suggestions of asking, “where’s the joy” coming for me and these tea cups. It was kind of an organic transition from holding on to these treasures to remember my Mom, her mentoring me in being a hostess with the mostest, to wanting the joy of sharing these memories with some beautiful ladies in Uganda at a special tea party.
During May 2019 the teacups traveled delicately transatlantic, stuffed between bubblewrap, clothing, silk flowers and paper doilies; Ft. Lauderdale, Florida to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, with a brief layover and then on to Entebbe, Uganda. The necessary 2-hour car ride to Mukono City to be unpacked in preparation of the Tea Party could have been deadly for the tea cups. Having a back tire of the van we were in almost totally fall off, could have resulted in a potentially life threatening encounter for all of us. The vehicle we were in apparently didn’t go through security or safety checks because there were no tire bolts visibly holding the wheel in place just 15-minutes from our pick-up at the airport. All I can say is that God was totally protecting those tea cups and us to make sure they made it to the party in one piece.
The Day of the Event
It was a Friday, and the event was to have been “published” locally to the women in the communities who had, or were too commence in the sewing projects. We had extended the invitation to a few others, specifically some women who were being considered for ‘Business Grants‘. Three years ago we had an event at the same church and inquired of the ladies what their needs were and where they felt significant support could be developed. One of the recurring modalities was through sewing.
Â
Ntenjeru Church was the hosting village where the first sponsored sewing club started. It was well received 2-years ago and it was something the ladies had been asking for years, a way to become self-supporting. Through a collaboration of Word inDeed Ministries and funding from a few women with sewing hobbies in USA, we were able to start by providing 10-manual sewing machines, tables for working and supplies like zippers, threads, buttons and material to start some projects. We established a sort of protocol, totally “will this work” mentality. Now that we have 4-Villages with sewing clubs, the momentum is excitedly perpetuating.
I was fortunate in 2018 to participate in the graduation ceremonies for the first sewing club. It was quite an event with all the ladies who completed the course dressed in graduation gowns like you would wear during a university graduation. There were village leaders and pastors giving speeches and official diplomas were handed out. Given that ‘gift-giving’ is one of my love languages, I put together small gift bags for each of the women with a small sewing kit, scissors, notebook, pens, and a Lugandan, King James Bible. Of course no graduation is complete without cake, so we had some of that also. For the community in attendance at the graduation, it was a visual acknowledgement of positive transformation and equipping these women. They now had skills to use to support their families.
Graduation 2018 First Sewing Club receives diplomas and a ceremony with cake and gifts.
Who Gets The Tea Cups?
The decision to give out the tea cups was one I felt very excited about. I knew the ladies who would be gifted the tea cups would cherish them as much as my Mother did. A fine, English Bone China cup & saucer like these don’t make it to remote villages in Uganda on a regular basis, so I was very confident they would be regarded highly and preciously.
Some of the ladies I had come to know over the past few years during my mission work in Uganda had also come to know of my mother, Mamma Ester she was lovingly called, because she had been knitting cotton wash cloths for the ladies for several years. My Mom had lots of time on her hands during retirement in Florida, and she earnestly wanted to participate in making things like the wash cloths for the ladies I would be meeting during my mission trips.
There is in a video from 2013 (https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=lH8L2t2Mv60) which my Mom shares her little story about making the wash cloths. It makes me smile every time I watch it.
Knowing that there would be so many ladies at the event who would want to take the cups home, I realized I would have to come up with a special way of making them a prize for one person sitting at each of the tables at the event. After the training and during the time of fellowship when all the ladies were eating I addressed them with microphone in hand and translator by my side.
I told the ladies the story about the tea cups, coming from my Mom from Canada to Florida and now here to Uganda. I explained that they meant a lot to me and that the value was so much more than the cup itself, it was because of the history and the value they had to my Mother that made them so very important to me. I also explained that my Mom would be soon turning 98 years old and was not able to look after herself anymore and was living in a special home where she was getting attended to for the needs she now had at the ripe-old age she was. I then asked that the oldest lady who was sitting at each table to please stand up so we all could acknowledge them. First there were some laughs and then the glances as the ladies looked at each other. Some tables you could see that they wondered, ‘Am I older than her?’ Other tables you could hear some discussion, and the truth is most of the people out in these villages don’t know the dates of their birth because the record keeping of such things is not done, even today. Women give birth and often the history of their children are never memorialized, even to the extent of knowing who the birth parents are. It’s a sad testimony to the village-tribe culture and the lack of value in information like birth statistics.
Eventually the ten ladies were standing and I asked everyone to applaud them for their participation in the sewing clubs and told them these would be the ladies who could take home the tea cups that were in the center of each table. There was even more applause and the traditional chanting in the high pitched squeal that the ladies do to show their excitement when each of these ladies reached for their treasure. So, the elderly ladies in our group were the ones who received the cups in honor of the elderly lady who once owned them.
This is the tale of the traveling tea cups.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 22nd, 2019 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Uganda. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.