Wednesday, November 25/2010

Take a walk and discover, on a side street, St. Felix Catholic church. Tunisia is 98% Moslem, and other religious buildings are pretty thin on the ground, almost nonexistant. The church itself doesn't look new, but the very small and plain cross on top of the steeple does appear as if it might have been a recent modification. Could it have been a church - perhaps under the French - and then lost and recently regained its ecclesiastical status? There's a caretaker who explains that he is Moslem, but very poor and with a family, and so he asked the priest for a job. The point is probably more that he is short of money than that he is embarrassed at having such a non-Islamic job. The church is a fair size but pretty plain, and appears to len d its facilities to an evangelical group that worships here as well as the Catholics.

There's an account in the news of an elderly woman in France who was locked in the loo for twenty days, trapped in the windowless room by a lock that jammed and surviving on lukewarm tap water. The sixty-nine year old woman banged on the pipes at night to alert neighbours in the apartment building, but it took them nearly three weeks to be more than annoyed by the disturbance. The most distressing aspect of the story? The description of a sixty-nine year old woman as elderly. Do think it might have helped to bang out SOS in Morse Code. Surely the neighbours couldn't have ignored that. Hope that her loo was larger than ours here. The toilet is an a blue and white tiled room four feet by three, and the only water available comes with the Arabic metal hosepipe provided for paperless cleaning of one's anatomy - unused by us as there is also toilet paper for the heathens. (We do have a very nice sink, tub and shower in the next room).