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Happy Swiss National Day
August ‘Deluded Custodians’ Challenge
There are several water troughs in our little village. One of my favorites has a line of rubber duckies engaging in a favorite Swiss past time. Talking. Endloser regen. Endlessly talking. Meine Ohren bluten. My ears are bleeding. Alles gut. Es okie dokie.
Here’s where the synchronicity kicks in. I’m sending tons of photos to the family in hell-on-earth Calzoncillos, where they’ve had a horrendous heat wave this summer. The day after I sent one of the duckie pics, my son said he found a rubber duckie in the street in front of their house. Coincidence? I think not. There are very few rubber duckies en Calzoncillos.
by Eve Muyanja
Water is not scarce but it’s hard to get. Every day I carry two ten-litre Jerry cans to the village well. It’s about four hundred meters from home so it’s not too far. In fact, our house is the nearest to the well compared to all the other households that fetch their water from there.
The day after I read Eve’s story, on our walk to the forest, we passed an elderly woman who was carrying two watering cans. I can understand small talk for about the first two minutes — then alles kaputt. Something about Peter’s accent. Her guess was close, considering there are so many dialects in a country one-tenth the size of California. He told her he had been living in the U.S. for 40 years. She nearly did a 180, gently flinging the empty watering cans at her side. I blurted out “Es tut mir leid.” (I’m sorry) I instinctively surmised she was not happy to see an American in her village, but learned from Peter, she was only surprised.
The concept of synchronicity was developed by Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung in the early 1900s. Jung defined synchronicity, as “meaningful coincidences.”
