Category Archives: Church

My parish church,
St. Andrew’s, Saratoga, has been offering an inspiring series
of Wednesday night soup suppers during this Lenten season. Please come join us for the final Wednesday Soup Supper, on 19 March. We will
be watching the excellent feature film

The Girl in the Café.

I have attended all but one of the series. Even though some of the topics
have been disturbing to hear about, the large room has been almost
full each time. We gather in the Center at 6 pm, collect our soup,
bread, water, and cookies, then sit down at round tables to talk.
After about half an hour of visiting, we watch a
Bullfrog Life film and hear a
speaker.

The topic of each evening has been one or more of the
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The Millennium Development Goals are a framework world leaders have agreed upon to reduce poverty and improve lives. These eight goals offer a vision of what we want to achieve to address the challenges facing the world today. The national
Episcopal Church and our
own Diocese of El Camino Real have
each endorsed the MDGs. I wrote about the MDGs in my
January 26, 2007 blog entry. The eight goals are:

1. Eliminate Extreme Poverty
2. Achieve Universal Primary Education
3. Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women
4. Reduce Child Mortality
5. Improve Maternal Health
6. Combat HIV/AIDS, Malaria, and Other Diseases
7. Ensure Environmental Sustainablity
8. Develop a Global Partnership for Development

In addition to the Wednesday Soup Suppers, each Sunday sermon during
this Lenten season has been structured around the MDGs. St Andrew’s has
also used the MDG Litany from the Bread of Life as part of the Sunday
service. Linda Rogers created a new MDG banner and there is a table
display of MDG information from Episcopal
Relief and Development (ERD) on colorful cloth from Africa.

Here is what we have heard so far at St. Andrew’s Wednesday Soup Suppers:

• UNCSW 2005 – Melita Thorpe spoke on her experience as an affiliate representative to the United Nations 49th Session and the Millennium Development Goals. Melita is a member of the CSW (Commission on the Status of Women). She has made 17 trips to Africa and carrying medical supplies, visiting the AIDS ward in the Nairobi hospital, talking to women about their situation in Zimbabwe, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi.
• Jean Hankey spoke on MDG Goal 1 – Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; Goal 2 – Achieve universal primary education; and Goal 3 – Promote gender equality and empower women. Jean is co-chair of the Women Helping Women group at St. Andrews. The group brought handmade note cards to sell as a fund raiser.
• Dr. John Watson-Williams & Melita Thorpe spoke on Goal 4 – Reduce Child mortality & Goal 5 – Improve maternal health. John spoke from his experience treating Malaria in Africa. He also presented research data about the effect of Malaria on maternal health.
• Dr. John Watson-Williams & Jean-Claude Gigot spoke on Goal 6 – combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other preventable disease. Jean-Claude spoke of his
  experiences working to combat disease in Cote d’Ivoire.
• Bruce Friesen spoke on Goal 7 – Ensure environmental sustainability & Goal 8 – Develop a global partnership for development.
  
  Bishops Blend Coffee was served and everyone was sent home with a sample. ERD is offering Bishops Blend, Pura Vida’s premium line of Certified Fair Trade, organic, and shade-grown coffees from Central America and Indonesia. Purchases of Bishops Blend helps ERD meet needs worldwide.

Melita wrote in her notes on these suppers: “It is hoped that by sharing our hopes and concerns for a world in which our Christian faith calls us to action, we helped our congregation engage in these issues in our own context as well as globally. Together, we can work toward creating a world where all God’s people may flourish. Katy, I cannot speak for the others but I am happy to help facilitate a program on the MDG’s with any congregation.”

I have been adding to the new SAMA
(St. Andrew’s Medical Assistance) web page:
4 more middle eastern recipes plus auction items donated for the 13 April Middle
Eastern Feast. The dinner for raising funds to support SAMA’s medical outreach programs
will be: Sunday, 13 April 2008 at
St. Andrew’s Episcopal
Church, 13601 Saratoga Avenue,
Saratoga, CA.

SAMA published a small cookbook called “Favorite Middle Eastern Recipes” in 1998.
It is now out of print. The new recipes I just added to the
SAMA webpage are:

SAMA Favorite Middle Eastern Recipes

• Tabooli
• Chicken and Rice Soup
• Shorabat Addas (Lentil Soup)
• Split Pea Soup

I will add more recipes as I get them typed in. I also added a new web page
section listing auction items donated so far:

SAMA Auction Items

16-inch colorful ceramic fish platter by artist Carol Worthington Levy

Backgammon Instruction (Basic or Advanced) – training certificate for one hour for up to four people, plus rules of the game

Brunch on a private 1916 historic railroad caboose (Western Pacific Feather River Railway WP668) in Willow Glen, San Jose

Middle Eastern Dinner for Six

Update your collection: Convert 10 Long Play Albums or 10 Audio Cassettes to CD Audio Format

Images Copyright 2008 by Katy Dickinson and Sami Asfour

On Tuesday (5 February), we held a Shrove Tuesday pancake supper and race at
our parish, St. Andrew’s
Episcopal Church in Saratoga, CA. The Pancake Race
is one of our family’s favorite church festivals and we helped manage the event
in partnership with St. Andrew’s amazing Youth Group.
My daughter Jessica was sad she could not join us this year (she is at Carnegie Mellon
in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania). She wrote out her

“How to run a Shrove Tuesday Pancake supper and race” instructions in case
anyone wants to hold their own pre-Lent celebration. (She said last night that this
has been her most popular blog post so far!) John and I sent Jessica our notes on
this week’s event and she wrote an

update blog entry today. For those who don’t know

Shrove Tuesday from
Mardi Gras, read
The Unofficial Olney Page for one version of how the famous tradition got started
in 1445 in Olney, England.

Here are some photos from St. Andrew’s grand event. As you can see, we had
races between little kids, older kids, teens, and mixed groups. All the racers
won a strand of sugar beads (which also were the table decorations).

Youth Group Cooking Pancakes

Cooking Pancakes

Cooking Pancakes

Eating Pancakes

Laura Announcing

John Coaching Little Racers

Pancake Race

Cooks Race

Cooks Race

Pancake Race

Pancake Race

Pancake Race

Pancake Race

Pancake Race

Pancake Race

Pancake Race

Sugar Beads

Images Copyright 2008 by Katy Dickinson

SAMA – St. Andrew’s Medical Assistance – is an outreach program of
St. Andrew’s Episcopal
Church. Today, the SAMA committee had its second meeting in 2008
to prepare for the SAMA fundraising dinner (to be on Sunday, 13 April
2008 at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, 13601 Saratoga Avenue,
Saratoga, CA.) There will be Middle Eastern food and an auction. I am
in charge of event publicity.

My first effort was to create the SAMA web page, now available at
http://st-andrews-sama.org.
As the newest member of the committee, I am still learning about the
program’s 14-year history of raising money for charitable medical
programs in the Holy Land and Africa. Other SAMA committee members will
send me photos, recipes, and text for the web site. For now, I put
up the pictures I took at last month’s Christian Palestinian craft sale.
(The same photos I posted on my

4 Dec 2007 blog entry.) I am looking forward to working on the
13th April fundraising event and SAMA.

At the end of 2007, I was touched and honored to be invited
to the annual awards service for

Mision Cristo Rey, a Spanish-speaking congregation in Watsonville,
CA. Cristo Rey was one of the missions of the
Episcopal Diocese of El Camino Real with which I worked
when I was Convener of the Department of Missions (2003-2007).
It was a triumph when, through the efforts of a great many
dedicated supporters, Cristo Rey was finally

welcomed into union as a diocesan Mission at the October 2007 convention.
The plaque is “For the great effort on helping us become a mission. Thank you
– we will always remember your hard work!”

Rev. Mario Macias Hauttecoeur at Mision Cristo Rey

Rev. Mary Lou McKenney, Padre Mario, and me

Plaque from Mision Cristo Rey

Images Copyright 2007 by John Plocher and Katy Dickinson

During the last two weekends, I helped SAMA –
St. Andrew’s Medical Assistance –
in their annual sale of goods from the Holy Land. SAMA supports several medical
programs in the Holy Land, including the

Ahli Arab Hospital (the only Christian hospital in Gaza) and the
Four Homes of Mercy (based in Jerusalem).
Many of the crafts we were selling were created by Palestinian Christians.

On my two trips to Israel (in 1979 and in 2006), I purchased many crafts
like those we were selling. In fact, our olive wood nativity set at home is now richer
by three angels and two camels from the SAMA sale. Here are some photos:

SAMA Tile

Ahli Arab Hospital

Bishop Riah Abu-Assal

Holy Land goods for sale

Jerusalem tile

SAMA Donation Certificate

Palestinian cloth crafts

Palestinian puppets

Palestinian puppets

Palestinian cloth crafts

Olive nativity set

Olive nativity set

Silver and Gold crosses

Liz at the sales table

Holy Land goods for sale

Olive wood carvings

Images Copyright 2007 by Katy Dickinson