A Tribute to Joseph Federer

Who we are is determined by many things: who are parents are, where we grow up, our experiences, and how we respond to God’s shaping the events and movements of our lives and history. But in spite of our immediate environment, so much of our personality often comes from our ancestors, many of whom we have never met. God puts something in us that we can’t put there ourselves, a unique blending of personality traits from our genes that make us uniquely us. It’s uncanny how you can think you are your own person, but there are character traits about you that keep presenting themselves which you can’t explain.

If someone were to ask “who in your family do you most take after”, I would have to say my grandfather, Joseph Federer, who died in 1980 and whom I really did not know very well at all. Yet ironically many of his same interests, talents and giftedness seem to have resurfaced in me. I would like to dedicate this entry to this man who fascinates me because I find that I am in so many ways like him, yet in so many ways different.

My grandfather was born as Johann Joseph Federer in the town of Berneck, Switzerland, August 3, 1891, he grew up in a huge old timber framed house in Berneck which I had the privilege to visit twice in my life. Berneck is a small village situated in the beautiful, gently rolling hills of the northeastern corner of Switzerland near Germany’s Bodensee and Austria. It is the same village where many notorious Federers have come from, including mayors, poets and Roger Federer, the famous tennis player.

As a teenager my grandfather decided he wanted to be a pastry chef after seeing beautifully decorated cakes on display in one of the little pastry shops in his town. He served an apprenticeship in Paris, where he specialized in cake decorating and sugar sculpture, and became rather fluent in French. Shortly after that he worked for a while in London. But he didn’t learn to speak English until he immigrated at the age of 29 to the United States.

After he died in 1980 at the age of 89, 70 letters were discovered by his family in Switzerland, which were letters he wrote home to his parents, all written in German. These letters reveal many fascinating facts about him, his thoughts, and who he really was. These letters also reveal his motivation to immigrate to America – it was a land of opportunity, and there was high unemployment in Europe.

One of his brothers and a cousin, who were also chefs, had come to America before him, and helped him find as job as a pastry chef in Atlantic City at $100 a month. After two months there, he followed a lead to a better job in Los Angeles, California, which he described as the “land of milk and honey”.

In Los Angeles he worked for two years as a pastry chef for the Ambassador Hotel, where even in tough economic times he was able to hold a job because of his specialized and rare skills in sugar sculpture.

After two years at the Ambassador, he went to work in a pastry shop in Hollywood where his specialized skills were required. At a later time he got a job working as a pastry chef for United Airlines, creating many masterpieces for various celebrities who traveled with the airline. Among our favorite photos is the head chef presenting one of his cakes to Bob Hope.

While in Los Angeles, he met my grandmother, Elizabeth Martin, through the Swiss Society. They had four daughters, their youngest being my mother, Catherine.

Besides having inherited his artistic inclinations, I also seem to have inherited his love of nature and farming. Even though he worked in the huge city of Los Angeles, he mentioned that he once wished he had a job as a farmhand. He kept many close friendships with other Swiss farmers in Southern California, and one of his favorite activities was milking the cows on his friends’ farms, something he knew well from growing up in Switzerland. My mother tells me how embarrassed she was that he tried to raise chickens and grow potatoes right in the middle of Los Angeles. I remember him years later, when he had retired to Arizona, growing citrus trees in his yard, and teaching me how to catch and pin butterflies. Ironically here I am today living in Africa, with a citrus orchard and a huge butterfly and moth collection that I have helped my children to put together.

My mother taught me many cake decorating techniques that she learned mostly on her own, inspired by her father, and I in turn learned a few more. From a young age I have always loved decorating cakes, and I continue to do it for my children and many friends. Even my daughter Katie, who has natural talent, has taken an interest in cake decorating, and was already making pretty decent roses at the age of 8.

Among the family memories we still have of my grandfather are some of his now antique cake decorating tools and supplies, as well as his collection of recipes, many of which are in his own handwriting, in four different languages: German, French, English and Italian. I hope to learn more of his recipes and in some small way carry on the legacy he started, creating the incredible art that he so loved and which brought pleasure to so many people, using the talent and gifts that God put in me, and passing that on to my children.

Holding the family together on a "bad" day

For me a "good day" or a "bad" day is defined most often by my physical health and how few crisis arose. On “good days” I get up early, get in a 15-20 minute quiet time before everyone is up, I am able to cook, do a little cleaning, keep the kids’ homeschooling going, check email, do a little internet browsing, take a walk outside, read stories to the children, get in a little sewing, and relax in the evening watching a tv episode with my hubby. If I’m really lucky, I’ll get a few hours in working on a language project, like the grammar book I have been editing.

But today was not one of those days. Yesterday I forgot to take my thyroid hormone supplement, and didn’t remember till this morning. I have taken a supplement since four years ago when I had a partial thyroidectomy due to three pre-cancerous tumors my doctor found. Whenever I don’t take my supplement, I usually pay for it the next day. Such was the case today. I slept in and didn’t have the energy to get up in time to have quiet time. I got through breakfast and even read the kids a few stories, but then school started. Now for me on a “bad” day, when my thyroid hormone levels are not where they should be, my brain shuts down. If that happens at the same time as any crisis, I’m in trouble. Multi-tasking demands are the first thing to trigger it. It is almost like a switch goes off. Once I am in the middle of one thing, and another thing presents itself, I get confused, forgetful, and suddenly cannot process anything, even the first thing I was doing. That is what happened today. I was doing school with my 6-year-old, when I remembered I needed to make a phone call. While making the phone call, listening to it ring on the other end, my 11-year-old comes to me with a question about how to attach pictures to an email to his friends for an assignment he is writing for school. I look at the clock and realize that it was getting close to lunch time and I hadn’t even begun to think about what to fix for lunch. Suddenly realizing that four things were now presenting themselves which only I could do, I felt tired, weak, confused, and needed to lay down. I did so, realizing that if I didn’t get my “act together”, no one would eat.

This is the interesting dilemma I am sure many a mother faces on a “hectic” day. For me, it is complicated by my hypothyroidism. Some days it just seems that if I can’t keep it all together, keep everything organized, keep everything running smoothely, everything will cease to function, things will come screeching to a halt, everyone will starve to death. I am thankful for my older kids who can help out. So I asked my kids to stop school and, one step at a time, I walked them through turning our leftover cream-of-wheat from breakfast into corn fritters, and making the left-over bread into toast so they could eat something for lunch. I quietly lay down in bed, drank some “triple greens” (which I have found to be brain food), and let my brain recover a little and get past the tangled “knot” in my brain so I could think clearly again.

Then in Guatemala, 2 years later in Africa

I was looking back the other day at pictures of Jim and I when we went to Guatemala 2 years ago to pick up Gabriel, our adopted son, and visit Aisha, our adopted daughter. The pictures reminded me of how small they seemed. Aisha was four years old, and only looked 2; Gabriel was 2, but seemed not much older than 1. I got a kick out of posing a picture of them in the same position as a previous one to show how much they have grown. They are now 6 and 4. It is great to see how much they have grown, and especially the smiles on their faces.

Remembering Christmas 2008

This will be our last Christmas in Africa (that I know of). I have been trying to make it memorable, but it has been a challenge. We came home from five weeks of travel pretty exhausted. We had two days to unpack, clean the house, bake and make all the food for a celebration of nearly 30 missionaries at our home on Saturday before Christmas. We somehow managed to team together as a family and get everything done, including raking most of our 1/4 acre courtyard (our African worker we hired was nowhere in sight for those two days). I tried not to stress about it too much; thankfully all turned out well. The festivities and fellowship were great, and we had some memorable moments with friends, celebrating the season, the blessings, and God's gift to us.

Then the next few days I was so tired I barely had it in me to wrap the gifts that I had saved up and set aside for our kids. Thankfully I had planned way ahead months in advance. I have had to pack up a lot of our home, put things in garage sales (we have had five so far), and narrow down the remaining items that we had brought out ahead of time as gifts for this one last Christmas. I wanted it to be special.

Unfortunately three days before Christmas the president of this country where we live and work died, and the military staged a coup. We were on the internet almost constantly communicating with people, asking for prayers, and monitoring the situation as closely as we could. I found myself even more exhausted. Finally on Christmas Eve after dinner, skyping with family, and taking in all the political events my brain shut down. Ok, I'm not a super mom I guess. Just weary from all the uncertainty, but trying my best to make memories in the midst of uncertainty for my family. But for a brief hour or so while we ate our traditional Christmas dinner in candle light with Christmas music in the background all the other realities faded for a while and the "magic" of Christmas permeated our home. We watched a video reading of the biblical story of Christmas, and sang Christmas carols.

I am thankful for traditions, which bring us together and help us have something familiar to hold onto in unpredictable times. I am thankful for the promise of a future in heaven, a home where we will never have to be in transition and wonder what familiar is.

Today, Christmas Day, we woke to parades and cheers as the local people welcomed the change in government, and glimmers of hope for peace are in sight. Let us cheer together the coming of the Prince of Peace who alone can bring us real peace no matter what is happening around us. May His peace ground us this holiday season, whatever we may be facing.

bread in a pressure cooker

When I first came to Africa 18 years ago I knew that life here would entail baking my own bread at times. I have tried many recipes, but one disadvantage is that it requires using the oven, which in turn uses enormous amounts of gas, which here in Africa is expensive. So I tend to avoid baking bread instead of taking advantage of the opportunity. Many have suggested, "Why don't you get a bread maker?" The answer is simple. It requires electricity. 110 electricity to be exact, something that is not very easy to obtain here in a former French colony where everthing electric is 220, and even though our house is wired for solar and with 110 inverted power, my husband reminds me that appliances with heating elements are not welcome in our home. So I am limited to baking.

Recently on a trip to a remote village to visit another American family who are friends of ours, the wife introduced me to baking bread in a pressure cooker, since she had no oven. Funny, why hadn't I thought of that? I use my pressure cooker to can a lot, especially meat. But I had never thought about bread. So I tried it - it was really quite simple, and saved on gas. I simply put my dough to rise in a metal bowl that fit inside the pressure cooker, rested the bowl in water on several jar lids, and set it to pressure for about an hour. Out came some delicious, non-crumbly, soft bread. Not a bad idea for living non-electric. This could really come in handy for anyone who is camping even on the open fire. Imagine, baking bread on the open fire in the wilderness! It has lots of potential!

On the Road Again

I haven't blogged for a while, since I have been travelling a lot. We just got back from two long trips, one two-week trip in November over 1000 km of rough roads, and then another two-week trip over 800 km of windy mountain roads here in West Africa. Travelling in rural Africa is not a small undertaking, especially with four kids. It seems like we take everything with us - the usual, like clothing, and snacks, and the not-so-usual like air mattresses, extra linens, food for cooking for ourselves for two weeks or several trunks full of fresh produce that we get in the mountains, and are taking to those we are visiting who can't get that kind of thing in their remote villages. We went to visit several American families whose projects my husband helps to supervise, as well as some friends in another remote area for Thanksgiving, and the roads getting there got so bad at times it brought me to tears. Over the past 18 years of living this life in Africa I have developed arthritis in my back which makes these kinds of trips nearly unbearable and requires lots of therapy afterward. It is ironic when I think about it, since when I first came to Africa 18 years ago I was intrigued by the remote places, and longed to venture out into them. My first "bad road" trip in 1991 in which a fellow colleague drove his fossil of a Land Rover over deep potholes as if they were mere cracks, sent me soaring out of my seat and hitting my head on the ceiling over and over - at the time I remember thinking how exhilarating that was, to be "roughing it" in the "African bush". At the time I had the "wanderlust" of my German ancestors flowing freely through my veins, driving me to explore the outermost regions with enthusiasm and a great sense of adventure.

18 years and four kids later, my back arthritic and my tolerance threshold for change and stress pretty low, I endure the roads with all the strength and character I can muster, and crash into bed at night exhausted. The case of ameba and malaria I got on this trip was far from exhilarating. But I did it for the fellowship of good friends, and to say for one last time that I could do it. Now we are finally home for a long stretch after nearly 6 weeks of living out of suitcases, and all I long for is routine, and relaxing at home with my family in familiar surroundings. That will probably be our last "bad road" trip. We will leave Africa next year, and in many ways that was my farewell trip. Africa has a lot of charm and intrigue, but it also can have its toll on you, as it has on me. One thing it has taught me is that I long for my home country, the familiar, the normal, the comfort of home, family, friends and traditions. I have many good memories here, but many bitter-sweet ones too. I now look forward to the journey home.

Why I love to quilt

I am an artist at heart. I love to create things that are beautiful and express what is inside myself through the media of paint, charcoal, cloth, furniture, interior decorating or whatever other medium that I discover. It is one way to express that “thing” that God put within me which shows like nothing else can that little glimpse of Him to the world. I like quilting, not because I like to sew (I really don’t like to sew). I actually hate the tedious steps in the process, the endless, monotonous cutting, sewing of tiny pieces together, and wondering if and when I will ever finish it. Most of my quilts take 2-3 years to finish. But I never wonder why I started in the first place; it is to see the end result, which is always so amazing even to me, that I marvel at the fact that something so beautiful came from my own hands. There is something magic about it. I think all quilters would agree. A think what fascinates us all about a quilt is that in many ways it arouses in us an awareness of some hidden truth. A quilt is a picture of a many faceted unique blend of many parts, in many ways one portrait of all the facets of me, which I discover as I gaze upon the finished product. It is at the same time a depiction of God’s unique multi-faceted nature, His creation, and the body of Christ, each with its unique colors, shapes and personalities, each fitting together perfectly when willing to be cut and sewn according to His will and molding, and without which the whole picture would be incomplete.

I love the story “the Josephine Story Quilt” which I read to my children. In it a pioneer family travels westward, having to leave many things behind, but one thing they have kept with them through the whole journey of their lives is the story quilt, the quilt into which they sewed together over many years all the left-over pieces of cloth from various clothing, drapes, and other items in their past, shaping them into pictures of pieces of the “story” each one bringing back a precious memory. A quilt is also a great gift of love to someone else. It takes time and effort, and is a unique gift, with nothing else like it in the world. How many of us have old, sometimes gaudy quilts that a grandmother made once, but with which we cannot part. It is too precious, too sacred, a reminder of the loving hands of grandma, sometimes all we have left of her life and love. I too want to leave behind traces of myself and my family’s life behind to tell the next generation our story, and reveal to the world the little pieces of God’s truth He has put in us as a testimony to the next generation. Quilting is just one little way I can do that. To most people this sounds crazy. To all you artists out there, I know you will understand.