The limits of patience

While today was nominally a work day, I took two hours out of the middle to run errands. First up, a trip to an industrial site in Dunmurry, where I collected maybe 20 bags of food for a refugee agency. Second, I called in at a pet store to get cat food and cat litter. Third, the refugee agency.

The pet store is in a row of big stores (Marks & Spencer’s, cookery store, fitness store, etc). Six stores served by a long, narrow strip of a parking lot wedged between the stores on the south and the very busy Boucher Road on the north. The wizards of Belfast decided to put all the big chain retailers on one road in Belfast -- car dealers, nurseries, furniture stores, flooring, tile, kitchen design, Laura Ashley, etc. To exit my pet store parking lot, I have to wait in a queue that gets me into the only exit lane. That lane lets you into a road that is perpendicular to Boucher. The perpendicular road, filled with lorries, backs up, meaning the car park exit lane backs up. There are traffic jams to get into and out of this parking lot. This is not unusual in Belfast. I attribute poor parking lot design to a culture that is more dependent on public transport and less in thrall to private cars, bless them.

I left that lot in a very bad mood. After dropping the bags of food at Nicras, I had to sit through a lot of traffic lights to get through downtown Belfast and home. Poor me, right? I tried to offset my irritation by feeling humbled by my spending. Cat food is outrageously expensive here. Today I spent around $37 for 9 pounds of cat food. No, $74 for 18 pounds (and that was on sale). Plus another sum for cat litter. Had that money been directed to refugees, it could have gone a long way to feeding people who the government is leaving to fend for themselves (those who have been approved get a stipend, those who haven’t depend on charity--most refugee and asylum seekers are rejected).

So I was rather self conscious when Justin, a refugee from Cote d’Ivoire, helped me lug baby formula and cereal into Nicras’s cramped office--while my cats get an expensive brand of food (cheap food causes vet visits b/c our little cat gets constipated). The Nicras people are very grateful for my help, which is just embarrassing. Justin offered to pay me for my work on the annual report for the women’s project--apparently he got a grant to cover producing the report. I said to put the money toward helping his clients.
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