| Original Message: Re: Could we do a 'Who is who'? |
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Hi here I’m, Greta, a Belgian woman.
I hesitated a long time and finally decided to show a part of me. In 3 weeks I’ll have 64 candles on my birthday-cake, but I don’t feel that number of candles.
Have been collecting my whole live. Already when I only was 6 I putted away antique books, beads, stamps, laces, curtain-ribbon with wooden beads, beaded handbags etc. It was forbidden by my mother to keep rubbish , in her eyes that old stuff was to throw away. My father was different, but he died when I was 5.
1970 I accompanied my husband to Congo, we both worked there for 26 years, We staid 5 years, in the region and the period of the Ebola epidemic, in the real bush, no shop, no telephone, no TV, nothing !
We survived the two pillages 1991 AND 1993 in Kinshasa.
In Kinshasa I had a string with a bell and some beads, a Frenchman was teasing me all the time to get it, but when I buy things I like, I never sell them. Until that time I didn’t know anything about beads, I had masks with beads but didn’t pay attention at the beads properly. It’s only years later that I realised why he wanted my string with beads, he was collecting beads. He never said it.
1996 we moved to Benin, we were guided by a French colleague , and he introduced me in the bead world and Benin was the paradise for finding beads.
2002 we stayed 3 further years in the Rep. of Central Africa, where I didn’t find one single bead. We also had war there. When we staid in the bush, we were only 400 km away from Bangui and I had problems to accept that in Bangui was everything, it was an European Town, with hotels, restaurants etc. Meanwhile we didn’t even have TV of telephone.
When I arrived in 2002 in Bangui it was a big disillusionment everything was destroyed, no more hotels, no more shops it was a little bit more than a village.
Later on we made some others short stays in Burkina, Niger …..
Greta Here I’m with pygmies All rights reserved by Bead Collector Network and its users |
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