El Niño cometh
Preacher: Professor Nina Laurie, Professor of Human Geography, School of Geography and Sustainable Development
Readings: Isaiah 35:1-7; Mark 13:24-37
INTRODUCTION
My brother suspects that he is getting a jigsaw puzzle for Christmas. He saw it and picked it up in a shop when my teenage nieces were standing near him. He says that the older one, Daisy, keeps on bringing it up in random conversations. But of course, he doesn’t really know for sure, he will just have to wait and see what arrives on the day. Like most of us I suspect he really just wants a nice surprise – and in part he’s already had that as he is so clearly touched by how much care my nieces are taking over the Christmas preparations this year.
So, taking my cue from them, my question for us today, at the start of this advent season, is how are the preparations going? Are we all preparing to be surprised because: El Niño cometh whether we like it or not! “El Niño” the Spanish word for the child/ the masculine version – the boy – the boy child comes.
However today, I am not going to talk about that El Niño, the one we have all heard about since childhood – ‘baby Jesus meek and mild in a manger’ but the other El Niño, the El Niño Phenomenon, part of the Southern Oscillation, a natural cyclical pattern of rains that occurs every 5-7 years as the sea surface temperatures in the Pacific rise. This El Niño is one of the most powerful factors affecting weather patterns around the world.
While scientists first identified El Niño off the coast of Peru around the 1880s, Peruvian fishers had known about it for millennia. They knew that around December-January every so many years the rich anchovies catch would disappear along with the cool water currents. This is why the phenomenon became known as El Nino because it occurred around Christmas.
For those of you who do not know your geography of South America and Peru the rains normally come from the East across the Amazon basin, when they hit the Andes mountains the clouds rise and drop their rain – the coast of Peru is therefore in ‘a rain shadow’ and dry. During an El Niño year the rains switch and come directly on shore from the Pacific, causing widespread flooding. The dominant image of El Niño in Peru is one of disaster and a mega El Niño is being predicted for the country at the end of this year – everyone is on high alert.
Building a research agenda on El Niño in the School of Geography and Sustainable Development’s at the University of St Andrews
For the last few years now, I have been working with colleagues in the UK and Peru on the impacts of El Niño on desert livelihoods in the northern coast. I absolutely love it –it has been a game changer for me. However the thing that we seldom talk openly about in universities is the role that happenstance plays in our research processes (we talk even less about the role of God in these happenstance moments – but that is another sermon topic that I will leave to Donald and my friends in Divinity).
My happenstance encounter with El Niño started as a chance conversation in a corridor with a physical geography colleague who had just returned from fieldwork in Peru where he had been collecting sediment cores in the Sechura desert, in the north of the country. He was trying to reconstruct the past environment becasue he wanted to establish whether El Niño was becoming more intense with climate change (you can do all sorts of clever things with pollen and shells to do this!). They found themselves in the middle of what the paper maps and google maps told them was a big lake or lagoon but everywhere they looked it was just dry desert. When they asked why some local men told them they used to be fishers and had to turn to farming because the lake dried up. When mu colleague showed me their field site on the map I was very sceptical – I saw a nice line – the Pan-American highway and their location was only a 30 minute drive from the main city. To be honest as a human geographer – expert in social processes – I sort of mocked them as scientists and said that in all likelihood the supposed fishers did a bit of everything on the side including mainly commuting to the city for informal work.
My rebuff was met with the challenge of a visit to come and see for myself!
FIELDWORK AND THE SECOND HAPPENSTANCE MAGICAL MOMENT
Fast forward as year or so there we were in the middle of this same dry hot, desert – sand as far as the eye could see in a 4 x 4 travelling to one of their field sites to take samples. I ahd been spending the previous few weeks in a local newspaper archive trying to piece together the overall story about how El Niño was seen in Peru. Over the course the project we have analysed more than 6000 articles covering the big El Niño events in 1983 and 1998 that caused widespread devastation in Peru. Everywhere where I looked it was a story of destruction, homes washed away, lives lost, crops ruined, transport grinding to a halt for months, fishing collapsing.
El Niño at its worst. No meek mild baby Jesus here.
The local district mayor Sr Angel Pingo came with us on the journey to introduce us to the communities in the desert so that we could explain what we were doing. Along the way I made conversation with him and talked about what I had read in the archives, about the disasters caused when El Niño comes. At that point he turned round abruptly, looked me straight in the eye and said:
“No senorita para nosotros so es ninugun disastser es abudnancia” – No miss it isn’t at all a disaster its abundance. “The desert turns green, there is pasture for our animals and people fish in the big lagoons that appear in the desert”.
Echoing vividly the imagery that my friend and colleague on the El Niño work, Dr Tania Mendo, read to us from Isaiah, one fisher whom I interviewed later on during that same trip said:
“We become joyful when the rain comes because the rivers fill up with water and it fills lagoons with small nursery fish”
Another older farmer added:
“We are happy when it rains!” With El Niño, after the rains pass the soil remains damp, we plant crops, we grow corn, watermelon, beans, we grow everything because with those damp soils we can harvest”.
The chance conversation with the mayor became the second happenstance moment that changed the course of our research completely. Instead of disaster we started to focus on the promise that ‘the desert and the parched lands will be glad’. When we returned for field work soon after an El Nino event in 2017, I saw this with my own eyes. I saw first-hand what living water in the desert gushing forth can do.
NEXT STEPS AND PLANNING
Our research started to focus on how the local knowledge forged over generations is used to manage the desert-El Niño-food systems sustainably. We changed our methods to include oral history accounts, planning to work with school children and their parents and grandparents in a desert community, whose name was ‘Mala Vida’. In Spanish this literally means ‘bad life’ – and conveys the sense of abandonment and stigma that these desert communities live with on a daily basis. And yet we knew that they have an intimate knowledge of the landscape and a deep understanding of how to manage El Niño that has been forged over generations. They know and can predict the benefits that come after the rains as the branches on the desert trees grow tender, much like the fig trees in the passage that Elena (one of our 4th year Sustainable Development students) read to us. They produce syrup and sprout blossoms that support bees for honey. We wanted to help make their voices heard beyond the desert. Our research got traction and funding as we started to explore El Niño as a phenomenon of opportunity.
In the context of climate change it is really important to be able to identify locations and food systems that can be resilient to sudden shock and this we think is potentially one of those. We developed a cool logo to explain our work (which along with our project website where has been reproduced in the order of service) and we were rocking as a team.
Our preparations for El Niño (the gift of the boy child) were in place: We had visited the school and met the teachers (tick), identified the field sites for sediment cores (tick), ordered the field device for monitor changing surface sea temperature (tick). We had done financial due diligence, got ethical approval and the funds had finally arrived in Peru.
We had just rented a house for a year when I returned to the UK for a short visit – and to be honest I was feeling a little bit smug. We were poised and ready. We were fully prepared – it was March 2020 …
And so as you can no doubt imagine, I suddenly found myself swapping the views of the open hot Sechura desert for the Grange Road and higher heating bills in St Andrews. It was devastating news and the months that followed, with almost daily on-line calls with colleagues and friends in Peru made for late nights after a long day of learning how to teach my first years on line in terrifyingly, aptly named module ‘a world in crisis’.
There was much coverage of Peru in the UK media in the early day because British tourists were stranded in Machu Pichu but almost nothing after this as the weeks went on and the death toll rose – it was nearly a year later that it became widely known that Peru was the country that experienced the highest death rate form COVID in the world. Very sadly, one of the early casualties was Sr Pingo – the local district mayor who had accompanied us on our 4×4 journey. Never did the name of the community’ ‘Mala Vida’ and district where it was located – Cristo nos Valga (Chris saves us) and seem so apt and risible. The promise of abundance and singing for joy in the desert seemed very far off.
THIRD MAGICAL MOMENT
It was in the middle of all this pain and suffering that the third magical moment occurred. My Peruvian NGO colleagues suggested that we divert our travel budget to buy computer tablets and data packages for the students in the school. This was no easy task in lock-down but we managed it. And so instead of oral histories being gathered by me and my research colleagues, working closely with the teachers we developed an on-line curriculum to deliver classes on how to conduct oral histories, which we recast with the much nicer sounding name of ‘story telling’.
The students become the knowledge brokers and knowledge producers. They became experts on El Niño, taking photographs and making videos and artwork based on their interviews with the wise elders in their community. I can see the amazing social studies teacher Nancy on-line in a meeting from her kitchen, communicating with two girls on whats app, describing what was on the power point slide as they did not have enough band width to see the video. I hear another with audio explaining that she is speaking to us from the corner of her family’s land, in the chorale where they keep the goats because she had been able to climb the fence to get a signal.
With an advent like spirit, they were all enthusiastically prepared to be ready for whatever would come along, in this case through a dodgy mobile signal.
MY SIGNIFICANT FAITH MOMENT
When Donald asked me, in preparation for this sermon, to think about what has been significant in my faith, and my experience over recent years, I tell you this was that moment. Through their eyes, and in their words I could again see the promise of the desert turning green and the joy and abundance that this can bring. In those dark days students interviewing their older relatives ‘strengthened weak hands, and helped make firm feeble knees’ that were so often poised to give way – mine included.
They sent a clear message to all our fearful hearts “Be strong, do not fear; behold your God will come”.
Parents of those students talk movingly about what it means to them to have their knowledge and know-how valued in this way, by their children, their children’s teachers and by scientists who come from so very very far away – An advent link there if ever there was one!
So, to draw to a close, how are your preparations going this advent?
Are you preparing to be surprised by this wonderful planet of ours,
- by its beauty in the bleakness of short winter days,
Are you preparing during this advent time to receive the new gifts that may be coming your way in terms of friendship, love and community, peace, joy and hope?
I do not say this lightly, I do not want to be trite,
the preparations we make to be ready are necessarily also sometimes about planning for resilience, to protect ourselves from loss and from what we fear is going to be a deluge of anything other than blessing,
but in the mist of this, during the dry times that can feel like a drought in the desert, we can choose to know that it is possible to be surprised in a good way.
Our plans can be swept away, and events and our lives can take a new course as the fig tree branches grow tender and the singing of Christmas carols augur that El Niño is indeed coming.
May we all prepare to be ready for the offer of an outpouring of abundance this advent and Christmas season.
Amen