Edmund Rice International

Sometimes an email will arrive on my screen like a breath of fresh air. Daniel Devincenzi, from the City of Beautiful Breezes (Buenos Aires), sent me one with the refreshing title you see above. Isn’t that an idea to move the Edmund Rice Network to work? Colegio Cardenal Newman (yes, he who is moving towards […]

On a flying visit to Auckland, in late May 2009, I had six energising encounters – Hayden Kingdon (religious studies, St Peter’s), Damaris Kingdon (Edmund Rice Network), Sam Drumm (social justice), all at St Peter’s, and the two dynamic communities in Queen Mary Road, the Brothers and the young lay community. The St Peter’s visit […]

In 2006, when I first visited the site of the present novitiate in Bhopal, it was an empty soggy field, with one huge mango tree and a line of magnificent mohu’a trees across it, like shaggy green elephants. Whatever plans I heard, preserving those trees were part of them. It was as if they were […]

Dum Dum Road is one of the most choked arteries in Kolkata’s network, struggling with the traffic running between Dum Dum Station (north end of the Metro) and the airport, plus the usual vendors and commercial centres that line its narrow strip of bitumen. Yet immediately to the west of Dum Dum Road, behind a […]

Chandigarh, capital of two states (Haryana and the Punjab), is a planned city – designed by Le Corbusier, no less, in the 1950s. St John’s College, Chandigarh, shares this inheritance – spacious grounds, tall trees, thoughtful buildings. Fifty years on, we can ask – how far can we plan? The footpaths are so wide the […]

St Mary’s High School, Mt Abu, in Rajasthan, is one of the most beautiful sites for a school in the world, between a deep lake and forested hills (also a Wildlife Sanctuary). Yet, daily, the forest is being pillaged by local villagers, who are chopping it down and selling the firewood in the town below. […]

On the north-east edge of Mumbai, where the seven islands underlying the city merge with the rest of the state of Maharashtra, St Augustine’s High School, Vasai Road, finds itself with room to move. With spacious grounds and some tall trees already established, it stands in marked contrast to the crowded site at Dadar, the […]

As you arrive at Mumbai Airport, you are greeted by a mural depicting, amongst many aspects of Mumbai, a pair of house crows. It is a fitting tribute to some of the hardest working birds in any Indian city, and their raucous croaking is part of urban India’s constant curtain of sound. I arrived in […]

Everybody lives in a watershed, and most of us live in the valley of a large river. Geographers, and many indigenous myths, point to the river as the one that carves the valley, and shapes the surrounding slopes. In Gaillard, we live on the Arve, a word that’s so old the linguists say it pre-dates […]

A lone black kite appeared around Geneva two weeks ago. In many parts of the world (Asia, Africa, Australia), these kites are common, but in this part of Europe they are rare. A special reserve has been created on the Arve River, near Gaillard where we live, to encourage them to nest there. This bird, […]