Why I'm happy to do my bit for building project
I COULD be wrong, but I think I have agreed to walk through Belfast wearing a pair of pink stilettos.
That's if Jenny Williams and Jackie Trainor can find me a pair in size 13.
They're the madwomen from Habitat for Humanity who've persuaded me to go to Romania with them in October, along with 249 other volunteers from Northern Ireland, for Big Build 09, a plan to build 10 houses, including homes for orphans who are no longer eligible to remain in the local orphanage.
Not content with that, they've now somehow convinced me to go along with the scheme of their equally lunatic mate Hazel Alexander-Law to lead a bunch of gals down the Lisburn Road to Victoria Square in August.
The only consolation I have is that Alan Simpson of the BBC has also signed up for it, so at least we'll both look equally ridiculous.
The Blister Sisters, as the merry band will be known, will all be in pink stilettos, and their mission, should they choose to accept it, is to pass every shop en route without going in and buying something.
Easier said than done, even if you're not a shopaholic: when I lived on the Lisburn Road, there was only one shop, the Fruit Fayre fruit and veg emporium run by Wally and Isabel, but these days it has every retail outlet known to personkind.
The reason, of course, is to raise money for Big Build and help Romania, a country in which a third of the houses in the country are in a state of complete neglect and in which thousands of children were left orphaned by the Ceausescu regime.
Perhaps some of the benighted racists of south Belfast might like to think about that, and to wonder also what makes people so desperate that they leave their country behind to come here.
They might like to think, too, that it is a better thing in this world to help those who are less fortunate by building homes for them, rather than throwing bricks through their windows.
But then, making yourself feel better by hating people who are different comes too easily to people in this part of the world, and once you hate another group of people, it becomes all too easy to see them as less than human, and to draw the conclusion that you can therefore do anything you like to them.
Just as the Nazis did about the Jews, the Turks did about the Armenians and the Israelis and the Palestinians do about each other.
The truth is, of course, that we are all human beings, and that we have far more in common than anything that divides us.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll just phone Alan Simpson and see if he has a spare pair of pink stilettos.
n To sign up for Big Build 09, visit www.habitatni.co.ukor call 028 9024 3686. To join me and Alan on the Blister Sisters event, email hazel.alexander.law @googlemail.com or call 077 1060 9222.
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Weather for Belfast
Monday 13 February 2012
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