Can You Sleep At Night?

t's been an interesting journey from Napier to Thames at the Southern end of the Coromandel Peninsula.  In Taupo Jayne and I stopped for coffee and met a fellow croquet player and his family travelling from, coincidentally, Thames to a Tournament in Wanganui where we were last weekend.  We stopped in Tirau and had lunch and then stopped in Te Aroha to have a look at their croquet lawns (we won't be going there for a tournament that's for sure!).  We arrived in Thames just before 5pm.  After booking in to the motel and having a look round the town we settled down outside with a glass of wine and some nibbles.

Jayne was recounting some of the travels through Nepal, Afghanistan, Iran and many other places that she and Norman had visited in the 1970s.  I found it all fascinating because I had visited none of those places.

But an incident she related which cured in Ghana when she was visiting her sister, Hilary, who was working there at the time, stuck in my mind the most.

Jayne found herself talking to a Ghanaian lady who was selling items in the street.  The lady said to Jayne "You white people you don't sleep at night.  You white people worry.  You have too many things.  I have nothing.  I don't worry.  I sleep at night."

Jayne never forgot that conversation and when she wakes up in the middle of the night worrying about some, usually relatively inconsequential, matter the words return to her.