EMF has workers in most countries in south-eastern Europe. You will have heard about camps in Greece being evacuated because of nearby wildfires, about the Acropolis being closed to visitors, or about the elderly needing to be looked-in-on in Italy, to make sure they drink enough and are not over-heating.

Our EMF colleagues in some countries have become stoical about fiery summer heat, and they will just carry on. But that does not mean that they are cheerfully flitting through the present heatwave. Thankfully, some of those who live in the hottest areas have been able to get away from the worst of the heat and escape to a cooler place for a holiday. Others are trying to stick it out and serve the Lord faithfully and well and perseveringly, while Rome burns, Madrid burns, Athens burns, and their village burns. They may not tell you that it’s hard to work in a heatwave. But frankly, it is awful; please pray for them.

In this kind of compendium of experiences seared into her memory by the merciless roasting heat of the most severe days of Spanish summers, Vivienne Birch, our director’s wife, tells us what some of our workers may really be going through right now in this present heatwave!

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So what's it like to live and work in a heatwave?
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You start early each day, buying tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers first thing, before they look like you feel, which is like pulp, though you will blitz all this food into pulp anyway to make gazpacho soup, chilling it to an icy slush of summer-friendly vitamins, liquid, and minerals. ‘Nobody can stand this heat!’ fellow shoppers say, fanning their faces (and arm-pits), and impatient to get home to clean the house before their bodies give up for the day.

The kids may not yet be awake when you get home with morning purchases. On waking,the grouchy little tikes, as irritable as you are after a sleepless, sultry night when mosquitoes exultingly dive-bombed around you, find the house already in semi-darkness, with windows closed tight and blinds right down. School broke up in mid-June and won’t start until mid-September. ‘What fascinating craft can I do with them today?’ (There were times, you see, when there were no screens to occupy restless little minds for hours).

You stay well away from the sun all summer if you’re fair-skinned, especially in a heatwave, but even native Mediterraneans must avoid the mid-day heat. ‘Crazy tourists!’ your neighbours exclaim with astonishment, contemplating TV images of northern Europeans visiting historic sites in Seville at 3 pm.

As your day goes on, you are wondering how you can go door-to-door in this heat with a team of young people from other churches, offering them hospitality afterwards; meanwhile you are trying to think which church members may be vulnerable and need checking up on. You are mentally and physically at a low point. The heat leaches out much of your strength, which means you might be emotionally and spiritually unwell too. Yet you have to organise a camp, and prepare lessons for the kids (in most countries there are not many/no ready-made materials to use, so you have to produce these), though being creative when your mind is in melt-down is well-nigh impossible. Camp work in the heat is especially gruelling. Your inexperienced camp team will look to you for all kinds of leadership; parents will expect you to sort out transport for their little camper offspring. And just try keeping all those children safe from sun-stroke, tummy bugs, and insect bites! You recall that one year the annual camp was cancelled when the site burned down in a wildfire just before the start date. That was dreadful, but at least you were not there with 50 kids, nor did you have to cook in a roasting camp kitchen, or carry kayaks to a lake in blazing heat. ‘Every cloud … ’(Oh, wouldn't it be great if I could actually see one!), and all that … The heat makes you think very selfishly, I’m afraid.

Your pastor husband sits beside a fan which is doing barely more than circulate warm air around his study. He has a desk-light on all day (all the blinds are down, remember?); there is no air-con, but not many people can afford to have that on all day anyway. Somehow, he will prepare two sermons, always feeling that his Sunday preaching, undertaken by a heat-affected mind, is hardly worthy of the gospel.

As the heatwave persists, you do all the TV tells you to do, though you know exactly what to do by now, without their harping on about it again. Drink a lot of water; rest in the fiercest heat of the day. Shut the windows until sunset, then open them in a (normally pretty unsuccessful) attempt to draw in any tiny breeze there might be as soon as ‘Lorenzo’(nickname for the Sun) hides his face. You survive. Not triumphantly, but you kind of get through. You know that by the end of August you will probably have a bit more order in your brain. You praise the Lord for his faithfulness in giving us the seasons (Genesis 8:22). This (heatwave) too will end.

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