Please join us for this week’s Service – we are delighted to welcome Apple and are looking forward to hearing her thoughts and perceptive on cultural awareness in a world wherein countries, and some peoples, are reverting to an insular and intolerant outlook. How identity, and the inherent need to belong to a ‘tribe’, need not negate acceptance or a willingness to learn of another’s beliefs. How literature and music can play a part in cultural knowledge, and how the fear of cultural appropriation can lessen that awareness.

Our one-hour Service begins at 10:00 AM and is followed by light refreshments.  All are welcome!

Bio – Apple Gidley
A transient life has seen Apple Gidley live in countries as diverse as Papua New Guinea and Thailand, Equatorial Guinea and the USA, and another eight in between. Her memoir, Expat Life Slice by Slice tells of the highs and lows of that nomadic life – one she wouldn’t trade for all the proverbial tea in one of the places she hasn’t lived, China.
Gidley’s roles have been varied – editor, intercultural trainer for multi-national corporations, Her Britannic Majesty’s Honorary Consul to Equatorial Guinea, amongst others. She started writing full time twelve years ago.
Gidley has spoken on cultural awareness at global conferences and was on the international board for Families in Global Transition for three years. She was on the Advisory Board of the University Museum at Texas Southern University, an hbcu, in Houston, TX for ten years. Most recently she was vice president on the board for St Croix Friends of Denmark. Gidley writes a regular blog, A Broad View, http://www.applegidley.wordpress.com She has two published novels, Fireburn and Transfer, which are set on St Croix, and she has stories published
in various anthologies and is working on a book of short stories. A novel, set in 1950’s Malaya is currently with agents and she is now working on another historical novel set in Poland and India.
http://www.applegidley.com