Wednesday 2 May 2012

STRANGER IN OUR MIDST!

Life is never short of surprises.  On Saturday afternoon we got a phone call from a lovely (elderly) couple in our church, inviting us for Sunday lunch.  To give a bit of background to this, one of the members - and part of the leadership team - in our church is a chaplain at Harmondsworth Detention Centre at Heathrow, which deals with illegal immigrants/refugees/asylum seekers coming into the UK.

For the past two years, we have had several Iranian guys turn up at church as a result, and various members of the church take it in turns once a month to host Sunday lunch for them.  Anyhow, we were invited to have lunch along with some of the Iranians.  In the event, only one of the Iranians was able to make it, a fella called Omid who we have got to know fairly well over the months that he has been coming to church. 

At different times we have wondered about offering him accommodation with us but it has not been practical at all as we have not really had a spare room (or rather we did but it was full of my clutter and needed occasionally when younger daughter is at home and has to have a ground floor bedroom.)

On Sunday we heard more about his heart wrenching story ... he is still going through the long process of trying to get a status in the UK.  We also discovered that in two weeks time he would  have nowhere to stay and so during the course of lunch, we also decided that we would offer him the opportunity to come and live with us!!!!!!  

We did not say anything to Omid on Sunday, but invited him to come round for supper on Tuesday instead.  (That would give us two days to realise what a rash decision we had made!!!).

On Monday morning I went into a frenzy of clearing out the room, ending up with 3 bags of *junk* and trying to make room for various bits of craft stuff which themselves had become asylum seekers!!!  We also needed to try and find another home in the house for a displaced tumble dryer that was also happily residing in the downstairs bedroom.

Yesterday (Tuesday) was spent at the council tip, getting rid of the stuff that did not make it as far as passport control!!!  Then came dinner (spag bol and chocolate pudding!) which was all going really well .... until we made the offer to Omid of living with us.  He started crying and even more alarming, elder daughter also burst into tears (even though she had only just met him and rarely shows emotion!).  Even the cat started flirting.

The long and the short of this is that in two weeks time our household will suddenly have grown by one ... and I will need to start learning how to cook Iranian food and speak Farsi !!!  Where crafting will fit into all this remains to be seen.  

*THE BOX* was duly finished and posted to my Mum who thought it was wonderful.  However, there is only one problem, which was that her Easter card was too big for it!!!  You can please all people SOME of the time ............... !!!!!!!!!!!!

TTFN,

Mandi xx




3 comments:

  1. Hi Mandy thank you for the comment on my baptism card.
    that image is a decoupage and is from

    More-Head number 11052-018

    hope you find it.

    greetings karin

    ReplyDelete