[Dialogue] refugees

Wed Mar 16 13:37:55 PDT 2022

 Thank you for the update, Jo. God bless you for your caring spirit and practical, concrete love.Ann
    On Wednesday, March 16, 2022, 02:27:47 PM MDT, Jo Nelson via Dialogue <dialogue at lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:  

 Thank you for all your work and care for this community, Tim.  
And thank you for your story of refugee support. 

I also have had the privilege of supporting an Afghan refugee family, the family of a young woman I have been mentoring for 12 years, beginning when she was studying in Afghanistan.  She has been in the US for 8 years now.  They are an amazing family. Two sons and five daughters have all been educated, most with university degrees.  
Her oldest brother, along with his (pregnant) wife and children and his parents, escaped from Afghanistan in August the day after the Kabul airport bombing, and were bounced from one place to another for 3 months.  They decided to come to Canada where the youngest son had made a refugee claim, but they had no other contacts here.  I made a commitment to provide part of their support for the first year, as I feel that they are extended family. When they couldn’t find rental housing, one of our deep colleagues here (I think he would be embarrassed if I said his name) bought a house to rent to them at cost, and they moved in on December 22.   
Some of our colleagues on this list have contributed as well, when I first told the story on Facebook.  And many of my neighbours and friends have also contributed many household goods, baby things, and money.  
The baby was born on January 9, with a house in a safe country to grow up in.  
The whole story has brought hope and  joy, something we need in these times!  I have been in a state of profound gratitude since then, for being able to help and for the generous contributions of so many. 
If you’d like the full story (sans specific names and places for safety), it is on my blog at jofacilitator.ca  
Take care,Jo

On Mar 16, 2022, at 3:31 PM, Timothy Wegner via Dialogue <dialogue at lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:
[First a response about the list gmail problems.

Wes, there's no debate that this is (was) a gmail problem - gmail
suddenly became more fussy, and messages from the list to gmail
addresses started to bounce. I reported this to Dreamhost, who was
extremely responsive and made changes to my lists.wedgeblade.net
subdomain that might fix the problem. It's only been 24 hours, too
early to say.

Even though of necessity I raised this gmail problem on both lists, I
suggest unless there is something new, we return to discussion that is
more on topic, and not continue the "gmail problem" discussion here. I
would like to see more traffic (hopefully on topic, not about gmail),
because more list posts will help me to see more quickly whether or
not the problem is resolved. If you want to discuss gmail more, feel
free to email me privately. I do feel a bit bad for all the emails the
list sent out to people saying their accounts had been suspended. In
these trying times we don't need another aggravation! ]

(back on topic ...)

I have found that the Ukraine news has been causing me to reminisce
about my own travels. Just before Susan and I joined the order we
travelled by local transportation through Afghanistan, then in a brief
lull between wars. Now that I think of it, we continued through Iran!
The year was 1971.

We went out to dinner with some neighbors a few nights ago to a
Houston restaurant called the Afghan Village. The food was amazing,
and I would say 90% of the other diners were Afghans.

Susan is working on a program through our church to help out refugee
families. Among other things we are collecting donations to outfit an
apartment. We don't know yet what the nationality of the family will
be. There are thousands of Afghan refugees headed to Houston, and
other nationalities as well.

Tim
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