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My daughters have experienced working with several Syrian families - driving them to school, picking them up after school, taking a mother and baby to hospital, seeing how difficult communication can be. One daughter spent part of her summer holidays teaching English to Syrian children. Helping to settle these newcomers can be a difficult task but certainly has its rewards as well.

Time for an update.

We are now sponsoring four families, two from Syria who arrived around the time I started this thread, two from the Congo who arrived about a month ago. I have also helped in some airport pickups, we welcomed a Rohingya man yesterday.

The most important work is simply the work of friendship and being there for people. You can definitely witness to your faith in this program, as long as you don't make it a condition for serving them and aren't too heavy-handed. It basically has to arise naturally. The best way to help is often to tutor the children or teach English.

In our area, at least, there are communities for just about any group of refugees, so we aren't their only source of support. The local mosque is very friendly with the churches that help, and they provide a lot of help for Syrian refugees or other Muslims. We also have a community of Congolese in this area and a community of Rohingya. Each of these communities is very social and very supportive of newcomers. Some of the refugees have family here already.

The Syrian refugee families have brought up the topic of faith several times, often to tell us ways that their local communities are showing their faith in the same way we are showing ours, to discuss how they should help homeless people (asking what we do, since they respect our faith), etc. Their identity as Muslims is very strong, I don't hear any questions leading in the direction of converting, but there is a very strong current of respect for our faith.

And it's been very good for our church, giving us a way to put Christians to work serving others.

Yesterday, a little Congolese girl kept running her hands through my hair, obviously wondering what it felt like. I have heard blacks tell stories about whites who did that to them, I had never experienced it the other way around.

Bootstrap wrote:Yesterday, a little Congolese girl kept running her hands through my hair, obviously wondering what it felt like. I have heard blacks tell stories about whites who did that to them, I had never experienced it the other way around.

The little things like this make up for a lot of hard work.