As you can imagine, meals being prepared have great variety and often present opportunities to eat foods many have never seen, let alone tasted. First it starts with a discussion about what the English word is for the foods. Our Ethiopian family had a mutual friend visit from their home country and shared two foods the visitor brought with her. No one had ever had these foods. This was a great adventure for everyone. I am discovering a vast difference in what different cultures constitute safe food handling and storage as well. Everyone recently completed an online King County food handler’s course.
Many of the moms have been trying to learn a few words in the others first languages. Everyone speaks a little bit of English, except for the Chinese grandma who is visiting from China to help her daughter and grandson. I find it delightful to be cooking with the Chinese grandma, weeding flower beds and picking up the Kirkland Farmer’s Market donations with no spoken language to communicate but only gestures and a lot of laughter. She is such a hard worker and wants to help in any way she can. I loved seeing one of the moms and another child run through the house giggling after an attempt to speak another language recently. I had met with this young mom only a few days before and it was a very different situation. She was very distraught over their situation and was very fearful. She had a lot of tears and rightfully so. Now they are safe, well fed, comfortable and enjoying the companionship and community of the others, while they work through the process of becoming self sufficient and pursuing education.
Do you love babies? There are lots of opportunities to snuggle a baby and encourage a young mom, if you’d like to share your time and parenting skills. We enjoy three baby boys in the house – a 3-month old, a 4-month old and an 8-month old. The first few weeks I was awakened by the babies at night. Now I don’t even hear them when they wake up crying. We’ve had two trips to the emergency room only to receive the good news that there was nothing serious wrong and the babies just had a virus. Better safe than sorry.
We have been blessed with Melissa Foltz, our amazing intern. She is a college student in International Studies and Biblical studies. Her gifts and God’s prompting make her a very nice fit for our program in the many ways she is helping out this summer. She and her husband have provided some timely respite care for me and she has played a big part in filling up our house with families with the many phone calls to collaborative and referring agencies. The fact that she too is pregnant gives her and the moms with babies at the house a lot in common and I see great relationships developing. Her current projects include assembling a Resource Book for the residents of the house, case management, and organizing our big fundraiser coming up October 15.On October 15, 2011 we will be holding a major fund raiser at Westminster Chapel for a fun evening. We’ll have the details available soon. Keep the date open and be thinking of others to invite.
