Rain, Rain Go Away...

In case you haven’t seen the weather for Seattle recently, we are currently living up to our reputation that it rains all the time here. Usually when people say that, I just roll my eyes and brag about our beautiful summers and argue, “it really doesn’t rain THAT much here….” But this month is proving me wrong. So far in November we have had 11.2 inches of rain!!! Our average month of Nov. usually produes 5.9 inches, and we’ve had double that and are only half way through the month! It feels like we have a long winter ahead of us….it only makes me more thankful for our cozy little house and the warm fires that zach has been building in our fireplace almost daily. Despite the bad weather, I want to be thankful for all of the things that we DO have.

Last week I spent time volunteering at World Relief, which I do each week with a group of our students. World Relief is an agency that serves refugees and particularly in Seattle they help to resettle refugees when they arrive here and help place them in homes, teach them basic skills, and get them enrolled in English classes. Our job as volunteers is to help teach an English class each Thursday. Last week we were teaching parts of the body and to help we taught them the children’s song “head, shoulders, knees and toes”. I have to say it was hilarious to see the grown men especially singing the song along with us and doing the motions too! ☺ Each of the people we teach there has such a willingness to learn and gratefulness to us for helping to teach them. I feel it is the least we can do as so many of them have come from horrific circumstances and are now faced with tackling life in a new culture, away from everything familiar to them. They have more persistence and perseverance than I can imagine having.
After class, one of the women asked for my help in filling out some paper work for her child’s school. As I sat and talked with her I learned a little of her story. She had recently lost her husband to heart disease and had just moved here with her 2 children. She knows no one and can barely speak English. That day, she was faced with the impossible task of filling out a pile of paper work to enroll her children in school. Thankfully, since I am a native English speaker, this was an easy thing for me to be able to help her with. Left on her own, it would have taken her hours and hours to complete. I felt so much joy from being able to help in just a small way to relieve her of that burden, yet I am aware she has much bigger challenges facing her as she settles in to life here as a single mother in this strange land. Being able to help this woman reminded me of importance of acts of kindness to others in our path. So often I am so focused on my life or what I need to get done that I barely take time to notice those around me. I was reminded of the ability we have to help carry each other and relieve each others burdens and it challenged me to look for more ways to do that throughout my week. I came across a non-profit organization committed to spreading kindess- they can be found at actsofkindness.org. They have declared this particular week “World Kindness Week” so we challenged our students to each look for at least one opportunity this week to show kindness to those in their path. We are going to share our stories and experiences this Friday and I’m excited to hear about the creative ways that they find to show love.