Karen Refugees

Hello! Welcome from Seattle! I hope that this finds you well; we are fine here and have had a good few days with our refugees.

Our refugees arrived at a reasonable time on Thursday night - a first in itself! They have come from the border between Thailand and Burma and are a displaced group called the Karen (pronounced 'caren' with the stress on the 'en'). A lot of these people have been caught up in a long term war and have been on the run from the government forces for many years. There are now a lot of Karen families in Kent and so when they move into their appartment tomorrow, they will soon find people with whom they can communicate and befriend. They have a hard task ahead of them, learning to live here, learning English and then finding a job and supporting themselves.

Our family are just a Mum, a Dad and a little 2 year old, who weighs less than Silas by a long way! They were very drawn and haggard on Thursday night but are better today. We had a quiet day on Friday and they slept a lot, yesterday we did some shopping at the Goodwill (second-hand) store where they can spend their vouchers and today we have had a fun day out in Seattle. The family arrived with less clothing than I keep in my car for emergencies and no personal belongings. A trip to the store was essential! They are now kitted out quite well and I managed to find some things for the little boy. We also took the Dad to Target and to the supermarket yesterday but we haven't done any food shopping with them. However, they have picked up on things remarkably quickly and so I think that they will be OK.

We have shown them how to use a washing machine, a hob and the dishwasher and they have been able to use them by themselves, which is good. The Mum has some English and can draw beautifully, the Dad has had only intermittent schooling. They have not eaten much but are doing better today. They are very thin and small - finding clothes was tricky yesterday!

Today we have been to Alki Beach in Seattle, where we had fish and chips (which went down very well) and then went to the park. The little boy loved the slide and it was fun watching him play! Mum and Dad loved walking along the beach and it was the first time they had seen the sea. We collected a lot of shells and they know the words for shell, sea and sand, which , I appreciate, are not the most useful first English words but there you go! Tomorrow will be the start of a long week for them, so I hope that they have had a nice day today!

The girls had their sports class on Friday afternoon and are now learning a simplified version of baseball. After this we went to Rosie's house to have a craft session which was fun! Caitlin loved making the paper flowers that I took with us and so I left her with some tissue paper to make some more! We had a really smooth journey home which was great!

The children made me laugh on the way there. We drove passed the dairy on the way through Issaquah and we were talking about how milk got to us. I mentioned that the farmers used a milking machine and Naomi said "no mummy, there is a lady who sits and squeezes the cow  and the milk goes into a pail"! I giggled and explained that this was how it was done in the old days but that now there were machines. Esther then started talking about the pigs underneath the cow and it took some time to realise that she was talking about the udders! Weird! In all of this, Silas is mooing in the back as he can hear us talking about cows! It was all very funny!

Silas had some new pyjamas last week as the ones that I had bought him for Christmas fell apart at the waistband! I bought him a pair with the "cars" movie on them and a pair with Thomas on them. The Thomas one is his favourite and I found that he was carrying them around with him during the day, making woo woo noises! On a couple of occasions I found the pyjamas in bizarre places (like my kitchen) as he had obviously been carrying them around and then dropped them!

Silas and the family's little boy have enjoyed playing with the trains this weekend! No language required when you are little!

Well, that is it for now! Lots of love!