an international day

I finished the summer quarter! Now I have about 2 weeks off before the next quarter begins. Thursday I had the opportunity to join a group of women from church to go on some sort of out-reach in Atlanta. That's all I really knew when I arrived at church on thursday morning.
A woman at our church is involved with the international student wives at Georgia Tech (our church is practically on their campus). I've been wanting to help out and get to know more internationals. So I was very happy and surprised when I discovered that the women I was joining on the out-reach were the international student wives! I had so much fun getting to know them. Most of them had only been in the U.S. a few months. They were from Thailand, Argentina, China, S. Korea, and India. I quickly became friends with June. She's 25, got married in May (like me!) and moved to Atlanta from South Korea just 2 months ago! Her husband is in the phd program for chemical engineering at Georgia Tech. She's trying to learn english. I wish I could speak Dutch as well as she speaks English!! It was great to hang out with her and all the other women for the day.

The outreach: We went to an apartment complex in eastern Atlanta called Willow Branch. It's mostly populated by political and religious refugees from all around the world. We brought food and had lunch with the women of the complex. There were women and children from Sudan, Afghanistan, Turkey, Mexico, Iran, etc. I don't think I've ever seen so many beautiful women in one room before! Before lunch we had to walk around to all the apartments to find women to invite. I thought the whole place was rather ghetto and depressing. But the leader from our church told us this is one of the nicer complexes. Sometimes you'll have huge families with 12 or more people in 2 rooms. And some of the people have never used a stove or microwave before! Some are highly educated and had great jobs and big homes in their home countries. But now they can't get a job and live in poverty. Others had such a bad life in their home country that they are very happy in these conditions.

The interesting thing was that I don't think any of the international women in my group were Christians! They had told our leader from Church that they wanted to do volunteer work! So here they were working with a church to love other people less fortunate than themselves. Beautiful!

After the lunch our group went to the Decateur Farmers Market. A huge market full of imported foods and fresh produce! Such a treat for our group. I got Edgar some Dutch cheese!