The doors opened at 7:00 pm Thursday night. From the kitchen alone, I could
tell that the main room was already packed. Used coffee and tea mugs were being
brought back by the fistful to be washed. The dish sanitizer couldn’t keep up
with them; dirty mugs were stacked everywhere; we had to run upstairs and get
more from the cupboard. Then we had to slow down the consumption by temporarily
stopping the hot drinks! By 7:40 pm we had run out of coffee. By 8:00 pm we had
nearly run out of tea. And the evening was still young!
One Afghani boy (age 15 or 16) was standing alone at the
literature rack, avidly reading Christian tracts in Farsi for a long time.
Occasionally he’d look up, pondering something, then go back to reading.
At one crowded table, an older Austrian man, Friedl, was
animatedly teaching German to about seven young Afghani men. Each had paper and
pencil, writing German words with Farsi translation what Friedl was explaining.
One woman brought her cup into the kitchen and motioned that
she was willing to wash the cups (overflowing the sink area). We pointed to the
dish washer/sanitizer: considering the international germs in that crowded
room, very important. She nodded but ignored the machine and just kept washing;
she wanted to be of help.
One table had colored pencils, blank paper, and pages from
coloring books. All evening that table was full of young men drawing and
coloring: a soothing, peaceful, soul-satisfying respite from the world
outside.
Another table had world atlases—always a big attraction as
people proudly want to show their homeland—and sometimes the route they took to
get to Austria.
Towards the end of the evening, I was standing at the coffee
bar (drinks long gone). One Afghani boy saw me paging through the atlas. I
smiled in invitation and he came over. He told me his story in English. His
father and older brother had been killed, his mother remarried but the husband
was not kind to the family. His mother told him to go to Pakistan. He was there
for a while, learned more English, but knew it wasn’t safe to stay there. His
mother wanted him to go further away to be safe. He traveled west all the way
through Iran to the border of Turkey. He was traveling at that point with eight
other companions. They couldn’t get across the border—too many guards. So they
waited. Tried again the next night, but the eight got caught—he didn’t. He
wondered what to do: should he go on all alone? Or just go back to Afghanistan?
He tried again the next night and made it through. At some point after getting
through Istanbul and into the next country, he called his mom. In all the
months of separation and harrowing circumstances he had been through, he said
he actually forgot the word for “Mom”! So his mother, finally recognizing her
son’s voice, was crying, “You forgot me! How could you forget me?!” He said he
was crying too, but then told her, “Let’s not waste time crying on the phone!”
So here he was this evening, having been two weeks in Austria. He’s 16. His
eyes and mine misted up at the end of his account. He doesn’t know how his life
will go. Multiply his story by about 400 or 500. That’s how many unaccompanied minors there
are currently in the refugee camp here in Traiskirchen.
I am convinced that the Oasis is truly a haven for those
that enter, even if only for one evening. The love of Christ is tangible,
winsome. May all of us who belong to Him shine and offer living water to those
around us who are thirsty.
Sue...(a visiting Short Term Worker)
0 comments:
Post a Comment