New

Christmas was wonderful, as I expected it would be. New Year's Eve was good... my brother and his wife had a low-key party and I got my ass kicked in foosball. New Year's Day I went to church and took a nice long nap in the afternoon.

January 2nd, however, was an extraordinary day. I met the coolest family in the whole world. They are a family of refugees from Liberia. When the civil war started there several years ago, the Muslims were being slaughtered and so Abu took his family to Sierra Leone to a refugee camp there. Eventually, he and his family were picked to be sent to the US. All FIFTEEN of them. They came here and my little sister spent the summer volunteering with Catholic Charities and she met four of the girls there. Abu had 4 wives in Liberia. The men are allowed up to 4. One of them died in Africa, one of them is still there with 5 more of his children, and the other 2 came with him. They arrived in August, and this is the first time they have experienced winter. Everyone speaks English enough to be understood, though some are far better than others. The children range in age from 4 to 21.

We took them sledding, something they didn't comprehend until we showed them. We fed them hot dogs- one of the girls put salsa on hers. They were 15 extra people in our house, and you would never know. They weren't noisy- 12 children of our culture these ages would have been complaining they were bored or bothering their parents every few seconds. The children were very independent and allowed to be so. They thanked us every couple of minutes, for everything. Abu called us his family when they left, saying he didn't need to go back to Africa to see his family because now he has such a big family here.

Little does he know what an impact they had on me. How poorly I express it.