Enjoying our multinational guests

Last night I was giving the kids a rundown of who will be hosting for the next three weeks, and one of them commented that since moving here, we’ve had guests from a lot of different countries!

I hadn’t really thought about it, and then realized he’s right!  Since beginning to host people about six or seven weeks ago, we’ve had guests from Poland, France, Tunisia, Switzerland, Australia, Ukraine, Germany, Brazil, and of course, the US and Israel.  Next week we’ll be having someone from Vancouver BC (we met years ago when we were living in Seattle, and now we’re all living in Israel!), the next week we’ll have friends from Baltimore, and just a few weeks after that, one of my blog readers from Germany will be visiting!

We have a number of people we’d like to invite but have to wait a couple of weeks until our schedule clears – the first time we have guests, we prefer to have them on their own so we get to know them, and then later on, will have them with other guests.  We also like to keep the Shabbos (Sabbath/ Friday) night meal for our family only, and mostly have guests during the day (Saturday), but there are not infrequently exceptions to that.

A few weeks ago, we discovered one of our guests shared some common history with us, but didn’t recognize him at all when he came with his family.  Years ago, I was a young working mother, pregnant with two small children, and my husband had been hospitalized.   It was less than ten days before Pesach (Passover), and a friend who knew I was spending hours every afternoon after work traveling to and from the hospital knew I didn’t have any help, time, or energy after all I was doing, called the post high school yeshiva I worked at and asked the the head of the yeshiva to send some young men to help out. It was a busy time for everyone and the guys were already on vacation,  but one young man volunteered and came to my house for two or three hours to help me clean – the only time I’ve ever had cleaning help (outside of my immediate family)!  And now, over fifteen years later, he appears at my house, married, bearded, and with three kids – and I had invited his wife and didn’t even know his first name until the end of the meal, when he mentioned his child was named after the head of the yeshiva I worked at, and from there we simultaneously realized who the other was.  He remembered my 2.5 year old (my oldest), who was sitting right next to him during the meal and is now 18, the age that he was when he came to my house.  It was a very interesting feeling.

The world is a very small place, and with Israel being the tiny melting pot country that it is, we’ve been discovering that first hand!

Avivah

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