Our Welcome Day Out
Saturday 20th May was a golden day. The sun shone and the English countryside was at its most beautiful to welcome LDCoS members and friends to Beaudesert Park at the invitation of our local Iona Community group.
Some of us had travelled only short distances to Cannock Chase that day. Others had made much longer, often perilous, journeys and arrived from Afghanistan, Jordan, Pakistan, Syria and Ukraine.
Wherever we came from on that glorious, early summer Saturday, we were made welcome by our kind hosts. We shared food and drink, forest walks, tree-climbing & go-karting adventures – and many conversations in Arabic, Dari, English, Urdu, Ukrainian. Small children played and slept in the sunshine. Teenagers mooched about. Elders, who would almost certainly never have met in past lives, exchanged stories and told Tasbih.
And so, for a while, on a sunny Saturday afternoon in the Staffordshire countryside, we all experienced what a better, kinder world might be. People from very different lives coming together in friendship and simply ‘getting on’. We hope the memories of our Welcome Day and the friendships formed there will warm and sustain us in days to come.
CMW