Week 3 - Ahmed - this is a must read!

Tonight we had Ahmed come over to our house.  He is the newest member of the Luxembourg ward. He has quite a heartbreaking story and is one courageous young man.

I'll try and summarize.  Ahmed is a Somali who's parents died in the war there when he was very young.  He was taken in by a foster mother who was very sweet.  She sold small tourist items from China in the local market.  Due to the unrest, they fled to Kenya as refugees.  He really, really loved his foster mother.  She taught him well and how to make good choices.  Unfortunately, she died of complications from a bullet wound.

After that he joined a group of boy refugees that fled from Kenya to Somalia to Algeria to Syria.  He eventually joined up with a nice family that were also refugees.  They eventually ended up in Turkey, but the conditions there for refugees were not good.

They paid a man to take them on a boat to Greece.  They thought the weather was going to be good, but they got caught in a huge storm.  They thought they were all going to die.  Eventually the Turkish coast guard rescued them and they went back to Turkey.  They waited a while and then tried again and luckily they got smooth water and landed in Greece.

By this time Ahmed, who speaks English as his native tongue has learned Arabic and is a practicing Muslim.

In Greece the family that he had been staying with him said that he could no longer stay with them because the government would eventually find out that he wasn't their son.  So they gave him 500 euros and left.

Luckily a friend that he played football with talked to his family and they let him stay and work on their farm.  He couldn't go to school and basically worked on the farm for a year and a half. During this time he learned Greek.

Eventually he got connected up with the Red Cross refugee program and they flew him to Luxembourg.  He's been staying with them for the past two years.  They put him in a French school where it was basically sink or swim.  He learned French and a little bit of German in school.  He's now 18 and was moved out of the juvenile living quarters and has to live with an Iranian, Iraqi that are older and smoke a lot in the apartment.

In the August time frame he met the missionaries in the train station and accepted their message.  They sat down in the train station and he listed to the first discussion.  Three days later he had a dream that came to him three times.  A man in white came to him and told him that this was the correct path and that he should continue.  He didn't tell the missionaries about the dream, but he knew it was true.

He was baptized about 2 months ago in a kiddie pool while it was snowing.  He received the priesthood the week I came in December and is now blessing the sacrament.  He is an amazing young man, with a strong testimony and more life experiences that most of us will ever have.

His trials are not over.  He is living in a bad situation, he would never say it, but he goes hungry.  I'm hoping that we can convince the ward to use fast offerings to help him, but I guess they really haven't done that in the past.  Not sure why...  He is doing an apprenticeship in body work for cars.  He hopes to go on a mission once he has been a member for a year.  He is a big runner, from his time in Kenya. He runs about 30 km, three times a week.  He says he can't sleep unless he runs!  He was pretty excited to show us his t-shirts and medals from the Luxembourg marathon.  I guess he took first one time and second another.

If any of you are feeling the need to donate to someone where it would make an immediate difference, I would make sure that every euro goes to him.  He really has no one, but his new friends in the church.

We are going to have him over more times because he is such an inspiring and positive young man.  He is exactly the type of example and person that we hoped we'd meet over here.

It is pretty amazing to know his story and see him blessing the sacrament.  He probably doesn't comprehend the amazing network and people and resources that the church can help him with.  The gospel is going to make a huge difference in his life and he will in turn make a huge difference for others.  Pretty amazing to see that happening in real-time!

It was pretty powerful after that story when he told our kids without any prompting to "Listen to your parents, they only want the best for you.  If they tell you to go right, go right, if they tell you to go left, go left if they tell you to stay in the middle, stay in the middle."  We take so much about the gospel and our families for granted.  It was so refreshing to meet someone that doesn't.

Ben