As I mentioned the other day, my team was invited to have dinner with some new friends from an Afghan school here in Istanbul, Turkey. It was an incredible & warm experience! We arrived at the school following their afternoon prayer time. We were immediately invited to gather around their dining room table as they prepared to serve us dinner.
Soon after we sat down, our Aghan friend (He is a teacher at the school) sat down next to me on my left, along with 5-6 of his Afghan brothers. Most of them were originally from Uzbekistan, but moved to Turkey from Afghanistan.
Then 3 HUGE rice plates were brought to our table! Then another. and another. and another. This rice is a little different than most rice I have ever eaten. It was traditional afghan rice which has grains a little longer usual, but is very tasty, almost with a sweetness about it. The rice had raisins mixed in, and buried beneath the rice was roasted chicken.
But our meal didn’t stop there. In addition to the rice were plates of vegetables for us all, and we all shared large loaves of flat bread. For desert, little rectangle-sliced sweet cake was brought. It was of course much more than we could eat, but they encouraged us to eat it all. We were unsuccessful.
They were very hospitable. Ridiculously hospitable! They served us first before they would serve themselves, and encouraged us to eat as much as we wanted. They served us as much green tea as we could stand. They weren’t just being nice. As a part of their culture and religion, they consider it a privilege and honor to have guests and to fill their stomachs. We could not prevent them from having that privilege. Haha.
We could learn a lot from them about loving and serving each other.
God is teaching me how, when we give in faith, believing in faith that he will provide, He usually responds with blessing us with more than we actually had to start with. Kinda Crazy, but Awesome?!
We were truly blessed with the opportunity. We were able to make some new friends, learn about their culture, history, and where they came from, and talk about our different beliefs.
It seems that a lot of the people that have migrated from the Afghanistan and Pakistan regions actually moved to Turkey about 30 years ago due to all the war that was taking place over there.
We ate dinner, hung out with our friends, and discussed their culture. We even discussed our differing beliefs about who Jesus is. Really! It was very refreshing to just sit and calmly discuss what our beliefs were about who Jesus is and the differences between each faith.
A day or two later, we had dinner with them again. The rice is so good!
