Finally

'Our' family has arrived and must now be installed in this their new home. Our greeting team met them when they landed at Birmingham airport today and drove them back to Pembrokeshire on this wet and chilly evening - that's as much as I know so far.

The house was looking amazing this afternoon: beds made up, toys and toiletries, fruit and flowers and freshly cooked food  in place, kitchen cupboards bulging with provisions  - some of which may indeed cause puzzlement  (Bisto, Branston pickle, baked beans?) but all were donated with the best of intentions. Every possible contingency has been rehearsed and every possible measure taken to ensure the comfort, privacy and security of these people about whom we know next to nothing except that they have suffered and survived great adversity and the children have spent most or much of their short lives in a refugee camp.
The whole process of our community sponsorship, of which we are among the first to complete, has felt like a very prolonged and complicated gestation. Now we are faced with the next stage of supporting and enabling a new life to develop, for just one family among the countless thousands disrupted and uprooted by circumstances beyond their control. If we can do it in this small, distant and poorly resourced community of 5000, why not in many more?