Quilting for Refugees

Today the JoAnn's fabric store nearest to me has its grand re-opening.  Ordinarily, I would stay away.  But I need supplies for church tomorrow.

Yes, it's another quilting day at my church, and I am the one who leads it all.  We need supplies:  batting, fabric for backing, embroidery floss for knotting the layers together.  We have many quilts in progress; hopefully tomorrow we can actually finish some of them.

There are days I beat back despair.  I love doing the quilting projects and the thought of helping refugees with these quilts.  But we complete so few of them a year.  How many refugees do we really help?

I don't indulge in that thinking for long.  We don't help as many refugees as larger churches with cadres of people who quilt in different teams.  No, that's not us.  But we do have a church with a wide variety of people who want to help.  We give them an outlet.  Even people who say that they cannot sew--those people can help knot the quilts together.

Along the way, we do old-fashioned consciousness raising.  Because of our periodic projects to help Lutheran World Relief, you won't hear a lot of anti-refugee rhetoric coming from our members.  We understand that many people have fled horrors that we can only barely understand and often they flee with very little resources.  We are happy to send them quilts and hygiene kits.

If you're in the South Florida area and would like to help, come to Trinity Lutheran Church, at the corner of 72nd and Pines in Pembroke Pines, across from the South Campus of Broward College, on the south side of Pines.  We'll be quilting from 9 to 1 or so, and we'd love to have your help.