This evening my wife noticed a man sitting on the little retaining wall next to our cars. Once we finished dinner we noticed he was still there, and our neighbors asked if we knew who he was. Our neighbors had noticed him wandering around the lot earlier in the evening. I went outside to go get the mail, smiled and said hello to him as I walked past. The man smiled and waved back. I asked him if I could help him, he just seemed out of place, and it was beginning to get dark. He responded as best he could by saying hello and that he was happy. I took a guess and asked if he spoke arabic, he immediately responded that he spoke Farsi and that he was Iranian. Fortunately I know an Iranian pastor, I gestured for the man to stay there and went to go see if I could get the pastor to translate. I was almost certain that the man was lost.
I can't imagine being lost where I don't speak the language, sitting on steps as the sun is going down. Fortunately we where abled to get the Iranian pastor on the phone to help us communicate. The pastor knew the man and his family, the man has lost his way before, and the pastor has found him wandering around the church. We were able to contact the mans daughter and arrange for her to come pick him up. In the meantime we invited the man into our home and spent some awkward time looking up phonetic spellings of farsi words to try and communicate in a very rudimentary way. I'm glad we were able to help get this man back to his family.
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