So it is nearly 9pm and I am home alone. Paul is running his 3-day retreat in a town an hour away. The doorbell goes (the highly inappropriate one that blasts out the wedding march,\u00a0Christmas\u00a0carols and other delights at high volume) and looking out of the window I see the guy who keeps coming to our home for food, attention and … well needs a lot of looking after. He (at 34 years old) called us both mum and dad the other day !!!!) has been a challenge in many, many ways and tested our patience big-time. He has taken advantage to the point where we have had to lay down rules…. yet at the same time he has made an effort to try to be our friends (he does our washing up quite regularly – that is about as far as friendship goes here).<\/p>\n
He has been thrown out of his lodgings- a local hostal (here that means a brothel) and so has turned to us for help – we can’t help. At least, while I am home alone I can’t let him in – we have a rule to protect me… so I had to turn him away (after standing on the doorstep for a while chatting to him and then giving him the remains of my bean dinner. \u00a0Thinking about it now I could maybe have found him a cheap room somewhere and paid for it (only just thought of that) – but I know he has money of his own (not very much) that he refuses to use… so at the end of the day if he has nowhere to go, he isn’t really helping himself is he??? Hmmm.<\/p>\n
It isn’t easy helping others to help themselves when really then just want to be looked after. That is why I am so tired and zapped.Helping others isn’t often very rewarding, it is mainly sacrificial.<\/p>\n
I am very thankful for our flat and a warm bed – it is getting significantly chilly here as we head into winter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So it is nearly 9pm and I am home alone. Paul is running his 3-day retreat in a town an hour away. The doorbell goes (the highly inappropriate one that blasts out the wedding march,\u00a0Christmas\u00a0carols and other delights at high volume) and looking out of the window I see the guy who keeps coming to […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[25,5,18],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/paulandrach.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/525"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/paulandrach.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/paulandrach.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/paulandrach.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/paulandrach.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=525"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/paulandrach.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/525\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":537,"href":"http:\/\/paulandrach.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/525\/revisions\/537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/paulandrach.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/paulandrach.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/paulandrach.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}