Choosing to Show Up, Choosing to Care: A Celebration of Friendship and Shared Humanity

By Lisa Judson

Sometimes, the people you never expected to meet become the people you can’t imagine your life without.

Friendship is a funny thing. We spend our lives collecting people. Some stay for a season. Some for a chapter. Some disappear for years and somehow walk back into our lives as though they’ve never been away. And then there are the ones who become your people.

Friendships are the lifeblood of life. They bring laughter, tears, support, comfort and solidarity. They bring a kick up the backside when you’ve wallowed for long enough, or a good-natured correction when you need one.

Honesty, reliability and love bring it all together. I often wonder how I’d manage without my tribe.

You see, I know lots of people. From all kinds of times and places in my life — school, work, church, the lake where I swim. And yet, I’ll admit, my inner circle is small. You know what I mean.

Those friends who are your ride or dies. The ones you can call at any time of the day or night, knowing they’ll be there. The ones you can snotty-cry with, and they don’t even wipe their shoulder clean until you’re not looking.

But what actually makes someone your friend?When does it change from a casual: “Alright?” to “You will NEVER believe this. Buckle up. Have I got a story for you?!”

I’ve always thought it was probably a combination of shared experiences, mutually held standards and beliefs, and a genuine affection for everything that person adds to your life.

But what happens when you become friends with someone from a completely different part of the world? Someone who doesn’t share your culture, language, religion or experiences? How does friendship work when, on paper, you have so little in common?

It turns out, very easily.

For the past three years, I’ve worked with the local asylum seeker community in my town. It began with anger and a sense of sadness. Anger at the way some people in my town spoke about and treated people they’d never met and knew absolutely nothing about. And a belief that someone needed to show them a bit of kindness. A bit of understanding. To reach out to a fellow human being in need.

I thought I was going to help them. What I didn’t expect was how much they would change me.

They introduced me to places I had previously only seen on the news or through Google Lens. They helped me untangle the myths and misunderstandings surrounding who they were. Why they had risked their lives to find somewhere they could build a new life. What it meant to leave behind their families and the only lives they had ever known, thousands of miles away.

And as I worked with them week after week, their stories began to unfold.

As they were preparing for their long-awaited interviews with the Home Office, I gradually began to see the people behind the statistics. Behind the headlines. Behind the hateful rhetoric.

I met their mothers and fathers, their wives and children, their little brothers and sisters over FaceTime. In broken English, I was told time and time again: “Thank you so much for being kind to our son.” “My brother.” “My daddy.” “My husband.”

As though kindness was so rare that it had to be remarked upon.

And then something changed. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, I began to care more and more. Not just about their asylum applications or their English lessons, but about them. Their cultures. Their faiths. Their families. Their futures. I woke up thinking about how they would survive after their Home Office interviews. What was happening to their mum or dad? Had their little sister managed to get to school that day?

I started inviting them to my house, to meet my friends and my kids. We gathered together with other local people who cared about them too, mixing our cultures together to gain a deeper understanding of what makes us tick. What shapes who we are. What we value. What we give back to the society we live in.

And slowly, they became comfortable enough to say: “Lisa, can we come over and cook for you today?”

So I’d leave them to it.

I’d sit working in my office and listen to their laughter drifting from the kitchen as they shared stories about how their mums cooked their favourite foods. And, inevitably, how the Afghans simply couldn’t cook rice as well as the Sudanese and why did Libyans always want to eat pasta?!

The banter was relentless. And utterly brilliant.

These were friendships born out of crisis. People from different countries, thrown together by circumstances none of them had chosen, finding each other along their treacherous journeys towards what they — and their families — believed would be safety.

Around my dinner table, they told stories of their childhoods. They remembered their countries. They laughed. They cried. And when grief or PTSD hit one of us particularly hard, we offered each other comfort. There were late-night phone calls when the airwaves had been unusually quiet and the regular exchanges of news hadn’t happened. There were kicks up the backside when morale had been low for too long. When learning a language that was, quite frankly, really bloody tricky became too much. When a qualification, hard-won in their own country, suddenly wasn’t enough for their new life in the UK.

And before I really noticed it happening, the same level of support I had always associated with my oldest and closest friendships was being given to — and received from — these people who had entered my life through a complete game of chance.

Google Translate regularly provides us with enormous amounts of laughter when it gets things spectacularly wrong. Tears are shared when someone loses a loved one thousands of miles away. We marvel at traditions that make absolutely no sense to either side.

But we try. We listen. We ask questions. And we offer solidarity even when we don’t fully understand. Because friendship, it turns out, doesn’t always need a shared history. Sometimes it just needs a shared humanity.

And then in March of this year, I found out just how deep those friendships had become. I had major surgery to remove a tumour from my salivary gland. And suddenly, the people I had thought of as “just friends” were there in a way I could never have imagined.

My oldest friends were there with lifts to and from the hospital. With meals made and brought over. With keeping me company and lifting my spirits. My kids were there for me as always. And so were these friends from other shores.

As I emerged from surgery, seven guys from three different countries were sitting quietly in a hospital waiting room. Only bothering the nursing staff to ask whether they were absolutely sure I was okay, because I had been in surgery longer than they thought I should have been.

Seven men who had their own worries. Their own uncertainty. Their own lives to navigate. But they were there. The guys who had less than £9 each week pooled their money to buy me a soft cushion for my battered face, a candle to bring me comfort during my recovery, and the softest scarf ever to keep my neck warm when I left the hospital.

They visited me every day to make sure I was okay and had everything I needed while my kids were at work. They walked miles to find me gluten-free food. Even though they really didn’t know what “gluten-free” actually meant. They just knew I needed it. And they wanted to help.

The love and support of my friends completely blew my kids away. They couldn’t believe the lengths everyone went to, making sure I was okay. And perhaps the most beautiful thing was this:

None of them saw colour.

They didn’t see culture.

They didn’t see religion.

They didn’t see nationality.

They just saw people who genuinely cared about me and my recovery.

And I saw them.

People who had come into my life from thousands of miles away, carrying stories and experiences I could never fully understand, yet who had somehow become part of my tribe. My people. My friends. And for that, I am truly, deeply grateful.

Because perhaps that is what true friendship really means.

Not having the same history.

Not sharing the same culture.

Not speaking the same language.

Not necessarily believing the same things.

Maybe friendship is simply two people from completely different worlds choosing to care about each other.

Choosing to listen.

Choosing to show up.

Choosing kindness.

And when push comes to shove, sitting in a hospital waiting room for someone you could once have described as a complete stranger.

Perhaps that’s the thing about friendship.

Sometimes, the people you never expected to meet become the people you can’t imagine your life without.

 

Photo by Lisa Judson.