Student Escapades

Just after we got married in 1991, like most couples, we bought a house.

Maybe not the normal 3 bed, but a four bed semi, which in time we converted to a five bed, as we never used the garage!

Did we plan on having a large family?

In the conventional sense, no, but we were going to become a host family, enjoy their company and pay our mortgage at the same time!

Over the next twenty years or so, we would have about 200 students pass through our front door from the local college.

Most were friendly and fitted in pretty well with our free and easy lifestyle, of you take care of yourself, cook your own food and respect each other, mostly it worked quite well.

Some even invited us to visit their home countries, mostly the very friendly Spanish, visiting them in Gran Canaria, Segovia and Almeria.

Sadly, these were the days before Facebook, so we are not in contact with many of them these days.

Our first students were from Belgium, France and Taiwan and we enjoyed tasting their Chinese food when they cooked for everyone and had great fun.

We had students from all over the world, including Joe from Thailand, where we eventually ended up becoming missionaries, we never had a clue that God would use this road to take us on our next journey!

We had Piero, the Italian mature student, who lived with us for about 4 years, and was into the Viking philosophy, a great guy, nicknamed, “The Ghost” by his friends, as he slept in the day and was up at night, going to bed at 6am, a real night owl.

Numerous students from Spain, who are one of the friendliest people groups we know!

We also had many students from Taiwan, Jojo, or “Yu Ju”, came to us through an agent in Birmingham, I’ve spoken in another post about Alice, who used to buy us donuts every other weekend!

We had Danish, German, French, Japanese, Jordanians and Italians pass through the house and of course we shared the gospel with all of them as we welcomed them into our lives.

And then there were the students who were slightly rebellious or just couldn’t get the house rules.

We had few expectations really, treat everyone else with respect, no smoking and no bringing boys home, but for a small minority this was just too much!

Student Dating

At one stage we had two Spanish and an Algerian student living all together.

Our relationship did not start well for several reasons, as the Algerian boy was into hip hop music and insisted on referring to us as “MF’s”, which did not go down well with us, I’ll leave the meaning to your imagination, but he thought it was fine.

He also had a habit of turning up the music loud in the daytime, which annoyed our neighbours and they would come around to complain about it and he would deny it and say he wished they would die.

We also cooked for him and he had a nasty habit of leaving what we had cooked and sneaking downstairs in the middle of the night, taking a pizza out of the freezer (when we had already provided him with food) and scraping the top off, throwing it away and eating the base.

It’s understandable that not everyone is going to like Western food, but this was one of the reasons we preferred students to cook for themselves and sometimes I even tried to learn to cook a few of their dishes for them to make them feel at home.

After a while the Algerian boy started dating the Spanish girl, living with us at the time.

One week we went away on holiday, leaving a lady from church in charge to keep an eye on them.

At the weekend she came home and walked into the kitchen to find that the couple had made dinner, using the other student’s food and left as she was coming in, without washing up any of the pots or saucepans they had used.

When we got back he denied everything, “Who was it then, the fairies at the bottom of the garden?”

We asked him to leave and not even to be on our property.

Many times the girl tried to sneak him up the stairs, and when sat in the living room, I could see them sneaking down the stairs through the glass door!

Dave went upstairs and found him in the wardrobe!        

Still dating and completely infatuated, they used to sit on the wall outside our house and when it rained, sit under the porch on our neighbours property!

A definite no no!

Electricity Isn’t Cheap

Another entertaining one was the Taiwanese girl who used to creep out onto the landing in the middle of the night to turn the thermostat up.

The problem was that the radiators were on and she insisted on having the window open.

“I need fresh air,” she told Dave.

She moved out to share a house and a couple of months later Dave visited them.

“It’s so cold in here”, noticed Dave, “I know”, she said, “We can’t afford the electricity!”

Lesson learned!

Wild Swedes!

One of the most infamous sets of students we ever had staying at our house, in the mid 90’s were two Swedish girls from Oslo.

They had a habit of sitting in the garden in the evenings and drinking a bottle of vodka before going to the local pub and bring back boys.

One evening they were so drunk, they didn’t even get to the pub because they tripped over the step back into the kitchen

door and ended up going to bed!

I often saw them sneaking down the stairs (a common occurence in our house it seems!), peering through the glass panels in the living room door and sneaking back up with whichever boy they had picked up from the pub, when they saw me sitting on the sofa doing my morning devotional!

Suffice it to say that our elderly neighbours were none too impressed, as they sat in the garden drinking, and fell out of taxis at night, laughing raucously and shouting to each other, as they returned from a night of clubbing!

This was, of course, against the house rules, as was smoking.

The girls obviously thought this was holiday time, and one of the girls, brought up by her dad, had been pretty much allowed to do whatever she liked.

That however, was not going to wash with us.

It was fairly obvious that the girls were smoking in their rooms, especially as we didn’t smoke and one day Dave confronted them about it.

God had given him a picture of a broken cigarette, which meant that our no-smoking rule had been broken.

Dave said to the Swedish student, Rebekah, “You’ve been smoking in your room haven’t you?”

“No”, she said, as he walked to the window and looked behind the curtain.

There on the windowsill was a cup, full of cigarette ends!

“What is this?” Dave asked, “Did they come in through the window?!”

On another occasion Dave was in the kitchen praying and wanted to show the girls that God was more than a religion and that He was real.

So he asked God for a word of knowledge and God gave him the word, “Mother” and a woman with a bald head.

“Is your mother still alive?” he asked.

“No, she died when I was five”, she told him.

This gave him an understanding of why she was so wayward and he had compassion for her.

“Your mum died of cancer didn’t she?” he asked.

“Yes”, she said.

Dave said “My father also died from a heart attack when I was 20.”

“How did you know my mum died from cancer?” she asked.

Dave told her that God had given him the word “mother” and shown a woman with their hair falling out.

The next day I spoke to my neighbour’s son and he told me that the whole pub (bar) was talking about it.

Again, we had to ask these girls to move out, which they didn’t seem to understand and thought their behaviour was quite normal, we wondered if their next host family would think so.

Now, not all the students we had were bad, a small percentage, but certainly colourful!

A Hardworking Pole

In our later days, we had a really excellent guy from Poland staying with us.

He had signed up with a local temping agency, so when they called him, he packed up his sandwiches and headed off to work.

The same thing happened the next day, but when he got there they had already filled the postition and they didn’t have any work for tomorrow.

The next day, he was in the kitchen packing his sandwiches again when Dave saw him and said, “I thought they didn’t have any work for you today?”

To which he replied, “Yes, but I want to work!”

Now there’s a work ethic for you!

Jesus or Cheeses?!

To finish on a humourous note, we took a Spanish student to church with us once.

Halfway home they asked us why the people kept talking about cheeses?!

Hesus and cheeses must have sounded quite similar to them!