Praying with South Asians in Portugal
Suneel Shivdasani and Thomas Hieber visited Portugal as part of their two year project to research South Asians in Belgium, Netherlands and Portugal.
We visited Lisbon, Porto and different places across the Algarve. We were able to take local Christians, church leaders and missionaries for their first visit to a mosque, gurudwara and the Lisbon Ismaili centre, creating opportunities for discussion and prayer.
At the Gurudwara in Porto, the priest was so grateful that he asked for a Bible and wanted to visit the church. He sang us a couple of Gurbani Sangeet (songs from the Guru Granth). The words were similar to a Psalm, which we found on a Bible app and gave to the priest to read aloud in Panjabi. We were able to pray for him and the community, and one of the church members was also able to pray (for the first time) with a Sikh lady.
In the Ismaili centre in Lisbon, our Ismaili tour guide let us pray for the community in the prayer hall.
In Sao Teotonio, a small rural town, a large community of Nepalis, Bangladeshis, and Indians pick fruit in local fruit farms. They work long hours in difficult conditions with low pay, but are on their way to getting European passports. A young Nepali runs an agency that finds workers for the farms. His father had been a fruit picker and he had grown up in the area. He explained that while wages were low, the farms themselves were under pressure to survive. His manager, a Portuguese Christian lady, told us that a number of Nepalis attend the local catholic church. We also visited a small Nepali fellowship.
In Porto, a church has started a South Asian house group. In Lisbon, we visited another Nepali fellowship, and heard of a church planter working among South Asians. The Lisbon Project reaches out to migrants, with about 600 South Asians registered. But otherwise there appears to be limited engagement with South Asians by churches. Pray that the Lord would raise up laborers for his harvest field.
In August we’ll be visiting Belgium.
