Przemek

This week's coverage has been done on Przemek. A teacher of religious studies in Poland; here, a leader of a church group known as "The Chillout Club" and one of the initiators of the Youth Mass at the local church here in Luton.

'Our Lady Help of Christians' is one of very few Catholic churches in Luton, Bedfordshire. Masses are usually a mixture of different people, races and ethnic groups, Polish people being a significant one recently.

I got to know him and the rest of the club in March. Funny enough, Przemek comes from the same city I do; back there in Wroclaw (population of nearly 700 thousand) he used to live in a neighborhood right next to mine. And back there we could have possibly met in one school keeping in mind we're both teachers, yet here, we were sitting on the floor of the same church backroom.

Iggy, a Slovak buddy of mine from the university's Christian Union, is a fun of good food and snacks. He is one of a number of Slovak people who work with the Chillout Club.

Struggling hard with finding an appropriate job at the beginning of his staying in England, Przemek found out that a good friend of his was experimenting with setting a youth club in a local church, a place where young people could meet up after the mass and, without the sometimes patronizing voice of the priest, talk about their faith, God and everyday things.

Emilia, a Polish girl living in England for a couple of years has proved her artistic talent by means of numerous paintings and collage-type images; things that breathe in more light into dull interiors of the church hall.

"From a respectable teacher to a 'dishwasher'" his words seem to reflect thousands of similar stories as he reveals that he started as a kitchen porter in a restaurant. For him, at the beginning that was the most difficult part - a complete change of the way of how you view things and others perceive you. Also, the place itself - Luton's probably one of the biggest melting pots in Europe whereas Poland with its 97% of Polish people couldn't be more homogenious.

In the autumn/winter time the meetings kick off after 6p.m. and end around 9 so what we have outside is utter darkness. Sometimes, the warmth and cosiness of the place help you forget the English weather - the lonely umbrella being the only reminder of it.

The other day we got into a debate on religion-based schools: 'Yep, I guess Polish people prefer to send their kids to Catholics schools in England (a phenomenon unknown in Poland) because they know it offers them better tuition...and also, I don't know if there was any point of me teaching in a school which was predominantly Muslim, which seems to be the case in Luton. Plus, I don't know if the parents wanted that for their kids.'

'When one of those at the table with him heard this, he said to Jesus, "Blessed is the man who will eat at the feast in the kingdom of God." Luke 14:15 (NIV) on Jesus's Parable of The Great Banquet.

Maria and...Maria, two Slovak students who along with Iggy outnumber any other nationality in the room.

Tea and biscuits? We're in England in case somebody forgot.

All in all, he was somebody this project had been done for. Somebody who came here to earn some money, but who didn't follow the ways of the majority of Polish people, those who slave off 12 hours a day just to go back home, lock themselves away, turn on the Polish tv, shop at a local Polish grocery, hear gossip and complaints on the lack of benefits they could use, and after that return home on boards of Wizzair of EasyJet just to find everybody amazed that their English consists of 20-30 words which hardly resemble the junior high school student level, not to mention the Shakespearean verse.