Dimitra has been coming to our sessions since we started Heart & Parcel and loves cooking as much as we do. She moved to the UK with her husband and two young boys around 10 months ago. She was a hairdresser back in Greece and wants to continue work over here once she is happy with her level of English. She speaks Greek, Albanian and a good amount of Italian and is now starting her journey of learning English here in Manchester.

She tells us that she likes living here because of the people and that her sons are happy at school here. However, she does still miss certain aspects of Greece: the food, her family; mum, sister…. and the balconies out there. Why? Because the clothes dry much more quickly that way.

We asked Dimitra if she would like to lead our next session in English, and she happily agreed. It was a great session, where Dimitra demonstrated to the other mothers from Continue reading “Heart & Parcel Session #8 – Making Tiropitakia” →

For our fifth session we were really excited to come to our local community centre, Levenshulme Inspire to meet women from migrant communities around Levenshulme.

Inspire was a united reformed church redeveloped in 2009 to become a community centre owned and loved by the people of Levenshulme. It has a great cafe, business suites, spacious rooms for venue hire and many, many community groups that come through its doors every day of the week. For us it was no question as to where we would run our sessions.

Continue reading “Heart & Parcel ESOL Session #5” →

After the long Easter break, Heart & Parcel were at Marlborough Primary in Salford to greet some women whose children attend the school, cook some Pierogi and practise some English.

We had wanted to work with Marlborough school for a while ever since Clare ran a 10-week parenting ESOL course there. The school has an inclusive culture and are proud of their multicultural and multilingual identity. Up to 29 languages are spoken at the school and over 40 ethnicities are represented. Continue reading “Heart & Parcel ESOL Session #4” →

A couple of months ago, Sanaa and Aghareed, two women who had attended the last Heart & Parcel session came to their weekly English language parenting course with a plate of delicious pastries. They had really enjoyed folding the Jiaozi that we had made last time, and wanted to show us how they did various folds in Iraq. Because of this, we decided that these women should lead our February session.

Continue reading “Heart & Parcel ESOL Session #3 Making Iraqi Pastries” →

Due to the success of our debut dumpling class at the Welcome Centre, we were invited back in the new year to continue our folding and chatting sessions.

This time we thought we would  make the delicious Jiaozi (饺子). These dumplings originate from China and are traditionally eaten on the eve of Chinese New Year. They take many different forms; their filling, shapes and cooking method varying from province to province.

Continue reading “Heart & Parcel ESOL Session #2 – Making Jiaozi” →