My story: Usha Reifsnider

“We lived in an area of the West Midlands that was mostly White, and there wasn’t an Indian community on our doorstep. My dad was one of the first men who was able to bring his wife over from India, and so all the single men who’d had to come on their own had a sense of community that was centred on our house at the weekends.” 

She lights up when remembering those weekends. ​“Oh my goodness. They were full of food, and noisy. I’m an extreme extrovert, as was my mother, and we were a very musical family. My dad would pull out of harmonium and we would sing Indian songs. It was just fun,” she says. ​“Now, I also was part of a White community because I went to school.”

This was not long after Indian independence, and Usha remembers history being taught at school ​“very much from a superior position”. The prevailing attitude was ​“that we were less than welcome and in some ways less than human”. But individual relationships countered that narrative: ​“Our neighbours had a different idea of who we were, not what society said.”

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Two doors down lived Mrs McHugh, whose brother had a turkey farm. Every Christmas Eve she would bring a turkey to Usha’s family and put it in their oven before going to midnight mass. 

“The turkey cooked all night, and we would wake up on Christmas morning and the house was warm. The Indian community would come. There were no buses on Christmas Day, so they would walk five or six miles. This is 55 years ago, and people still talk about it.” 

When Usha was about five, one of her teachers invited her and her sisters to Sunday school. Sometimes Usha’s mum would come to watch them sing. On Mother’s Day, the church did something that meant a great deal to the young family. Each child was given a flower for their mum – and if they brought their mum, they got two! 

Her parents had a very small income and sent much of it back to family in India. One night Usha came downstairs and found her mum crying as she tried to make a pair of shoes for one of her children. ​“I had no idea how poor we were. So getting a flower was great. If five of us went and took our mum, we came home with a bouquet.” 

Usha remembers that church as a place of acceptance, which allowed her to come to faith in Jesus in her own time: ​“They never argued against our Hinduism. They only taught us the Bible. When we were ready, we made the decision we wanted to, and they supported it.” 

Several years later, Usha decided to be baptised. By this time her family had moved to another town, and the Christians she now knew had stricter ideas of discipleship. ​“We were encouraged to not be in any place with idols, which meant we couldn’t stay in our own home. It destroyed the relationship between me and my parents.” 

At only 19, Usha had counted the cost and made the decision she understood to be right – only to be let down by her Christian community. ​“I was homeless for two years even though I went to church every Sunday. I quickly learned that when Christians called you ​‘sister’, it only meant from 10 till 12 on a Sunday. My whole concept of what family is had to change.” 

Since then, she has seen the extremes of what community can do – from those who let her go hungry to those who helped her and her husband to buy a house. She poses this challenge: ​“When you bear my burden as somebody who’s come from a Hindu family, what’s it going to cost you? Because saying ​“I’ll pray for you” and calling me sister is not going to cut it. The number of converts that have told me about being homeless – they can’t share this in church because we want the success story.” 

Eventually Usha and her parents did reconcile, but the pain of their life in the UK was not over. ​“There was a horrible attack on my parents in the corner shop, and the people weren’t prosecuted. My dad was very, very badly hurt. He had to have 22 surgeries on his eye.” 

After 50 years they moved back to India. ​“But miraculously, both of my parents came to faith. It’s still, to me, almost unreal. 

“One evening, my mum recalled all the kind things Christians had done for us: the Sunday school teacher, the neighbour, the songs that we used to sing. My mum told my dad that she had become a Christian, but they never discussed it. And yet 10 years later, he did the exact same thing. He remembered the first time he met Christians, the kind things that people did. My dad came to faith in 2016 and 10 days later, he passed away in my arms.”

Usha imagines those acts of kindness not as seeds but as spores: ​“Community is more than roots. Millions of spores come out of mushrooms and go everywhere. They may stay dormant for a long time, silently growing. Bearing somebody’s burden costs. That’s what community is.”

Usha is passionate about making space for everyone’s voices in church, even when it is uncomfortable. In December 2024 she published Unmuted, which she describes as ​“an opportunity for evangelicals to hear from some of our own, albeit with a different life experience”. Contributors share challenging perspectives including from people who have experienced trafficking, those living with disabilities and Roma groups.