The bad thing about missing a week of posting on here is how hard it becomes to sift through the memories and decide which experiences, perceptions, and thoughts are worth sharing. Since the last blog I wrote things have changed very much. Here's a quick overview:
June 19 - Kayla and Sydney, two girls on a short term trip to Sibiu, arrived at the Bucharest airport and stayed with me at Rebecca's for the night before the three of us headed to Sibiu. I tried to show them a bit of the city that night but we got interrupted by a lightening storm and decided to head back. Early the next morning we took a taxi to the train station. On the train I met a girl who spoke English and wanted to chat a bit - as it turned out, the world is small. Very small. Ioana and I have mutual connections at three Romanian churches and enjoyed a really encouraging several hours as we traveled across Romania.
June 21-23 - Three days in Ocna Mures... they went by so quickly! Seeing the kids again at the orphanage there was a little hard because most of them did not remember me from when I was there two years ago and we arrived at the same time as a team from the Bible college in Cluj - a team of Romanians. But after the ice broke we started having a good time. Kayla and Sydney jumped right in to playing futbol with the kids and made quick friends. After a little bit, several of the kids remembered me and we tried to talk a little bit. Tante Luci at the orphanage laughed when I started talking with her and said (in Romanian) "NOW she learns some Romanian!" Little Maria just laughed at alot of my attempts to understand her though and would just say, "Americani." But it was not all fun and conversation - the rain started the first day we were there and by the morning the basement of the girls orphanage had flooded. We spent a good part of that day trying to get the water out with brooms and pans and towels. Once we had it all cleaned out the rain started again and by the next day the streets of Ocna were flooded too. There wasn't much to be done until the rain stopped so we went back to Sibiu as planned, praying that the rain would stop.
June 24 - Sighisoara... my third visit to the oldest still inhabited citadel in Eastern Europe... and the first time I got to go inside the old church there! No pictures allowed, but it was definitely worth seeing. This was Kayla and Sydney's tourist-y day and we enjoyed a trip to the old city and some time to relax. At the end of the day Stephanie and Leslie took us to see a friend of theirs who made some Texas fried chicken.
June 25-26 - The other tourist-y day turned into ministry when we found out that an older couple had not received much help with their house after the flood.
June 27 - Preparation for kids camp!
June 28-July 5 - We will be at the kids camp all this week, working with 15 girls from a gypsy village.
Please be praying for the camp as we begin to build relationships and reach out to these girls. A week is such a short time, but the Lord can open many things in less time!
I will be writing more over this week, but will probably not be able to update until next week.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
An outing (pictures)
Now that the kids have finished for the summer, we decided to take a little outing to Targoviste (Tar-go-vish-tay), which was the capital of Romania before Bucharest.
Making plans and comparing routes...
We got there... but it was a Monday, so the area around the ruins was closed... we got a good view from a nearby park... this tower was built by Vlad Tepes.
We could have gone in through the broken back fence (look close), but Rebecca wouldn't let us.
Me and Claudia posing with Vlad
Since Targoviste was closed, we headed up the hill to check out an Orthodox monastery, which was full of nuns, not monks. One of them gave us a tour.
Inside the old church - build in 1501, but repainted many times.
Looking down on Valea Mare (Big Valley)
Some seriously wild juniper berries
After that we headed further into the mountains and stopped at Bran to see the castle there. It was built here on the Bran Pass to watch out for Turkish invaders in the 14th century. It's famous for being the setting of Bram Stoker's Dracula, but Vlad Tepes (the very loose inspiration for the story) didn't build it or even spend much time here.
On the way back... a strange, yet familiar sight...
Some pictures from the program
Here are some promised pictures...
Rebecca (on the right) and Dana (in the back) work on reading with two of the girls in the program. It's encouraging to hear Rebecca speaking Romanian - helps me believe that I'll also eventually learn to speak it well.
This is one of the kids who just finished first grade. She and I worked on reading. It was exciting to see her interested in what the words mean and to see her work through her frustration over how difficult the work seemed to be. She and two of her sisters come to the program at the church.
This is one of her older sisters, playing with some schoolmates after the end-of-the-year classroom program. Behind her (in blue) is Dana, who works with the program and keeps the kids in line.
At the park, after the "graduation" ceremony at their school... The kids are gathered around Dan, who helps them with homework and also gives them the very important (and often lacking) influence and example of a man in their lives.
Claudia with two of the first-graders in their classroom. Believe it or not, both are gypsy - the blonde one they call Căpşunică or "little strawberry." Both girls did well in their schoolwork this year, learning to read even three and four syllable words!
The kids are finished with the program for the summer, but hopefully will be coming back in the fall along with a new set of first-graders - the younger siblings of these kids or other kids whose parents see the benefit of the program and tell their young kids "you'll be going to school with them when you're older."
Friday, June 11, 2010
Bucharest Week 3
I've been trying to decide what to blog about from this last week, the last week with the kids until they start school again in the fall. Over the past few days we've been at their school, watching their classroom programs, listening to them recite their poems and sing their songs, and today we watched them graduate to the next grade. I will write more and pick some pictures to upload when I am at the office next or when the internet works (this is Romania, after all - and not everything always works as simply as we would love for it to work). Even though I have only been here four weeks, it meant alot for me to see the kids finish the year well. I know it meant much more to those who have been spending all year pouring their lives into these kids. I will leave you with the verse that we put on the thank-you notes for the teachers --
Whoever brings blessing will be enriched, and one who waters will himself be watered.
Proverbs 11:25 (ESV)
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Bucharest Week 2
What is this place where I’m living right now? A place where I sometimes wake up to Manale music, where both children and elderly people beg on the sidewalks, where stray dogs ride the city bus (not even kidding), where in the midst of car horns you can also hear the clipping sound of hooves and the wailing yell of “buying old metal, sell me your metal,” the rich and the poor are in clear contrast here. Some things are just uniquely Bucharest, but in some ways the old way of life still exists here and the mindset of communism still affects the way that people live. And yet people remember 1989 - there was a demonstration here on May 19 (just after I arrived) – and between 30,000 and 50,000 people showed up in the center of Bucharest to send the government a message: we are Romania. The government, as of today, is reducing the help that they provide to people like that 80 year old widow who barely survives as it is and their financial help for the children who go to school at the same time that they are raising taxes. In 1989 many more people sent that same message and ended communism here, not peacefully, not quickly but it ended. But the message sent back by the government this time was “Who cares?” But today there are more demonstrations – the teachers are striking and there was a metro strike this morning that left the city’s streets crazy with traffic. We walked to the church this morning – it was by far faster and more comfortable than crawling through traffic on a bus.
It is in the midst of this that I am here and it is not the politics that have drawn me here. Why I am here is the question people ask me most often. I tell most my level one response: “I like Romania,” which many of them find hard to believe. One man asked if I liked the politics, a woman in a store asked what would bring me here. Almost everyone asks when I’m going back to America. “Nu stiu,” I tell them – I don’t know for sure. I am open to possibilities and open to the Lord changing my plans – which is linked to my level two response: for some reason my Lord decided to put in my heart a love for this country and its people and a desire to be here and tell people about Him and has opened the doors for me to be here now. The reason that’s level two is because I haven’t figured out how to say it in Romanian - it’s a lot more complicated than “Imi plac Romania.” Come to think of it, my answer would be better put with “Pentru ca Isus te iubeste si el a spus sa ma duc.” ("Because Jesus loves you and He told me to come.”) That may not be perfect Romanian, but it’s my best effort without doing a spell check.
Right now is a learning time and I am learning something that I didn’t realize I needed to learn – kindness over fear. In my past traveling, there was always one rule that I lived by: there is nobody that I have to talk to (except police and customs officials) and there is nothing wrong with simply walking away. I may have lived by that rule too often and I know that there have been times when I overused it. Much of the time I would say that I was running from what I didn’t understand, that I was afraid to stay and try to understand or that I just couldn't be bothered to do anything else. Occasionally there was a reason for running. That’s being challenged here. It’s been challenged before a bit, in a job that brought me to face many people in hard situations and be reminded that they are first people, regardless of anything else. But here I see it every day in a different way. It’s not me representing a company or an organization although I am here with a church. First of all, it’s me before God and how I live my life here – how do I respond to the people around me? Do I reach out to others or run away from things I don’t understand? From the children who beg outside the supermarket, from the empty stares of people like the man who gets high breathing who knows what from a paper bag on the street corner by the park? It will take wisdom to learn when to reach out and pray and when to keep walking and pray. And I know these are not problems that are helped by simply throwing money at them.
Spending a lot of time with Rebecca (the American missionary who has graciously let me move in with her for the time I am here) is teaching me kindness – through gestures I wish I’d thought of… offering fresh bread to a gypsy lady selling flowers outside of a bakery we had just visited, giving a child in the homework program a leu (about $.30) to give to an elderly man begging on the sidewalk, to a little girl who was begging she said no but called her “draga” (my dear) and spoke with kindness. After we passed that little girl she said to me, “That’s where all our kids would be if they weren’t in school.”
What does it mean to choose kindness over fear? Does it mean extending past my comfort zone for the purpose of alleviating someone else’s suffering? I remember reading that kindness is a bridge between two islands. One thing I’ve been thinking about today is what it means that Jesus must increase and I must decrease. I think one thing it means is that I listen when the Spirit speaks and I reach past my comfort zone regardless of how uncomfortable it makes me to do something that brings glory to God and to step out of the way to give God all of that glory. I’ve been thinking about Amy Carmichael and Mother Teresa and others whose stories of reaching out to the “untouchable” and the defenseless have touched the world - people by whom the world can see that there are those who truly love God. I hope to be more like that as each day passes.
It is in the midst of this that I am here and it is not the politics that have drawn me here. Why I am here is the question people ask me most often. I tell most my level one response: “I like Romania,” which many of them find hard to believe. One man asked if I liked the politics, a woman in a store asked what would bring me here. Almost everyone asks when I’m going back to America. “Nu stiu,” I tell them – I don’t know for sure. I am open to possibilities and open to the Lord changing my plans – which is linked to my level two response: for some reason my Lord decided to put in my heart a love for this country and its people and a desire to be here and tell people about Him and has opened the doors for me to be here now. The reason that’s level two is because I haven’t figured out how to say it in Romanian - it’s a lot more complicated than “Imi plac Romania.” Come to think of it, my answer would be better put with “Pentru ca Isus te iubeste si el a spus sa ma duc.” ("Because Jesus loves you and He told me to come.”) That may not be perfect Romanian, but it’s my best effort without doing a spell check.
Right now is a learning time and I am learning something that I didn’t realize I needed to learn – kindness over fear. In my past traveling, there was always one rule that I lived by: there is nobody that I have to talk to (except police and customs officials) and there is nothing wrong with simply walking away. I may have lived by that rule too often and I know that there have been times when I overused it. Much of the time I would say that I was running from what I didn’t understand, that I was afraid to stay and try to understand or that I just couldn't be bothered to do anything else. Occasionally there was a reason for running. That’s being challenged here. It’s been challenged before a bit, in a job that brought me to face many people in hard situations and be reminded that they are first people, regardless of anything else. But here I see it every day in a different way. It’s not me representing a company or an organization although I am here with a church. First of all, it’s me before God and how I live my life here – how do I respond to the people around me? Do I reach out to others or run away from things I don’t understand? From the children who beg outside the supermarket, from the empty stares of people like the man who gets high breathing who knows what from a paper bag on the street corner by the park? It will take wisdom to learn when to reach out and pray and when to keep walking and pray. And I know these are not problems that are helped by simply throwing money at them.
Spending a lot of time with Rebecca (the American missionary who has graciously let me move in with her for the time I am here) is teaching me kindness – through gestures I wish I’d thought of… offering fresh bread to a gypsy lady selling flowers outside of a bakery we had just visited, giving a child in the homework program a leu (about $.30) to give to an elderly man begging on the sidewalk, to a little girl who was begging she said no but called her “draga” (my dear) and spoke with kindness. After we passed that little girl she said to me, “That’s where all our kids would be if they weren’t in school.”
What does it mean to choose kindness over fear? Does it mean extending past my comfort zone for the purpose of alleviating someone else’s suffering? I remember reading that kindness is a bridge between two islands. One thing I’ve been thinking about today is what it means that Jesus must increase and I must decrease. I think one thing it means is that I listen when the Spirit speaks and I reach past my comfort zone regardless of how uncomfortable it makes me to do something that brings glory to God and to step out of the way to give God all of that glory. I’ve been thinking about Amy Carmichael and Mother Teresa and others whose stories of reaching out to the “untouchable” and the defenseless have touched the world - people by whom the world can see that there are those who truly love God. I hope to be more like that as each day passes.
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