After putting up the last post, I thought it would be good to add some photos and such of some of the fun things of the past month. :-) So here's a little glimpse...
A couple of weekends ago I went to the Vajta Wine Festival, an autumn gathering where people dress in traditional costume, serve little desserts, drink last year's wine or juice from the grape harvest (for us from the college, that would just be the juice), dance, and go on a procession through the town in wagons and carriages. The guy at the beginning of the video isn't whipping anything in particular - I think it's just to make noise. After I finished making the video, Lilla (one of the Hungarian students here) and I went and danced with the ladies. The whole thing was pretty fun!
Serbia
This was the post that was hard to write (and the reason I didn't update the blog for a long time)... maybe it was the depth of struggle that I saw there with the church or maybe it was because of the interesting mishaps I "fell into" ...like accidentally walking into an open sewer or having my camera stolen or coming back to the school with a bad cold. There were high moments too - like getting the churches storeroom put into order:
During
Before
After (Tiffany did the bulk of getting it to look this pretty as we got the boxes ready)
Seeing the food cooked outside was neat
(and scary but we all lived)
Anna and Rachel are posing with the rice as it is cooking
Eating together under a tent
the guys poured concrete
and we did some drama with the kids
On Saturday of the outreach we split into groups and visited several gypsy communities to sing and pray with them. The group that I went with was about half from the church and half from the school - so there were some who were very familiar to the people we were visiting and we were welcomed warmly. One of the men there made coffee for us and brought out soda. The children and some of the young women gathered with us, while some others stayed a little back. For the others from the school, it was their first time being to a place like that - with such obvious poverty - and it was a good reminder for me that it is a shocking sight. One of the young women stood out against the landscape of tiny, broken down houses. She was wearing strappy high heeled shoes in a place filled with dirt and mud, where walking to the road in tennis shoes is difficult. She reminded me of the girls from the summer camps in Romania - grasping hard for something in the midst of difficulty.
The gypsy villages were a stark contrast to the night before, when a group of us had gone to Belgrade for a bible study and then to a concert afterward. It may seem like a strange outreach activity, but the Belgrade Dixieland Orchestra had made a cd with the Budapest Gospel Choir (from Calvary Chapel Budapest) and the pastor who does the bible study there had helped arrange it, so we were just there to be friendly. It was quite a good concert - if you like Dixieland Jazz - but also felt a little weird... I mean seriously... Dixieland Jazz in Serbia? I have a video but uploading it takes forever. Sorry!
Tomorrow!
Well, in the morning we leave - bright and early! - for Split, Croatia for ten days. I don't have a camera anymore, so I can't guarantee that I'll take a lot of pictures but I will do my best to get some on here sometime in the next century so that you can see a little of what we were up to. :-)
Please pray for our team - for health, for unity, for safe travel, against accidents, and most especially please pray for those who will be hearing the gospel perhaps for the first time.
