There’s a common saying among the men in Eastern Europe, “Thank God He didn’t make me a woman”. And the women say, “Thank God He didn’t make me a Moldovan woman”. Life is hard for the people of Moldova, especially the women.
Month 11, the last month of our Race, we find ourselves in Moldova. Before starting our final month of ministry we had the opportunity to meet up with A squad (who launched in September). They are also in Moldova this month and as we hung out with the 2 all girl teams on their squad they told us about their ministry. And this is the first time I have ever heard about Transnistria. A ‘country’ unknown by many and recognized by few. And when it came time to find out about our final ministry we waited anxiously. How cool would it be to able to do ministry in 2 countries for our final month? And especially a country that is really in need of hope. They read off the other teams. Some teams working in conservative Baptist churches, one team working with a man known for selling beavers, another doing construction. Drumroll: .APEX is going to…. Transnistria!
Even though Transnistria isn’t officially recognized as its own country, it has its own border crossing (one of the strictest we’ve gone thru), currency, and government. Many countries that we go to we aren’t allowed to say that we are visiting for missionary reasons so we put down ‘holiday’, but who goes to a communist country for ‘holiday’?
Transnistria is under communist rule. It is a breakaway territory located between Moldova and Ukraine. The sovereignty of this ‘country’ is unrecognized by any United Nations member state and it has no diplomatic relations with any of them.
So you’d think it’d get easier to say our good-byes since we’ve done it dozens of times now, but the truth is it isn’t. Even though we only worked with these students for a week it was sad to say good-bye last night. We fell in love with these students. We will miss them L
