The world race has been surreal. It still hasn’t quite hit me completely that I will be gone for 11 months. I have been preparing for this journey for about 8 months. Now it is finally here! Launch was held in Atlanta Georgia. We had several days of meetings and final details before we left. It was a very exciting time to meet many of the other racers parents and also hard to say good-bye to my own parents. We flew out of Atlanta to Amsterdam on the 7th with an 8hr flight. We explored Amsterdam, mostly the airport for me for 8 hours during our delay. We then had a 3-4hr flight to Bucharest. Then we had a 3hr drive to Dragonesti-Olt, Romania.
Outside the Amsterdam Airport on our 8 hour Delay
Our squad is together in the same place for the first month. We have a big house where the girls are staying and the guys and some girls are in tents/hammocks outback. We walk each day about 10 minutes to the church that we are partnering with, and about 15 minutes to the “penny market” grocery store for food. The conversion rate for money is $1.00 US to about 3.44 Lei or .35 cents to 1 Lei. We have been super blessed to have showers, electricity, toilets, and wi-fi "sometimes when not all 50 of us are on" at our ministry house.
In the mornings before breakfast we go for runs. We learned to stay on the paved roads, because when you venture down the gravel roads the dogs run out and show you their “pearly whites” and chase you. Not saying this isn’t good motivation, but motivation we are not fans of. There are other obstacles while running. Sometimes there are horses that you need to walk slowly around, or new concrete getting put down in driveways, or the random occurrence of someone asking you where the train station is. On one run we stopped and helped some people pick up some fruit for several minutes.
So far for ministry I have helped hand out reading glasses, clean up trash around the public school, and chatted with the locals through our translator. There has been a huge amount of other ministry going on, all in small groups of us.Since our squad is still getting to know each other we have squad time each night, to learn more about each other.
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A big part of the world race is raw community. I have had very great communities in the last several years. Most people might think that the only part of this raw community that different is that you will be living with people 24/7. But just living with people you can hide so much of your life. I have lived with multiple people in the past but I truly didn’t know much about some of them at all. In the world race we are asked to be real, honest, and vulnerable with each other. If anything that comes up we communicate with each other and resolve issues. It has been amazing how deep we have gotten with each other and how fast we have gotten to truly know and love each other. This is what I believe all Christian communities should look like. Surface level relationships are meaningless and I am so glad to be a part of this deep and raw community!
