A gypsy life for me

After wandering around town for 45 minutes, we’ve finally found an internet cafe. Needless to say, we made it to Romania in one piece. From Ireland, we traveled three hours by plane, followed by a ten hour bus ride. That was great fun. We’re staying in a small village where the people live very simply. It really feels like the World Race has begun now. My team is living with Gina and Loise. Besides hi, bye, and good morning, they don’t speak a lick of English. We had a translator, but lost her after the third day. Team Unwritten has a translator, but he still has a hard time with the language. We’re mostly relying on sign language, animal noises, and smiles. It seems to be working for the most part. Gina and Loise (Mama and Papa) are taking great care of us. We are fed far too much food. We tried to tell them that we were full yesterday morning, but they thought we were saying that we were sick. 5 out of 6 of us were sick, but that was beside the point. Papa has been teaching us Romanian hymns, and he takes great pride in watching over us when we walk through the village.

 

 

We’ve broken down our ministry here into a few areas. Tomorrow we will start a vacation Bible school type children’s ministry. We’ll play games, sing songs, and have a Bible story lesson. We have a soccer tournament scheduled to try to reach some of the young adults. For the women we have gender specific Bible study and a spa day. We’re going to wash and fix their hair, give them mini pedicures, paint their nails, etc. They have been so generous, so I’m looking forward to the chance to pamper them. The kids go back to school next week, so we plan to go teach English classes. Besides the structured ministry, we’ve been going door to door inviting people to the church services that go on every night.

 

We are definitely learning to do without this month. We have no running water, so we get it from a well. Showers consist of splashing around some water from a bucket. There is no toilet or sink, but we have a very fashionable outhouse we call Seosahm (pronounced Shoseph). We’ve started a tradition of naming animals and other things after people from the previous country. We have dogs named Jucinda and Roland, bunnies named Alan and Darren, kittens named Mark and Rachel, and an outhouse named Shoseph. Don’t worry, it’s flattery- we loved our Irish comrades. Anyway, we’re lucky to have Shoseph. We’ve all bonded with him over the past few days. We have two rooms in our home. NIck and Lacey have the married room, and I’m with Chelsea, Colby, and Ken in the other room. Our pillow chat is very entertaining.

 

I’m really excited about being here. The people are incredible – their faith is so pure, so real. The kids act like they’ve known us forever. I can already tell that it’s going to be hard to leave. I still can’t believe this is my life. I wish I could tell you everything I’m seeing, everything I’m experiencing. Blogs and pictures just can’t do it justice. I’ll leave you with a few pictures to give you a small taste.