It’s September 12th,
what a month it’s been. We left Ireland
on 9/1 by plane to Romania, once in Romania Beautiful Feet and Benkadi said
farewell to the rest of K squad and all of J squad as we headed for our Hostel. We stayed in the Hostel for 2 nights. We left the Hostel on 9/3 and walked 15/30
min with our packs on to the metro station, we then took the metro to the train
station where we waited almost 2 hours for our 13 hour sleeper train.
The sleeper train
was just the beginning of what this month was going to look like. It was extremely hot and the beds were like a
hard rock hanging from the wall. We were
stopped twice for passport checks, but it did not seem like just twice. The first time they took our passports and
walked off the train, returning over an hour later with out passports. We then continued on to our next passport
stop where we were awaken by a doctor. Thinking we were done we laid back down only to be awakened again by Mr.
Passport guy who scanned our passports. After this guy we had some guy come into our cabin, which wasn’t big
enough for the 4 of us, and ask us questions in Russian. When he finally realized that we did not
understand each other he left and was on his way. We all then broke out into laughter because
it was extremely funny and we were beyond exhausted. Oh but that was not it, I did not fall asleep
fast enough because we got to our wheel change where they worked on the wheels
for over an hour before we could continue. When we finally made it to our stop we got off the train, greeted our
contacts and soon found out that we were not done traveling. We were informed that we would be waiting for
2 hours and then taking another train for 5 hours to where we would meet our
final destination.
Ministry has been
pretty easy this month. The first day I
got to go with Nicole and Hollis to visit 2 orphanages. The first housed 37 children. We only got to see a few because the rest
were at the lake. The second house 120
children, some who are special needs children. I really enjoyed the second and wish we could have stayed to play with
the children. As we were walking around
there was a little boy who was following us everywhere. I tried to wave at him several times, but it
wasn’t until we were leaving that he waved back. The evenings have been filled with working
with the children at the Church. Everyone knows I love kids and I sure do love these kids. I have one who is by far my favorite. His name is Cola (that’s how it’s pronounced
but I’m not sure how it’s spelled). He
has two older sisters. The three of them
live with their grandmother because their mother is a drug addict and their
father is an alcoholic. It really breaks
my heart because Cola comes to play in the same outfit, an outfit which is all
hand-me downs from his sisters. I know
I’m going to see this everywhere I go but this is only the beginning and things
like this are going to be really hard for me to see, especially coming from
working in a place where the families are really well off.
Today we just got
home from visiting the Rehabilitation Center and cutting down corn stalks. (video’s to follow to explain the events from
the last 24 hours)
