Adventures WorldRace SethBarnes Sponsorship Giving

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This place is relatively abandoned compared to the Budapest train station where there was a nearly constant hustle and bustle here people come in droves for one train and then the 20 minutes between trains the platform is completely empty except for the 7 of us and our 14 bags.

There is an unnatural peace here on this platform. Nobody is freakin out about the fact that we have no where to sleep tonight. It is now 4:35, we will see what happens, but we know even better given the events of the past few days that our God is big enough to provide even when we think it is impossible. We know for certain that the Lord has ordained our steps here and has sent us here and like Dez says ‘he is going to do this month, what he does best, take care of his kids.’

Tamica returns…

I left to go on the mission that I will now tell you about…

Tamica told us at about 4:50 that they had met a young man, Davor, who owns a internet café who was also a Christian and wanted to help us out. He let us have free internet for the afternoon and invited us to his church this evening to meet some young people in town and hopefully get plugged into some ministry contacts.

By the way in case you didn’t know our primary mission this month is pioneering Croatia for new ministry areas. We are going into two cities Osijek and Vinkovci to find ministry contacts there that we can hook up with and maybe send teams to work with in the future. This is a very exciting assignment as we have to completely rely on God for everything. We don’t know anyone in this city so we don’t have a place to sleep tonight, we don’t know how to get to the grocery store, we don’t have anyone to talk to about ministry, we are on a limited budget and have to travel quite a bit because of there being two cities and we have to get to Turkey at the end of the month. We are so excited about God entrusting this to us so early on in the race.

So back to the story, some of the team went to go register us with the police (because you will be thrown out of the country if you don’t register within 24 hours and they find you) and do some grocery shopping for dinner and breakfast, some others went to go scout out a camping spot that Davor told us about. Tamica came to the train station to instruct us to start moving bags to the internet café for the afternoon. Within 3 trips and 7 people all of us carrying bags and rotating shifts of staying with bags at either end of our trek, we got them all relocated. Stacy, Tamica, Joe and I were the first shift to go out and Stacy and I stayed at the café with the bags to wait for them to come back. While we waited we got on the internet and I found an email from a contact I had emailed yesterday. It said that they wanted to talk to us and to call them as soon as we got to town. We had asked them about ministry contact and about housing so Stacy and I got really excited. We called them and through a series of phone calls we arranged a meeting at 6:30.

So now we were waiting some more. 5:30 and the 6:00 roll around and all of the sudden I see Lauren peek her head over the stairwell wall and ask “Do we want to eat in here or outside?” They had food! Stacy, Lauren and I gathered around one table to begin making pb&j sandwiches for everybody and dividing up bananas. They have really interesting bread here. A loaf is stacked not as it would be sliced but like two half loaves stacked side by side. I thought that was interesting, something I had never seen. We all had our fill and realized that a loaf went farther than we originally thought they would so we actually got another half a sandwich on top of our one. Apparently someone asked Davor where we could find the cheapest groceries in town because when we were done eating he took Liz and Lauren to go to the University’s grocery store. They did not have a huge selection there as it was targeting college students and we all know how healthy college students can be, but they did have milk and juice and (wait for it) chocolate milk! That is right we got chocolate milk. When Lauren went to pay for the food they found out that it was not only super cheap (like 5 jugs of milk for 7 kuna which is a little more than an American $1) because of the student discount we were getting with Davor’s student card but in fact we would not pay for it at all, the girl that had gone with them had decided to buy these groceries for us.
 
Meanwhile back at the cafe, we had moved all of our bags out of the building on to the street thinking we needed to get headed to the campground and get the process of setting up camp started. Then Tamica mentions, no we should probably wait for the contacts and see what they have to say about housing. So we did. By 6:45 I was getting worried, what if they couldn’t find the place and just gave up, what if they decided not to come, what if it was a big joke?
 
To Be Continued…