Last month my squad was originally supposed to go to Bulgaria. We found out about a week before leaving Romania that we were re-routed and were no longer going to Bulgaria. Instead, we would be going to Moldova. Though I was really excited to go to Bulgaria, I found myself also excited to go to Moldova. Then my team found out that we would not be going to Moldova either. We would be going to Transnistria along with another team.
“Trans-what?” I asked. “I’ve never heard of that place before. Where is it?”
Transnistria is a small “country” within Moldova. This “country” in fact isn’t really a country. Moldova is the only country that recognizes it as a country. Everywhere else in the world continues to call that area Moldova. You’ll have a hard time to find it on a map. We couldn’t even get a stamp in our passports when crossing the border because America doesn’t recognize it. We had to get our stamps on a piece of paper. But that’s where we went last month, to the country that doesn’t exist.
It was a great month, one of my favorite months so far. We had two assignments. In the mornings, I would go to English Club along with two other girls form my team and one girl from the other team, team Awaken. English Club was a lot of fun because we basically did conversational english for two hours. Each morning we would pair up with a couple people and just talk. There were a few women there who were really sweet. One day, they took us to a local fortress and we toured all around. They were awesome and we had so much fun!
In the afternoons, I was on construction duty. We lived in a big cement building which was being turned into a family center. The grounds was under construction. We were able to help the men working there by leveling the grounds within the basement of the building that were in the process of building. By “leveling the grounds”, I really mean that we were digging up and moving dirt. Everyday. For one month. No, it wasn’t the most glorious of tasks and I can’t complain. Honestly, the first two weeks I was unable to work on construction because I was still recovering from pneumonia. But we were able to level the ground that they wanted level and I know that it really helped the men to be able to work on more complicated issues, like welding and such.
My favorite part of Transnistria was the evenings. I had the nights “off” of ministry, but I was able to spend a lot of time with a young man that lived on the grounds also. His name was Kolya. Kolya was a typical teenage boy. He loves music, listening to it constantly all day long blaring as loud as he could. He carried a small speaker around in his pocket, quickly earning him the nickname “music man” as you could know exactly where he was on the grounds at all times by listening for the music. Kolya spoke limited english, but he was very fun and would often come to hang out with us at night. We would practice english and he would teach me Russian, which is the language in Transnistria. Kolya quickly became like a little brother to me and I looked forward to getting to hang out with him at night. It was really hard to say goodbye at the end of the month.
It’s crazy to me, how the country that I had never heard of before has become one of my top three countries. The country that doesn’t exist. I never would have known what I was missing out on if we didn’t go there. There is another really cool story that happened there that I will save for another time, because it deserves it’s own blog, so keep an eye out for it!
