It’s been a while since I’ve blogged, I’ve been slacking, so I thought it was about time for an update!
We started off the race last month in Albania. It was quite the journey to get there. We flew out of the U.S. on July 7th at 5:00pm and took a 9 hour flight to Germany with a 3 hour layover. We then flew from Germany to Turkey; once we arrived in Turkey, we then took a 28 hour bus ride through Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, and then Albania. We went through 4 border crossings, took 6 bathroom/food breaks and finally arrived in Lehze, Albania at 11:00pm on July 9, 2013. We traveled for a total of about 54 hours with the time lost/gained and stepped foot in 6 countries in a little over 2 days. Thankfully everyone had good attitudes and high spirits, which made the trip that much easier.
Side note: You sometimes have to play the thankful game on race days like that, especially when you realize your bus driver was lost most of the time and took you through a whole country you didn’t even have to go through. Extra stamp in my passport though- woohooo!
Once we arrived in Albania we went straight to the children’s camp that we would be working with for the month to get settled in. It was a nice way to transition into the race. We had structure and a schedule every day, with an English speaking contact, which is really rare on this trip. There was a women’s dorm and a men’s dorm. We were with our whole squad last month, which meant I shared a room with 16 other girls.
(Our view from the children's camp)
We had no ac or fans, we hand washed our clothes, used squatty potties, and ate mostly carbs this month; we did have normal showers though!
On a typical day we would have breakfast at 7:15 then bible study until around 8:30. We would then split up into ours teams and pair up with a team of kids from the camp. The children stayed Monday-Friday so we had the same group every day. The kids had various activities throughout the day just like any other camp. They had swim, football (soccer), billiards, field hockey, bounce house, arts and crafts, and even a dance to end the week on Friday night. Lunch was at 12 and then we had siesta from 1:30-3:30, then back to camp until dinner at 6:00 and so on until “quite time” at 9:00pm. And on Tuesday and Thursday nights, they watched films on Jesus and Moses.
(Some of my team with our group of kids week 2)
Even though the children didn’t speak English, we found out early on that we didn’t need words to communicate. We would play hand games and braid hair and even try to teach each other how to count and spell in the others language. We learned a few short words and phrases from them to get us through the month.
On the nights that the children had movie nights our squad would come together to worship and read scripture. It was nice being able to get to know our whole squad in new ways and have that time to pray together.
We also learned a lot about serving last month. The women got to switch out and serve in the kitchen with the locals that prepared our food and trim shrubbery. The men got to serve by helping our contact take the roof off of a building, trim shrubbery, weld, hang doors, and tag tons of pigs. You never know what ministry will look like from month to month, so even though we were mainly working with children, ministry can really look like anything.
We had 3 free weekends while we were in Albania as well. We got the go to the beach, swim in the Adriatic Sea, we went to the capital, and got to see a castle.
(At the Adriatic Sea)
Out of 55 people, 16 got sick last month and 3 had to go to the hospital, but luckily the Lord healed everyone before we had to travel again.
Last month was a huge blessing in may ways. I know I missed a lot of things, but this is just a small summary of what Albania looked like for us. I wish I would have blogged more along the way so that I could go into more detail about these things, but I’ll try to do better this month. Also, if you have any specific questions about last month, if you leave them in the comment section, I’ll be happy to answer them! Thanks for reading, don't forget to subscribe on the left side of the page to get my blog updates e-mailed to you!
