So my squad has been in Albania for a little over a week; and I'm not going to lie, I have had a really hard time here. The language is probably the most difficult thing that I have ever tried to understand, I am really missing my friends and family, I have hurt my knee and the pain won't go away, our ministry is 110% manual labor, I don't get to play with children even though we are working at a children's camp and I am finding it difficult to really appreciate and respect our ministry contact.
The other night I had some really good time with Jesus and agreed to hand all of these things over to Him, but I constantly find myself grabbing ahold of these things over and over again. And so I have decided that now, instead of just saying that I am handing these things back over to God, again, I am actually going to begin walking in that.
You may be wondering how exactly am I going to do that; well, I am going to tell you about some really awesome parts of being here in this country.
I get the privilage of living and working alongside of my entire squad. We are able to stay up late and have crazy awesome conversation. We work side by side and have some more crazy awesome conversations. We study the Word and worship God together, which is always an exciting thing. We also laugh…all of the time!! I couldn't imagine being here in Albania with any other group of people, and I am so lucky to be apart of O Squad!
The scenery is magnificent!! Everything is green, and there are flowers and mountains all around! We even have a castle to visit in our humble little town of Lehze, Albania. I really feel as though I am smack dab in the middle of a movie that is set in the countryside of some European country! It's magnificent!
There is this little store right by the compound that we are staying in, and they have children!! I don't mean that the stores sells children, but that the owners have a family and the kids are really cute! Yesterday I learned all of their names and played with them for a minute. It was really enjoyable, and I cannot wait to see what happens with these kids over the next two weeks that we have here!
The food is awesome!! We get meat, potatoes, bread and cheese very consistently! These are most definitely some of my favorite things!! And….they eat cherries like we eat strawberries, which means that they have cherry flavored everything, including juice!! And let me just tell you, this juice is soooo good!!!
We have excellent living conditions here!! We have beds, hot showers, we can drink the water out of the tap, somebody cooks all of our meals for us and does the dishes as well, and we have a nice big room with chairs for everybody to meet in every day.
And though I don't see eye to eye with our ministry contact all of the time, I am learning some incredible lessons about ministry here. The biggest being about self-sustainability. Realistically, the only way for my dream of having an orphanage to become a reality I will need to figure out a way to have said orphanage be a self-sustaining orphanage. That way the well-being of my beautiful little orphans won't be dependant on anybody else's wallet! I'm not really sure what this will look like, but I know that it is definitely the direction that I want to go!
And my Brittish accent is getting really, really good here!! I almost sound Brittish.
So, at the end of the day all of those things that I am struggling with are outweighed, in a big way, by all of these incredible things that I am learning and experiencing! My month in Albania has been challenging so far, and it probably won't be my favorite month; but God is so good, and He is so very present here. He's doing something big!!!
