A little glimpse into this holiday on the race!
A few of us woke up early to go on a run, and met most of the team by the river. We watched the sun rise over Calafat while listening to worship music and hanging out with our favorite furry friend, Jill. Alison read Scripture over us, and we just spent time enjoying the early morning.
Then we headed back to the apartment to get ready for church. After the past few weeks here, we are masters at maneuvering the 8-girls-to-1-bathroom ratio. It’s surprisingly not an issue. Most of us had breakfast and coffee, and some quiet time with the Lord before heading out again.
We walked over to church and arrived around 10 am for fellowship before service started. The congregation is small, but you can tell they regard one another as family.
The craziest thing about Easter in Bulgaria is that it wasn’t Easter at all. Well it was—but not really. Our Easter landed on the 21st this year, while Orthodox Easter (and the day that most Balkan Christians, evangelical or not, celebrate Easter) was a week later on the 28th. Church went on as usual. We sang some songs, struggled to read Cyrillic lyrics (sometimes there were English translations for us or better yet we recognized the song and could sing in English!), Pastor Yavor preached, and we gave testimonies of our month and our lives.
After church, we went back to the apartment to relax. I had just laid down when Shelby, our team leader, gave us instructions on preparing for “the surprise.” Some context: we found out earlier in the month that Month 10 will be a No Host or ATL (Ask the Lord) month for our team! After taking a few days to ask God what He wants us to do next month or where He wants us to go within Serbia, we shared any insight we’d gotten and prayed some more. Then Amy, our logistics/admin extraordinaire worked alongside Shelby to figure out how to fulfill the vision we had for the month.
Shelby gathered us all in the living room, and then closed the door and didn’t let us out for about 15 minutes. Then…THE SURPRISE! Amy and Shelby created a scavenger hunt for us, complete with “eggs” (taped up cupcake liners) that each held clues about the next egg’s location and a piece of where we’re going next month! It was so fun. There was a ton of chocolate involved, including some suspicious looking “bunny poop.”
They even involved the woman who owns the shop we frequent downstairs. We went to go buy a soda, as per the egg’s instructions, and received another clue while checking out. She also asked for a photo with all of us (it felt like India all over again).
At the end, we were able to spell out the clues to read “Belgrade” and “Zlatibor”! We will be splitting our month between the two, and we are SO pumped.
There was a lot of chocolate after that, and then some down time before our evening plans. At around 4:30, we headed over to the church, carrying bags full of ingredients for our very American meal that we planned to make for them: hot dogs, macaroni and cheese, and popcorn. As we were walking over, I couldn’t help but think, “We should have checked the church kitchen this morning to see if they have a big pot we could use.” (At the apartment we had zero pots, and only one deep enough saucer to impersonate a pot, so boiling anything in there took quite a bit of patience.)
The joke was on all of us, because when we walked into the church kitchen, there were no pots—and no stove! The rest of the team went on to ministry, and Amy and I toted all of the ingredients back to our apartment to cook vigorously for an hour.
Their ministry was evangelizing and handing out New Testaments in the park while Pastor and another church member played guitar. Everyone said they had a lot of fun doing it, and hundreds of New Testaments were handed out!
Back to Amy and me: we used our pan/pot to cook as much pasta as we could. Another thing about our kitchen: we have two burners and a tiny little oven, but we can’t use the stove and the oven at the same time or it gets overwhelmed and gives up. I hope you’re starting to get a picture of this cooking experience.
It was a mad dash. We had 1 ½ burners, an imposter pot, and 15 people to feed. And they knew enough about American stereotypes to expect big portions. As round 1 of the pasta was boiling, I got to work on the hot dogs. I ripped open the package to find that every single one of the 20 hot dogs we bought was individually wrapped. While I peeled plastic off of hot dogs, Amy was unwrapping individual slices of American cheese. It was tedious, to say the least.
As the hot dogs cooked on the stove and I moved them, Amy wrapped each one in aluminum foil to keep the heat in. We ended up making some good (and garlicky) mac and cheese that honestly impressed me a bit.
Then another task came. If you didn’t catch this drift before, our kitchen is quite limited. We don’t actually have large bowls to serve, stir, mix, or keep anything in. We do however have a couple of huge Kaufland reusable grocery bags. We had a lot of people to feed and plenty of popcorn kernels, so we got to it. I scrubbed the inside of the bag in our tiny sink just long enough to realize there was no way of rinsing it off without turning our cramped kitchen into a slip and slide. So, into the shower I went… This was probably one of my proudest problem solving moments. Ever.
We made as many batches of popcorn as we could before Pastor Yavor arrived at the apartment building to pick us up. He drove us back to the church, where the rest of the team was, and we all ate together. Then we had a movie night and watched We Were Soldiers using the church projector, and eating popcorn out of the Kaufland bag.
On our way home, I called my family in Long Island and got passed around, catching up and cluing them in on what this month has looked like in Bulgaria.
Not exactly traditional by my definition, but it was a full and eggs-ellent Easter Sunday (sorry about the pun, but I had to!).
