I always liked to wake up early and head to the house to get coffee and be alone with the Lord. My team slept in the renovated barn and there wasn’t much personal space, so morning coffee time with Jesus was essential! By 9, breakfast was on the table and everyone was supposed to be up so we could spend the next hour eating, worshiping, and discussing whatever heated subject came up.
Soon after 10 we were on the job. There were a few projects we wanted to accomplish; putting a sidewalk around the house, cementing over the patio in the front and making it bigger, painting the window frames in the dining/common room, filling the trench along one side of the house, trimming tree branches, picking up all the trash inside and along the outside of our compound, making the barn a more livable space, and many other little things. We also did a lot of cooking – we had a dozen people to feed and a very narrow kitchen to cook in. (I finally stopped saying sorry when I bumped into someone cause I wouldn’t have been able to say anything else.)
I recall one day’s work going something like this. After breakfast, the table always had things on it, so I cleaned up and washed dishes. The bathrooms and the dining room/kitchen floors were in dire need of some TLC, so that got taken care of in a hurry. Soon it was lunch time and as I was washing the dishes after, Tyler asked if I could come help with mixing cement. So I got some work shoes on and we mixed so many wheelbarrows of cement. I was the gravel shoveler, and my back and arms let me know I might be getting out of shape. But we had a record of a ‘batch’ every 3-5 minutes! By 5, we accomplished what we set out to do and a hot shower felt glorious! Sarah had made a wonderful dinner and bedtime couldn’t come soon enough for this tired girl! I did manage to stay awake for team-time. I think.
That was the work aspect of things. But we did more than that as well. Most every weekend, we got to go to a different church. The first weekend, we helped the local church with some meetings they were hosting for a speaker from Israel. It had been arranged through a group from Romania, so we had at least five nations represented (Israel, Romania, Bulgaria, U.S., and Canada) in our services.
The second weekend, we headed to a church in Yambol where we met a few interesting youth. They had lots of questions for the Americans and we got to know them as well as we could in 3 hours time. We were on our way to the Black Sea for a few days off, and they told us about some fun things they knew about that area.
We were also able to go to two Friday night services in a town over the mountains. The last one we went to, we stayed the night after the service. The people there were so very hospitable and gave us a good place to sleep, drove us to get some breakfast food cause he didn’t want us to walk, and let us use their hot showers.
Our host for the month was from Canada and has been involved in the churches in Bulgaria for at least a decade. He loves the country and showed us many beautiful places there!
Bulgaria was a month of hard physical work, beautiful countryside, and generous, happy people.
