So you’re all probably wondering what I’ve been doing all month in Albania. Well, this is the blog for you, because I’m about to share with y’all what this month has consisted of!
First, we are located in the city of Lezhe…a moderately sized city nestled into the mountains of Albania. It’s a beautiful scene that I have had the privilege of seeing every day from our ministry site! Speaking of our ministry site – we are staying at a camp called Lightforce. When I say “we” I mean the entire squad of 49 people, not just my team of 6 women, haha! This month has been commonly referred to as “all-squad” month due to the fact we are all living in community together, serving alongside each other in the same ministry, for the same ministry contact person.
The camp consists of cabins, a dining hall, courtyard area, volleyball, soccer, and basketball spaces, a rock climbing wall, a challenge course, archery, worship spaces, and a pig farm (which also have chickens and sheep). It’s a very nice camp with very friendly staff members and two pet/guard dogs named Bobby and Larry.
Our stay here has been pretty nice – there are 8 bunk beds in almost every cabin, which means we haven’t had to use our tents or sleeping pads this month. The exchange for this comfort is the lack of personal space…it’s basically non-existent. Just imagine 16 girls in a cabin together with all our hiking packs and you’ll understand what I mean. But close living quarters has allowed us to learn how to work with each other when maneuvering around all our stuff. It has also reminded us that respect for other people and their belongings goes a long way. Lack of personal space on the race was a guarantee, so no one has had any issues with it thus far. Then again, it is only month two, haha.
Our ministry contact has been great. His name is George. He is a stern, but fair leader. He has a fierce love for Christ and strives to encourage each of us to dig deeper in our personal relationships with Christ every day. At first, he was a little intimidating because his demeanor exudes a “no-nonsense” flare – imagine a pit bull – but once you got to know him and work alongside him, he wasn’t that bad. Still intimidating at times, but he also knew how to laugh and have fun. He is the kind of guy that demands respect immediately.
Our ministry focus: The focus has been centered on everything dealing with Lightforce Camp. We have had two weeks of camp and one yet to come at the end of this month. The first week was with a group of 80 Albanian teenagers who were chaperoned/led by Albanian Peace Core Volunteers (PCV’s). Their week at Lightforce was spent learning about how to “Go Green.” It’s funny how, from an American standpoint, the things they were being tested on seemed like common sense to me. I thought everyone knew that kind of stuff…like what materials are reusable and how you can be more efficient with them, water usage, etc. But for these particular Albanians, they had NO clue and it took them very lengthy discussions to arrive at an answer for the questions being asked. Our squad didn’t really have any direct interactions with them, but did a lot of behind-the-scenes work instead. Since there were so many of us to help, we were all split up into different areas of the camp to help. My particular area of work has been on the pig farm for the month. (More to come on that later).
The second camp was a group of baptist kids visiting with their pastor. They were on a retreat as a church. Once again, we didn’t have very much interaction with them, but I did get to have some very solid conversations with the pastor! He has been a missionary in Tirana, Albania with his wife and 4 kids for 16 years! Tirana is the capital of Albania for those of you who didn’t know. One of the cool parts about meeting him was that he graduated from the University of Madison, WI!! #instantconnection
He also has two sons that live in WI. They work with TREK bikes – fitting people with the correct bike, painting and maintaining them and such. His other two children are living here in Albania with him and his wife. God must have known I was feeling slightly homesick, because meeting a family that has a sentimental connection to WI brought me immense comfort! Thanks God!
I was still working on the pig farm for that week, but was able to have more conversations with the group and even got a hug from a very affectionate little Albanian girl. So precious!
Now for the farm – what does a day on the pig farm look like? Well, our day begins at 8am and ends at 4pm – Monday through Friday. We start the day by scraping pigpens clean of manure. All the manure is placed in a wheelbarrow and brought to the chicken coop where it decomposes in a corner. After that, we spray the pens down with a hose you have to apply thumb-pressure to in order to get them semi-clean. Let’s just say my thumb muscles have gotten quite the workout this month! In total, we clean out about 35 pigpens every day. When we’ve finished doing that, we wash all the gutters out (with the same hose) so that it will run into a big gravity drain that leads to an adjacent river. Feeding time rolls around soon thereafter and the pigs literally go wild! They jump up over the edge of their pens so they can see where the wheelbarrow full of food is…basically seeing how close it is to their turn for the ground-up mixture of corn, wheat, soybeans, and some other grain I’m unsure of, haha. They scream and hop around and get pretty aggressive while they wait – it’s like a madhouse. Once they’re all fed, we rinse the cement walkways down and break for lunch. This is where you’ll catch our fearless leader, Ramazan, playing a game of charades with us to explain that it’s break-time. In Albanian, he says “pushime” (poo-sheem) to all of us, which means “break.”
Let me tell you about Ramazan. He is the head farmer for Lightforce camp, and has been for a very long time. This man is 64 years old and is still going strong! At first when we were placed to work in the farm, he was super unhappy about it because we were all females – obviously he wanted men…which is understandable. He spoke very aggressively with George about how it wasn’t going to work and to send him men instead. George said no, and we began the journey of trying to gain Ramazan’s trust, respect, and friendship. Once we showed him that we were more than capable to help him on the farm, he ended up loving us and now smiles every time he sees us. Sometimes in the afternoons, we will have another break where we sing and dance with each other in the barn…Ramazan even joins in at times. We all love him dearly. He is a strong but gentle soul who is also Muslim. So he has been apart of my ministry focus all month – loving on him as best I can, sharing my time with him, smiling and laughing with him, playing charades with him as a form of conversation, and letting him hug and kiss my hand (this is a normal greeting and sign of respect in Albania). I will definitely miss him when we leave for Moldova.
Some cool things I’ve experienced while working on the farm:
– Vaccinating piglets and spraying them with anti-parasitic medication -which made all the piglets blue polka-dotted.
– Unloading a truck full of unground bags of food. This happens once a week and there are usually around 30 bags to unload. Each bag weighs anywhere from 50 – 110 pounds…talk about a workout!
– Grinding up food for all the pigs – this is an “all morning” process and when you’re finished, you come out looking like a ghost because of all the food particles floating in the air….these are days I live for a good, cold shower!
– Witnessing the death of 2 pigs to feed the camp.
Never in my life have I witnessed the entire process of life brought to death in order to feed others to sustain human life. Digest that sentence for a second. When I read it, here’s what comes to mind: “Jesus said to her, I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” – John 11:25-26. Maybe it’s a little odd to have this particular verse pop up in my mind when I think about the day pigs were put to death…but let me explain why it travels thru my thoughts so clearly. In this passage it talks about dying to ourselves so we can live in Christ. Once we surrender our earthly life up to Him, we die to ourselves and become a new creation in Christ that is rooted in Him – that bears good fruit and furthers his Kingdom here on earth. Now the pig story is a bit literal, but just think about the process. They lived – they died – and now nurture the living in an entirely new form….in a form they NEVER could do in their living form…not until they died to themselves were they able to sustain life in others. That’s pretty cool. A lesson that God constantly reminds me of in the most bizarre ways….like the pig story, for example. That’s pretty random but personal enough to get the point across, haha.
God doesn’t want our words promising we will die to ourselves so we can live in Him…he wants our actions to do the talking. He wants us to show him that our hearts are all in with no reservations. He is actively seeking out our hearts because he LOVES us with a love that never ends, that is life-sustaining, that is boundless. His love casts out all fear. All you have to do is let go and let God do the rest.
